As someone said during the Our Oceans conference “now plastics are often on the menu.”
Plastics are also injuring animals and marine life. Pieces of plastic of all sizes have been found in even the most remote marine and land environments. We often see depictions in social media of animals being harmed by eating plastics, for example, birds killed by ingesting plastics, or large marine mammals drowned when caught in discarded ropes and netting.
At Earth Day Network we are launching a global campaign to help tackle this problem. We would like to help individual consumers of all ages understand the environmental, climate and health consequences of plastics so they can choose not only to “reuse and recycle,” but also to reject single-use plastics proactively, and think carefully every time that they buy products that contain plastic.
For years, my husband Byron has been picking up plastic every time he goes out for a walk. At first, my reaction was, why do that? Isn’t that the job of the municipality? Isn’t the USA, after all, a developed country? He made me see that if we do not collect the plastic trash we see, it will remain there for a long time polluting the land, or ending up in a stream or river, and then in the ocean.
Next, I started being careful about recycling and thinking about packaging when buying groceries and other goods. Deciding to buy a water filter and giving up single use plastic water bottles was easy. One step took me to the next. I became interested in how to push companies to take responsibility and in learning about policy issues.
All starts with a personal commitment. It’s not about refusing to buy anything plastic. It’s just about being conscious and making choices, and also having this conversation with our family members, friends, co-workers and stores that we patronize. Tech helps. There are many apps that can help us figure out ways to reduce plastics. And voting with our wallets, using our political might, is quite powerful, too.
If you want to engage with Earth Day Network, please let us know.