So I watched this documentary this afternoon, and boy, do I now feel like just a terrible human being.
I mean, it just takes a simple look around the room to see how much plastic is involved in our daily lives, and yet a few months or years from now just about all of it will be out the door and replaced with something new. All of that junk plastic has to go somewhere, and to think that these folks can get on a boat and sail a thousand miles out into the ocean and find themselves absolutely inundated with our garbage is kind of sickening!
Even if it isn’t just a giant, floating island of garbage like the description makes it sound, seeing the kinds of things that they were able to scoop out of the water in such abundance really makes you stop and think about how we’re kind of ruining the environment in ways that we don’t even realize, and that there’s not really an easy way to stop it, either. One of the lines that really stuck with me was the scientist talking about sandwich bags at Subway that get used for, what, maybe a minute if you then sit down and eat your sandwich right there at the restaurant?!
And here I felt a little better about myself for (mostly) using reusable bags at the grocery store, but clearly it’s not nearly good enough if the plastics we use get in the oceans, which then partially breaks down and ends up in the fish that we eat and finds their way right back to us.
It’s scary to see how a life of convenience is slowly ruining one of the biggest resources that our planet has, and we don’t even know it, and frankly most people probably wouldn’t care if they did.
What would it take to significantly cut down on consumer packaging in your life?
Of all the places that I’d expect to see pollution, plastics floating around in the ocean as tiny particles that will be there forever wouldn’t exactly have been on the top of my list. What do we do???