A Stunning Sad Statistic

Back in December 2014 a paper was published in the open access journal PLOS ONE that made a truly stunning statistic:

They estimated that the world's accessible (i.e. liquid) water contains an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic that weighed a total of 269,000 tons !

Although that is saddening, we've been adding to this plastic presence at the rate of 8 million pieces of plastic a year !

Some scientists have stated that, by the year 2050, if there is no change in our levels of waste, the amount of plastics in our oceans could weigh more than the fish that live alongside it!

We've all heard something, no doubt, about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - an area of seawater the size of Texas that sits between Hawaii and Japan. This area has been created by a water flow system called the North Pacific Gyre.

Well, there are 5 such water flow systems in our oceans, the North Pacific, the South Pacific, the North Atlantic, the South Alantic and the Indian Ocean Gyres.

Which may lead us to expect another 4 big patches of floating marine waste.

Well, you may well say, as I did, that all we need to do is to clear out those Gyres and all will be well. It seems as though that is only the beginning of the story, sadly.

You see, those Gyres act as a kind of a shredder and they break up the large bits of plastic into smaller and smaller pieces and these itsy-bitsy pieces, called microplastics, have been found in the water under the Artic ice pack and also, worryingly, in freshly fallen snow in Switzerland !

I took a very brief look in my kitchen cabinets and, after reading this article, I was amazed by how many foodstuff containers were made of plastic: Ketchup bottles, bottles of soda, mayo, BBQ sauce, rigid plastic trays containing almost everything from meats and fish through to grapes and melon pieces. Yogurt pots, pastic bags around large vegetables, the plastic bags my sliced sandwich bread comes in.

There's TOO MUCH PLASTIC in my life !

It's time to change - especially now that the world is gathering itself back after the 'interesting times' of the past 2 years - time to take personal steps, to reduce my own personal addition to waste anything.

It won't be easy, shopping, for one, is going to be difficult, requiring a lot more planning, a lot more buying in separate shops and, probably, more expensive.

Well, we'll see. I have found some very good 'steps' that can be followed by anyone that will reduce our personal, family and possibly workplaces' plastic impact on our world.

Naturally, I'll be documenting these steps, what I did and what difference each step made and, hopefully, some sort of metric (possibly money spent) that each step generates.

I hope you'll read my journey and follow along and we may start to see a noticeable reduction in waste products worldwide.

We've always been told to dream big - ridding our world of plastic pollution and waste is a pretty big dream!