It's the whiff of decay, of thousands of birds' bodies rotting. The smell hits you first, and catches in your throat. Once home to the decisive battle that turned World War Two in favor of the US in the Pacific, it's now locked in a new fight. Midway is out of sight, but again it is on the front line. Here plastic's impact is staring you in the face. Nothing is an emergency until you feel the burn, or see the red lights. Americans are said to use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour. Some 8 million tons of plastic trash leak into the ocean annually, and it's getting worse every year. More than five trillion pieces of plastic are already in the oceans, and by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish, by weight, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists today. Yet the coffee cup lids, water bottles and bags we use once and throw away do end up somewhere - in landfills, but also in the ocean. Plastic has become a vital part of our lives of convenience. And these are just the bits of it we can see. They were washed in with the tide, most likely from China or the US, thousands of miles away - part of an enormous plastic garbage patch, spinning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which you probably contribute to. They didn't fall from a plane or off a ship, and there aren't any civilians living here who could have left them behind. On the beach lies a motorcycle helmet, a mannequin's head, an umbrella handle, and a flip-flop.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |