Thank the Children

The penguins found in the Artic are dying from plastic particles they ingested in the water. How are they getting polluted water when no humans even live there? Do you think we have a pollution problem in our oceans? Humans are supposed to be the smartest things on earth. Why do we seek to destroy our very existence and the existence of our animal friends? Trump will spend millions of dollars just to go to his Florida resort as often as possible but he cut funding for our environmental preservation projects. When did we vote on that? Business leaders invest in cheap plastics to now cover or store just about everything we buy because it is so cheap to produce plastics made from totally unnatural substances.  They fail to invest in any recycling that should be mandatory but isn’t required. So, our landfills are well full and now our oceans are trash bins.

There are now regions in our oceans like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They are not land masses. They are trash masses swirling around in the Pacific Ocean now larger than the state of Texas, one of our largest states. The plastics have been floating in our oceans for so long that now they are breaking down into small particles and chemical sludge. Almost 1,000 miles off shores the composition of the water has changed. Finally there might be some solutions available for saving the world’s oceans. The southern tip of   Hawaii’s   big island used to be a beautiful paradise. It   is now a magnate for plastic trash due to the swirling currents there in the water. The beaches are full of trash that the sand is barely visible.  The garbage patch is also known as the North Pacific Gyre. Why do we name our polluted places instead of clean up the pollution?

The island of Niihau is covered in micro-particles of plastics that is nearly impossible to clean up. At least 700 species of birds and fish have man made debris in their bodies. Plastic is now a permanent part of our ecosystem. A 2015 study confirmed that almost 90% of all sea birds worldwide   consume plastics as part of their diet. Now the plastics are being found in Antarctic species where people don’t really live or visit. It is a global issue effecting the entire ocean food chain. Plastics are now the biggest habitat on the planet. 4 additional garbage patches have been found across the globe. The North Atlantic Gyre, South Atlantic Gyre, South Pacific Gyre and the Indian Ocean Gyre.

So far commerce has only either land filled plastics, burned it or dumped it in the oceans. At the rate we are going soon there will be more garbage in the oceans than fish. 16 year old Boyan Slat is the Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup. For 6 years he has been working on the project He opened a go fund me account and with the support of over 38,000 funders from 160 countries, in 100 days he collected over $2 million dollars for his cleanup project. Along with a team of engineers and scientists they have a simple goal to collect the most plastics for the cheapest way possible in the 5 trash patches in the world’s oceans. They are putting conveyor belts that will scoop the plastics into giant canisters that will go to companies like Prodin that will clean, chop up the plastics into tiny beads, sell the beads to be melted into the plastic products we use in everyday life.  Soon we hope to see many collector bins in our oceans to collect the trash before it is consumed by wildlife or washes up on the world’s beaches. The goal is also to ban the making of any more new plastics until all our existing plastics are totally recycled.

Thank the children for finding and implementing a viable solution to the bad things the adults have created for them in the world.