Fighting the scourge of undecomposable plastic
Print Edition
WE decided to investigate single plastic use within our school, as this is a catastrophic, but frequently disregarded, global issue — undecomposable plastics not only disrupt marine life, but also cause unnecessary casualties on land.
We came to a conclusion that on a typical school day, at least 45 plastic bottles of water were used by pupils. The amount of bottles used in our school daily may not seem significant to many, but the weight of 45 bottles adds up to around 148 kilograms per year! This is equivalent to the standard weight of a full-grown male panda and about one-third as heavy as a grand piano! However, only 15 out of the 45 bottles were recycled. Counting the entire school year, 2,081 liters of plastics will be dumped in the ocean. Just think about it, this is only the amount of plastic bottles used in our school. According to The Guardian, there are approximately a million plastic bottles consumed per minute, which indicates that at least 20,000 bottles are used every second.
Plastic takes around 700 years just to start deteriorating, but clogs up the available area on Earth and harms the lives of organisms. Nearly 26 million tons of plastic linger in the ocean each year, according to plasticpollution.org, and at least one million birds die due to ingesting plastic waste regularly. A recent study conducted by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has calculated that by 2050, the amount of plastic will exceed the amount of fish, according to ellenmacarthurfoundation.org. Chinese consumers bought 68.4 billion water bottles in 2015. Various types of organisms, especially marine ones, will become extinct without humans attempting to recycle or even completely halt the use of plastics. Not only do plastics devastate habitats, but they have a detrimental effect on humans as the water we drink may be contaminated.
We calculated that the plastic bottles we use at Harrow alone would fill 2.2 cubic meters. To illustrate this to our fellow Harrow pupils, we are building a cube in our Global Perspectives lessons. Hopefully this will make us all think twice!
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