Plastic Pollution

            Plastic Pollution - ways to stop Plastic pollution

Plastic is a horrible miracle. We use it in various ways that both help us and hurt us. For example, Plastic bottles are great because they’re cheap and easy to use. However, it is often not recycled and ends up in our oceans. We use plastic because it is useful, resourceful and easy to make. Millions of plastic entities can drift into our oceans, get eaten by fish and then get eaten by us. It is harming our aquatic ecosystems and ourselves. Luckily, great people have found many solutions towards our plastic problems. Although they’ve made great and powerful solutions. It would still be helpful to do our part in the 5r’s. This includes “Reduce, Refuse, Reuse, Re-purpose and Recycle”.

Reducing plastic as in using less plastic brands. This means avoiding things like plastic bottles, cutlery, toys etc. Reducing plastic could also include choosing to swap out plastic brands for metallic or glass ones. Take bottles for example, using metallic bottles last much longer than single-use plastic bottles.

Refusing plastic would mean getting less plastic like takeaways and other fast food plastic types. Cooking would be included in refusing due to its lack of plastic and including more long lasting plastic. It would also be helpful to avoid using plastic types and instead use non- plastic brands.

Reusing is keeping your plastic items for more uses. An example would be to continuously use a plastic bag until it’s no longer effective. It would also mean using the same plastic bottle, always refilling it when you’ve finished. It would prevent it from turning into pollution and avoids being single use plastics.

Re-purpose. Re-purpose is keeping your plastic valuables, and keeping them for another usage. An example could be a yogurt container, maybe using it for a container of paint or water. Re-purposing is very useful due to avoiding ending up in the ocean and keeping it for more use.

Lastly, Recycle. Although “recycle” used to be the main subject, it is almost no longer useful since our recycled pollution used to be shifted to China, which is no longer accepting our rubbish. Now it’s just being chucked into Malaysia and other places in Asia. So, Recycling is almost as bad as putting it in general rubbish. So maybe try participating in doing the 4r’s instead.