Book Worm

Recycling Plastic Someone goes to the grocery store, and they buy a single-use plastic water bottle. When they get home, they are finished, so they toss it into the recycling bin. Is this a good idea? What happens to the plastic bottle once it gets put outside to be picked up by the recycling companies? Plastic is actually not always recycled, even if it is put into the recycling bins and taken to the recycling companies. For example, in 2020, only 8 percent of the plastic the US generated was recycled. Even if it is recycled, it will be turned into another thing made of plastic. Take that single-use plastic water bottle. When it is recycled, maybe it was turned into a plastic Tupperware container. After the container has done its job, the person who owned it put it in the trash, and it got sent to a landfill. Plastic bags take 20 years to break down, and even then, it isn’t actually gone. Different plastic items take different amounts of time to break down. But is that plastic really ...

  Ocean Conservation As of 2020, there are 5.25 trillion macro and micro pieces of plastic in the ocean. That makes 46,000 pieces of plastic every square mile. 8 million pieces of plastic make their way into the ocean every day, and all of the plastic weighs up to 269,000 tonnes. There are many groups working to conserve the ocean and the life in them.  One group is Oceana. Oceana is the largest ocean conservation group in the world. They focus solely on marine conservation. They are an international group, and they have already saved nearly 4 million square million square miles of ocean. Oceana’s goal is to restore the ocean. Their slogan is ‘Save the ocean, feed the world.’ They want to save marine life so that people can have healthy meals. According to Oceana, “Restoring the ocean could feed 1 billion people a healthy seafood meal every day.” A different group is called the Project AWARE Foundation. Project AWARE is spread across 182 countries. They have made 217,552 conse...