What You Don’t Know About Plastic Bottles

January 24, 2022January 24, 2022 By Julia Plastic Pollution

Plastic bottles are infamous for finding their way into oceans, rivers, and lakes. It’s common knowledge that they harm the environment in numerous ways. Besides animals getting sick from eating plastic, what other ways do plastic bottles harm the environment? Is there a pollution aspect to their infamous story? What happens before the plastic gets to the water?

Before plastic bottles get into the ocean, they start off in an oil refinery. Through chemical bonding, they become plastic pellets. Once they are in this stage, they are melted down, and finally, molded into the shape of plastic bottles. Just to make these plastic bottles, a huge amount of oil is drawn from the earth, just so that they can be used once. In 2010, it was reported to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency that oil refineries produced about 22,000 tons of air pollution. This pollution can lead to harmful health issues for humans ¹ and causes the earth to get warmer, which leads to many extreme consequences. To find out what some of those reasons are, see my blog post on it here! As you can see, before plastic bottles even reach human hands, they create extreme negative effects on Earth.

Once plastic bottles do reach humans, however, they can end up in a landfill, in oceans, streams, rivers, lakes, creeks, or on beaches. In landfills, when it rains, the water absorbs all of the water-soluble compounds. Some of these compounds are poisonous, and when multiple of them join together, they are called leachate. The leachate poisons nearby bodies of water and can harm wildlife and their ecosystems. When plastic bottles are in the ocean, animals get tangled in plastic debris and eat the plastic, as well. Eating the plastic makes them feel like they’ve eaten enough when they still need more food. Because of this, they starve and die. Eating plastic bottles harms animals, and can kill them in more than one way. Plastic bottles are not only harmful to animals, but to humans as well. Plastic bottles can get into the food we eat. The plastic goes up and up the food chain. For example, if zooplankton has plastic in them and is then eaten by small fish, the small fish now have that plastic inside of them. If the small fish are eaten by a mackerel, the mackerel now has that plastic in them. Soon, the mackerel is caught by a fisher and then eaten by us. Now we have plastic in our bodies.

All of the effects that are caused by plastic bottles can be prevented in a simple way – using reusable water bottles instead of single-use plastic ones. By choosing a reusable water bottle instead of a single-use one, you are saving ecosystems, lives, and the environment. By choosing a reusable water bottle, you are contributing to the end of climate change and plastic pollution.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6xlNyWPpB8

Photo: Tsai, Olga. “brown sea turtle.” Unsplash, 12 November 2019, https://unsplash.com/photos/iRgbLpf50IE