If you’ve been keeping up with the times, you already know that climate change is real, and plastic waste isn’t helping the problem.

Our oceans are full of the stuff, and, as it turns out, so is the air, and our food.

According to Rolling Stone, every human on Earth is ingesting roughly 2000 plastic particles a week, and it’s almost impossible to avoid.

These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays.

That’s enough plastic in a single week to make a credit card.

In the States, one man is trying to turn things around, but he’s going up against some industry giants that don’t like his proposed policies.

With new legislation, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, [Senator Tom Udall] is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. Unveiled in February, the bill would ban many single-use plastics and force corporations to finance “end of life” programs to keep plastic out of the environment. “We’re going back to that principle,” the senator tells Rolling Stone. “The polluter pays.”

The battle pits Udall and his allies in Congress against some of the most powerful corporate interests on the planet, including the oil majors and chemical giants that produce the building blocks for our modern plastic world — think Exxon, Dow, and Shell — and consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that package their products in the stuff.

Nestlé is currently battling a PR nightmare after it was discovered that it has a bit of a child labour problem. 

It’s also going to take a lot more than the efforts of one senator to contain the plastic problem.

The world’s plastic waste is not so easily contained. Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into the oceans — the equivalent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland, and spiralling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster.

John Hocevar is a marine biologist who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace, shared the following terrifying take on the situation:

 “This is a much bigger problem than ‘just’ an ocean issue, or even a pollution issue,” he says. “We’ve found plastic everywhere we’ve ever looked. It’s in the Arctic and the Antarctic and in the middle of the Pacific. It’s in the Pyrenees and in the Rockies. It’s settling out of the air. It’s raining down on us.”

If you want to minimise the amount of plastic you use everyday, why not start by swapping out those hard plastic coffee pods for something biodegradable? 

Then, take a break, and reward yourself with this video of an octopus exchanging his plastic cup for a shell. 

[source:rollingstone]