For the blogs I am going to be doing I decided to follow what is going on with the plastic problem. Ever since I was young ive known about this problem. My towns elementary schools sought out to teach the kids the importance of recycling.  My school took us on a field trip to the recycling center one time. They showed us what they made with the materials they get. This is why I was interested in this subject. Because ever since I was young I knew the importance of the subject. I decided to look into the topic on https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/ . I felt this was a good source because I have seen a lot of the content they put out on animals. I have also seen a lot of the work they put out on global warming and things such as that so I felt they would be very knowledgeable on the plastic situation that is going on around the world and in the oceans.

I looked into the situation on the website and found lots of interesting information. For example, I found that “More than 40 percent of plastic is used just once, then tossed.” This made sense to me. This quote is talking about how things like plastic water bottles and plastic bags are only used a single time and then throw them out after that. I believe we need to stop the production of plastic bags fully and move on to paper bags to help out with this part of the problem.  A crazy stat that I found on this website was that around a million plastic bottles are sold every single minute. This is a crazy stat to me. To put this in perspective im from rhode island where there is a population of 1.057 million. This means that every minute the entire state of Rhode Island would be purchasing a one time use plastic bottle. This means in a day there would be around 1,440,000,000 plastic bottles sold. In just one day we put out over a billion things that classify as plastic waste. There’s not many places to go with this waste. Which means it ends up in places like the ocean. There is around 5 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans. This is a ridiculous amount of plastic in our oceans and the number is constantly growing. This affects a lot of the animals in and around the ocean environment. It is predicted that “By 2050, virtually every seabird species on the planet will be eating plastic.” let me just emphasize the “Every”. Every type of seabird is going to be eating this material. This is the article that I found all of this information in https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/plastic-facts/#close . 

This article focused on the problems that the plastic is causing and all the negatives impacts it’s having on the environment. I am looking forward to in latter blog posts talking about finding some solutions to the problem. I have limited knowledge on the solutions, especially when it comes to the plastic problem in the oceans. The only solutions I have heard about is things such as changing out plastic bottles for mettle reusable bottles and replacing plastic bags for paper bags. Also recycling all plastic waste. I have also heard about the whole save the turtles movement which is a whole movement against plastic straws which is promoting paper straws and reusable metal straws.