Nuclear Pollution In The Film Wall-E, By Pixar

As humanity has grown and expanded we have had an incredible, and arguably, irreversible effect on our biosphere. Between our intense levels of energy consumption and the pollution as a result of that use we are stretching the planet’s ability to correct itself it the limit. The Earth goes through different stages naturally, but the human race is torn between wanting to stop it, thereby keeping with what we know, and wanting to allow the Earth to right our wrongs. We are moving towards finding ways to reduce pollution and using renewable sources of energy, but only time will tell if we can do enough to continue to live in our current status. According to “Essentials of Biology” only about 6% of the global energy supply comes from nuclear …show more content…
Byproducts from warehouses and manufacturing, emissions from everything from cars to cows, and, of course, garbage. In 2008, Pixar released a movie titled Wall-E, which depicts Earth as nothing more than a giant garbage heap leaving the Earth uninhabitable. When this movie came out people began to wonder if this really was our future. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be that far off. According to a World Bank report, in the last ten years the urban populations around the world have doubled their municipal solid waste production and will double again in the next ten years; reaching up to 2.2 billion tons per year (Bhada-Tata 8). Municipal solid waste accounts for everything from food scraps, to plastics, to metal, basically, everything that we throw away, every day, without batting an eye (Bhada-Tata 16). Low income countries tend to produce more organic, biodegradable waste, while high income countries produce more paper waste than anything else (Bhada-Tata 19). Both food and paper are considered to be relatively easy on the environment in comparison, to say, plastic or metals; but in this regard higher income countries, such as the U.S. are producing significantly larger numbers. In low income countries 14% of their wastes comes from plastic, glass, or metal. While in high income countries 24% comes from those same items (Bhada-Tata 19). 10% my not seem like much, but given the toil they take on our biosphere the future implications are concerning, to say the least. Over use of plastic being a major point of concern. Plastics are manufactured using synthetic compounds. The same synthetic compounds that are thinning the ozone layer and assisting in that greenhouse effect (Mader