Imagine you are on a beach, swimming with your family, then you see a black figure inside the water that seems to be following you. You start swimming back to shore, and once you gain the courage to go check out what that was under the water, you find out that it was a black plastic bag. You start to think about how this affects sea animals in a negative way and how to stop this from happening. Humans are the main cause of plastic pollution, which kills marine animals. As they continue to see plastic as dinner or prey to eat, they get injured or, in the worst-case scenario, die. I would encourage county governments to hire people from the community to watch coastlines and clean up plastic from the sea.
The major issue with plastic pollution is the harm it causes to sea animals. According to Environmentamerica.org, “Each year, an estimated 11 million metric tons of plastic pour into the ocean. That’s the equivalent of dumping one garbage truck of plastic into the water every 45 seconds.” This shows the amount of plastic that is put into the ocean. This has a negative impact on marine animals, and it severely impacts our sea animals. According to the World Wildlife Fund Australia, a pregnant sperm whale died due to the consumption of plastic. They go on to say, “100,000 marine mammals die every year due to plastic ingestion or entanglement.” This tells us the amount of harm that plastic causes. 11 million metric tons of plastic dumped into the ocean is too much. We must do something about this now.
On the bright side, there are some ways to prevent this. One way is to focus on the areas where the most plastic washes up and clean them up weekly. According to mskuk.org, it states that “The best solution to preventing plastic pollution is to focus on the areas we can have the greatest impact on; our rivers and coastlines.” County governments are best able to tackle plastic pollution because they can offer jobs to clean up plastic regularly to the community. Offering these jobs to the community helps create consistency. This is another example of a way that we could possibly prevent plastic pollution from not only hurting the world but also the ocean.
To sum it all up, plastic can have a negative effect on the marine animals that we enjoy seeing. In order to keep them safe, we have to get the county governments to hire people from the community to check on the coastlines and spots that wash up the most plastic from the ocean to keep it clean. With this, we can keep our marine animals safe and outside of harm’s way! I want you to advocate to make this job possible and clean up the plastic strangling our animals on a daily basis.
