【Taiwan Immigrants' Global News Network】According to The Star, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the world needs to implement a binding pact to reduce plastic use. Plastic waste, according to the worldwide NGO, poses a nearly equal threat to the earth as climate change.
Every year, the average human is reported to consume the equivalent of a credit card's worth of plastic.
Every year, the average human is reported to consume the equivalent of a credit card's worth of plastic. (Photo / Retrieved from Pixabay)
What causes this to happen? Plastics, it turns out, never truly degrade. They've merely become smaller and smaller, to the point that microplastics have infiltrated every element of our planet.
Microplastics can be found in Arctic snow, food, and the air we breathe. Even if you buy the costliest organic products, you can't avoid microplastics because we've made so much of it that it's now everywhere. Whether you like it or not.
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The quantity of plastic consumed by people varies depending on what they eat. People who consume bottled water (i.e., water from plastic bottles, not rich people who drink bottled water from glass bottles) have more plastic in their system than those who drink tap water.
And babies are thought to ingest far more plastic than adults due to the use of plastic baby bottles. Because cleaning plastic bottles at a high heat to sterilise them, as many concerned parents do, dissolves the plastic, allowing it to flake off into babies' milk, their plastic consumption is extremely high.
Of course, the rest of the world isn't much better off as a result of all this plastic. Animals are routinely discovered dead after ingesting trash, and 20 elephants in Thailand recently perished after ingesting plastics from a landfill.
According to the EIA, the weight of plastics in the water might be larger than the weight of fish by 2040. That is a little unsettling.
The EIA and other experts concur that a legally enforceable global agreement to reduce plastic use and manufacture is required. A hundred countries are reportedly in favor of such an accord, which will be discussed at the United Nations Environmental Assembly in February and March.
The only solution is to reduce the amount of plastic produced.
