Mindless 'Use and Throw'
I wonder how somebody can routinely dispose a plastic spoon after a single usage out of it. One possible explanation is that we don't concern ourselves with anything/anybody other than ourselves. I want to celebrate my kid's party in style, of course I don't want to spend 2-3 hours loading up the dishwasher with reusable plates and cups. That time is better spent watching my favorite movie for the nth time.
It's time for some party planning. First - appetizers, next cutting the birthday cake, followed by lunch or dinner and lastly dessert. So, over four courses, four spoons/forks for each person. For fifty guests, it means 200 plastic spoons. Two hundred spoons to be added to a landfill or an ocean floor to live on forever and kill the marine life, and all this to save an hour so that I can watch TV? Seriously!
The Problem with Plastic
The main problem with plastic -- besides there being so much of it -- is that it doesn't biodegrade. No natural process can break it down. (Experts point out that the durability that makes plastic so useful to humans also makes it quite harmful to nature.) Instead, plastic photodegrades. A plastic cigarette lighter cast out to sea will fragment into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic without breaking into simpler compounds, which scientists estimate could take hundreds of years. The small bits of plastic produced by photodegradation are called mermaid tears or nurdles.
These tiny plastic particles can get sucked up by filter feeders and damage their bodies. Other marine animals eat the plastic, which can poison them or lead to deadly blockages. Nurdles also have the insidious property of soaking up toxic chemicals. Over time, even chemicals or poisons that are widely diffused in water can become highly concentrated as they're mopped up by nurdles. These poison-filled masses threaten the entire food chain, especially when eaten by filter feeders that are then consumed by large creatures.
Plastic has acutely affected albatrosses, which roam a wide swath of the northern Pacific Ocean. Albatrosses frequently grab food wherever they can find it, which leads to many of the birds ingesting -- and dying from -- plastic and other trash. On Midway Island, which comes into contact with parts of the Eastern Garbage Patch, albatrosses give birth to 500,000 chicks every year. Two hundred thousand of them die, many of them by consuming plastic fed to them by their parents, who confuse it for food [source: LA Times]. In total, more than a million birds and marine animals die each year from consuming or becoming caught in plastic and other debris.
