Did you know that plastic in many different forms is a known cancer risk?
Like the feared BPA in water bottles, single use plastics break down into tiny pieces. These pieces can also cause serious long term harm, entering our food chain. Yuck!
Recent Research has shown that of all the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic ever created, only 9% has been recycled. Much of the rest ends up in the oceans and on the beaches of Earth.8 Million metric tons of plastic enters the oceans every year where it wreaks havoc on ocean ecosystems.
The Endocrine Disruption Exchange has been researching the effects of chemicals in plastics, like BPA and others, and what they do to living cells.The picture is not pretty. What fish eat, we eat, and so does much of our livestock. Apparently as certain plastics get smaller they can interact with the human body much more easily, be passed into our food, and cause not just cancer but also genetic defects that span generations.
So the fact that plastics break down so easily into tiny pieces means we need to stop putting it out there as soon as possible, and get what’s out there, safely contained. There are projects to start dealing with the global problem of plastics, Dutch inventor, young Boyan Slot, has been deploying a large sieve net to remove plastics from the ocean in the Taiwan straits.
At Alliance Earth we are supporting an educational art project called The Dung Beetle, which is an art education platform that will travel and show people how to turn plastic rubbish into usable fuels with lower emissions.
The system plans will be given away freely, hoping to show and inspire others to create their own systems in their own communities.Plastic pollution reduction must happen quickly. It will require many different solutions, but humans are rather ingenious.