"​Corporations Should Ban Plastic": The Writers' Spotlight

"Corporations Should Ban Plastic"

Can you believe how much plastic is used everyday? Look around your grocery store and your kitchen. Cereal bags are plastic, new items are sometimes layered in plastic, paper towels, toilet paper and candy; all in plastic and that is just the tip of the iceberg! Have you ever thought about how plastic is damaging our world? Corporations should not be allowed to produce plastic. Plastic does not biodegrade easily, it pollutes the environment, and can be fatal to living things. There are hazardous chemicals in plastic, it pollutes the Earth in landfills, and sweet animals have died from it! Plastic is detrimental to the Earth in so many ways and should stop being produced and sold. For example, a paper bag takes two to six weeks to decompose, whereas some plastics will never break down! Corporations’ plastic waste and uses are unacceptable and need to be stopped.

Plastic should be banned in corporations because plastic does not biodegrade easily. Plastic making is called plasticity and the many materials of different plastics are polyethylene terephthalate (PET), Styrofoam, PVC, Bisphenol A, and even more types. Plastic takes a while to biodegrade because of those properties. This matters because, to fully biodegrade, polystyren (or styrofoam) plastic takes 500 years or never to do so! Also, plastic bags start to biodegrade after 1,000 years!! Luckily, California has banned single use plastic. In addition, plastic doesn ever fully disappear, but breaks down into micro plastics which can still harm people and animals. Some people think it doesn't matter if plastic takes a plastic of three different types, but only 31% of the United States has banned certain types of long time to break down because there's landfills that are just for waste, but Mark Miodownik is a scientist that said, “There is no value in biodegradable plastic", and those hazardous waste dumps don't contain all the plastic and are a big problem as well.
Plastic shouldn't be allowed to be produced in corporations because it pollutes the environment. For one thing, landfills affect human health! Specifically, when waste and gas mix together, their mixture can be virulent. As it leaks out of the landfill, the horrid liquid can seep into soil and rivers, ruining ecosystems around them. The mixture can also travel to home pipes, causing some humans to be around the waste water or plastic soup; the effects of this are undeniably uncontrollable as long as landfills are around. This matters because all of this plastic from corporations and companies making it is just going into a landfill after a one time use. Another thing you should know about landfills is that liquids from the dumps can sometimes diffuse into the Ozone and can form dark clouds. Acid would then rain down and be trenchant for health. The cycle transforms the gas into liquid showing how toxic water can be, and showing yet another reason of how landfills pollute the environment because of corporations. Fortunately, conservationists and environmental experts have tried their best to stop these events and are starting to succeed. Lucy Walker once said, “I love great locations in movies, and I couldn't believe I'd never seen a landfill on screen before. It was the most haunted place.“ The thing is, even though the bad things because of a landfill are trying to be stopped, that doesn't mean that everything bad about a landfill is being halted. Some might say this isn't true, but the plastic in landfills takes up a lot of precious room on Earth: about 1,200,000 acres in the United States! In other words, the worst of landfills and waste is plastic, causing so many problems, but corporations plastic are behind it all; they produce the plastic and then after one use, it travels to a landfill to cause damage, proving in all sorts of ways that plastic should not be produced any longer.

Corporations should be banned from producing plastic because it can be fatal to living things. Undoubtedly, animals die because of plastic and studies have shown that even humans consume plastic. Scientists have found plastic pieces in hundreds of species! 43% of all marine mammal species, 86% of all sea turtle species, and 44% of all seabird species have had pieces of plastic found inside of them. Whether plastic is found on both ocean and land, it harms animals. Furthermore, some people probably think it's the animals' fault that they eat the plastic and die from it, but they mistake plastic for food, and then eat it, causing them to die in most cases. Imagine, eating one wrong thing and then just dying. Something called their gastrointestinal tract gets blocked with large pieces of plastic, causing the plastic to stay in their body. Whales have even been found dead, because of the tons of plastic found inside them. According to Dutch research, the northern, fulmar, a bird type animal, have 25 pieces of plastic, on average, in their stomach! In the United Arab Emirates, half of camel deaths are because of plastic! Your probable sadness for these creatures is predictable, but what about you, do you eat plastic? The answer is yes, even if you're careful to take off the wrapper of candy or hotdogs or whatnot. According to a new study in the Journal Environmental Science and Technology, they say that humans may be consuming a range of 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles a year. The important thing about this is that plastic is so damaging, it is consumed by humans and animals!

“Science doesn't care what you believe in!“ Plastic has proven more guilty and negative than the “good things“ about plastic. All of these important reasons are why corporations should not be allowed to produce plastic. Plastic actually harms the environment and animals, polluting the Earth and doing so much harm. Plastic should not be allowed to be produced because it does not biodegrade easily, pollutes the environment, and can be fatal to living things! Because of all the horrible outcomes of plastic existing, the corporations need to stop producing plastic, and you should agree. The way the world revolves around plastic is damaging and needs to be stopped. Help convince other people that… corporations should not be allowed to produce plastic.

-Adelaide Rose Rampton

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All views expressed in this article are the author's own.