The Importance Of Water Pollution And Our Responsibility

Decent Essays
Water pollution and our Responsibility
Our planet is in a state of turmoil so detrimental that future generations populating the earth, our children, grandchildren, will never know the world as we do unless we make change. If this sounds scary, it’s because it is. The facts make the movie WALL-E a terrifying reality rather than a far-fetched theory wrapped in children’s entertainment. Littering and improper disposal of waste products is killing the Earth by polluting water sources faster now than ever before. We lovingly refer to our home, planet Earth, as the “blue planet”, a “marble” if you will. It has received these names from the way our oceans provide such beauty, especially on looking from outer space. It truly is breathtaking with all
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Trash makes its way to the ocean, this debris contain “incredibly dangerous chemicals, the fish eat the plastic, and we eat the fish.” (Wilson, 2014, Para. 4). It is a cycle in which we are the top of the food chain. The fish are caught, packaged for our super markets and then eaten by …show more content…
There are giant floating masses of garbage in our oceans, they even have their own names. “The great Pacific garbage patch” also known as the “Pacific trash vortex” (National Geographic Staff, n.d). This floating garbage is collected by the ocean currents to form massive piles of waste, and only become larger and larger. More notably the contents of debris is plastics which “does not biodegrade in a meaningful or even comprehensible timeframe” (Wilson, 2014, Para. 14). This means in our lifetime a plastic container we toss out will never decompose. This creates an entirely new issue since we know plastics, at very least, will not resolve themselves as pollution. There is no practical estimate for how much garbage is in our oceans. It would be impossible to come close given the extent of the problem and the fact that we are only able to see the waste that floats. The garbage that sinks is 15,000ft down at the bottom of the ocean. However, the best guess is one that comes from mixing exhausting data with computer modeling (Wilson, 2014) and calculates to roughly 73,878,000 pounds just in plastic alone in the boarder of the pacific gyres which only accounts for that small percentage of the ocean. “There are 315 million square kilometers of ocean surface on planet Earth” (Wilson, 2014, Para. 11) To which this is a vary minuscule

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