Let’s Stop Trashing Our Odds of Survival

Despite the constant nagging in my head that I need to reduce my plastic waste and carbon footprint, I see our environmental crisis as part of the natural unfolding of things. The earth is vast, while humans’ foresight is myopic for the most part. Much of our focus is on our selves, our next meal, our money, our time and convenience.

So we don’t think about the effects of waste in the long term. We have so many things to worry about, who worry about trash? We throw them, someone collects them and dump them somewhere where we assume they’ll rot and go away. They don’t.

Lately, trash from the developed nations has been showing up illegally in developing South-East Asian countries. Everyone’s passing their trash around like a hot potato and the big guys are trying to make the smaller ones hold it.

We seemed to have forgotten that Earth is a planet. Earth may be huge, but it’s a self-contained system. Everything is connected, and it’s the only home we have.

We should recognize that wherever the trash ends up at, it would be in one corner of our home. Humans and animals residing there would be affected firsthand, but the effects of it would be experienced in the rest of the world sooner or later.

Meanwhile, the world is still creating trash. We created 2 billion tonnes of household and commercial waste in 2016 alone. That number is set to double by 2050 as the developing nations catches up in wealth and the developed nations increase their consumption.

To give us a scale of the number in everyday terms,
2 billion tonnes = 2,000,000,000,000 kg or 4,409,245,243,697 lbs.
That’s the amount of trash we made in one year.

Then we have the plastic pollution problem. 91% of all plastic made to date ended up in landfills, the ocean and scattered all over our surroundings. That’s 8.3 billion metric tons.

Let’s see.
8.3 billion metric tons = 8300 billion kg, which is
8,300,000,000,000 kg or 18,298,367,761,345 lbs

Plastic also takes more than 400 years to degrade.

About 8 million metric tons of plastic ends up in the sea in a year. By now, we know it’s predicted that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.

That means the next generation – our kids/nieces/nephews/grand-kids, would likely face a shortage of protein and a much poorer air quality, considering that phytoplanktons in the ocean are responsible for more than half of the oxygen we breathe.

We can blame the problem on manufacturers and their sub-optimal business models, but these figures are also a result of each of us throwing what looks like a little bit of rubbish/plastic each day.

We’re all in this environmental crisis together.

Know that what we’re destroying is not mother earth, but the habitat of humans and animals – our habitat. When we make the climate inhospitable for our kind, most (if not all) of us would die, and earth would regenerate.

Now that we know what the consequences of our actions are, we can’t afford to ignore the problem any longer.

Whatever effort we put in to mitigate our negative impacts on the environment, we’re not doing it for earth, we’re doing it for our survival.

I hope to join my voice with the voices of so many others. We’re running out of time to remedy the situation. To overcome this environmental crisis, we need every bit of effort to curb our plastic pollution, waste creation and carbon footprint.

I would love to hear about your thoughts on this issue! Please remember to subscribe if articles like this resonate with you. Let’s do this together!