From Source to Sea: Tracing the Journey of Plastic Waste

Plastic waste is one of the most crucial and urgent problems these days. Plastic waste has grown over time and now our quality of life is undermined due to it. However, first of all, let’s see what plastic is and how it's wasted. Plastic is everywhere: In your home, your office, your school — and your ocean. Among the top, 10 kinds of trash picked up during the 2017 International Coastal Cleanup were food wrappers, beverage bottles, grocery bags, straws, and takeout containers, all made of plastic. How did it all get there? Why is it a problem? What can we do? Plastic mainly includes carbon, but sometimes oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, chlorine, fluorine, phosphorus, or silicon are also found in it. Plastic is made of polymers. A polymer is a substance or cloth including very large molecules, or macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Plastic is one of the most used man-made substances. Most of the things of daily use are made of plastic. 

Polyethylene Terephthalate, also referred to as PET, is the basic substance to create Soda bottles, wrappers and water bottles. It’s the most used plastic type in the whole world as many disposable products are made from it. No Marvel that it’s the most wasted kind of plastic. If we simply look at plastic bottles, we can find a few really surprising discoveries, as 60 million plastic bottles are used each day and about 8% of them are dumped into the ocean every 12 months. One out of four bottles are recycled each year and all the rest take thousands of years to decompose in landfills. Even the plastic baggage we use in our daily life can take 20 to 1000 years to decompose and plastic bottles take 450 years to decompose. Now, let's take a look at unrecyclable plastic. As we know, plastic bottles, most kinds of bottles, packing containers, baggage, pipes and so on are some examples of recyclable plastic. Non-recyclable plastics include rash bags, Ziplock bags, inside cereal box plastic, bubble wrap, clear plastic wrap, some department store bags, potato chip bags, single cheese wrappers, 6-pack plastic and candy wrappers.

Burning plastic trash to create energy apparently sounds realistic: Plastic is, despite everything, crafted from hydrocarbons, just like oil, and is more energy-dense than coal. But numerous limitations loom to a huge amount of waste-burning.

Burning plastic is a superb way to take away everything everywhere. However, we shouldn’t burn it away, rather we should recycle it. But in fact, plastic is being burned a lot more than it is recycled. What's the point of burning and releasing extra harmful gasses into the air whilst you could simply recycle it and use it again? That’s simply stupid, isn’t it?

Now let’s be careful of plastic baggage and canvas luggage. 55bn plastic luggage is being used in Pakistan with a predicted annual increase of 15 percent of its usage. Over more than a decade, Pakistani provinces have repeatedly imposed bans on the use of plastic bags made from polythene (also referred to as polythene), but the bans have failed. Citizens have not been able to resort to cheap options, like compostable plastic baggage, and the authorities haven't been able to correctly implement the bans. That is the main reason that nearly 1/3 of the waste is plastic baggage used by the public. The Pakistani public did not replace plastic luggage with canvas luggage, subsequently increasing a greater quantity of plastic bags and disturbing the authorities.

The latest reports declare that there could be more plastic than fish within the sea. It is meant to highlight a pollution crisis in the oceans. The problem does exist, but do the figures preserve water, or is there something fishy going on?

We have to save the oceans from plastic at any cost. Plastic should not be allowed on beaches and boats. Plastic waste from landfills should not be thrown out into the ocean. It should be recycled.

The satisfactory way to stop the increase in plastic waste is to broaden recycling dumpsters in each society and recycle the recyclable substances in preference to throwing them into the water or landfills. In particular, disposable things such as disposable plates, cups etc. Plastic enterprise amounts need to decrease and recycling dumpsters ought to increase if they need to manipulate plastic manufacturing and plastic waste. The government must offer unfastened canvas baggage and should ban the manufacturing of plastic baggage in place of banning its use. There ought to be glass bottles used in preference to plastic bottles. Glass is a great alternative source of plastic. Disposable things like diapers, plates, cups and so on should be replaced with glass plates and mugs. These disposable items take about 250-500 years to decompose. There is no point in calling them disposable if it takes 250 to 500 years to eliminate them. We simply think they are convenient to use and do not hurt our environment. However, the most important discoveries show that it’s one of the matters that's worrying our ecological device. We think that they may be disposable these days, and we use them with no worry, however simply, that’s no longer the reality.

You could reuse glass bottles and canvas luggage, but plastic bottles and plastic baggage are mainly manufactured for single use, which is increasing plastic waste. All of the plastic that is thrown into the ocean each year should be recycled in place of filling the oceans with plastic and lowering the wide variety of fish. It’s our responsibility to protect our environment from plastic waste and to use alternative sources of plastic-like paper, earthenware, wood and glass. We need to arrange massive awareness campaigns for plastic waste. We need to establish institutions that could recycle plastic. We need to take part in campaigns that can stop plastic waste from disturbing the ecological system of the Earth. All nations need to work together to stop plastic waste. It's our shared responsibility to stop plastic waste and recycle used plastic instead of throwing it into the oceans or landfills and disturbing the living organisms near it. I hope in the upcoming years plastic waste will decrease and our ecological balance will be restored.