I'VE BEEN THINKING A LOT ABOUT PLASTIC RECENTLY
Sounds weird but I’m starting to realise how big of a problem plastic is. It started when I scrolled through my twitter feed and saw the following from New Scientist
“One third of all plastic in the open ocean comes from microfibres shed from washing our clothes”
This really amazed me. Whenever I think of plastic in the oceans I think of plastic bags and bottles, but I had never thought about microplastics. They must be incredibly hard to remove. Sure, you could run a really fine filter through sea water but then you’d catch everything else too like the plankton and other natural components of the ocean. So how can you remove such small plastic particles?
AND THEN THERE'S BOTTLES.
Seems like an easy fix, just use a reusable one. But that reusable bottle is still plastic too! When it breaks it still ends up in a landfill or an ocean. So use a metal one. This is where another tweet, again from New Scientist, really blew my mind.
“You’d need to use a steel water bottle 500 times for it to be better than a plastic one”
I had always thought metal was the answer, but I’d never stopped to really think about it, but now it seems almost obvious. The amount of energy that goes into extracting metals from their ores is huge. Take iron, you need to extract the iron ore out of the ground which takes tremendous amounts of energy, then try and purify the ore, and then put it into a blast furnace to make the pure iron, which uses tons and tons of coal/coke which gives off tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide
IT'S NOT AS EASY AS IT SEEMS
How would you remove plastics? Drag a massive net through the ocean? That would take out all the animals too, and a lot of plastic is no longer just on the surface, quite a bit of it has sunk down to the sea bed too.
“Plastic bags are used for 12 minutes on average, then stay on the earth for almost 500 years”