Just imagine what could be accomplished if people drank tap water, not bottled water. It is, unfortunately, all too symptomatic of the egocentric and selfish lives we lead that few are willing to give up even something as minor as this. The pleasure principle surely prevails, eh?
Oh, and cutting back on soft drinks would help reduce not only plastic pollution but also runaway obesity.
Reports The Guardian:
A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.But what about recycling?
More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International’s global packaging trends report.
Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean.Humans are not immune to the effects of this environmental degradation:
Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish. Last year, the European Food Safety Authority called for urgent research, citing increasing concern for human health and food safety “given the potential for microplastic pollution in edible tissues of commercial fish”.As always, the fate of the world and all of its creatures is largely in our hands. And as always, warnings like The Guardian's will likely be ignored by the bulk of humanity whose personal preferences and comforts command such an unforgivably high premium.
Do you ever get that feeling you're howling at the moon? I sure do.
ReplyDeleteAll the time, Mound, but for me, it is therapeutic but also, admittedly, frustrating.
DeleteWho ever said the body politic had the inclination to use its collective or individual brain? Actually paying money for 1/1000 of a pennysworth of water makes people feel rich. I know, I've asked dozens, plus you know Halifax Regional Water is actually poison. Ranks right up there with believing in megavitamin doses, old wives' remedies, internal bodily cleansing BS preparations (apparently not a soul knows the function of the liver and kidney), fake diets, anti-aging hormonal creams, the dissing of measles, chicken pox and diptheria vaccines, naturopathic circus barker blurbs, chiropractorism (Mencken had that scam figured out a hundred years ago) the belief in astrology, ghosts and the myriad other wacko ideas our fellow citizens walk around believing. Then they stop at a fast food cafeteria, er restaurant, and stuff themselves full of bad hamburgers, sugary buns, salty french fries and diet pop or bottled water. Then they do it all again tomorrow, because most people cannot even assemble a sandwich at home by themselves. Food at home is a bag of chips. No wonder they feel rich shelling out a buck for a plastic bottle of water with no guarantee of provenance that it even matches the cleanliness of the public water supply. It's belief in magic.
ReplyDeleteMakes you wonder why we bother sending children to school. They know better than the collective knowledge gained by the human race in the past, so why bother polluting their minds with facts and attempting to teach them basic logic in the first place? In my three score years and ten, I've seen little reason to come to any other conclusion than that the vast majority of the human race is as dumb as a bag of nails and happy to be that way. Whether they have high school or college edjumacation seems to make little difference. I know a man with an MBA who hasn't eaten a home-cooked meal in years except when his parents invite him for Thanksgiving or Xmas. Drinking bottled water for health reasons is what he does.
No wonder cooking shows perpetuate on TV. What dem people is doing just takes the average slob's breath away! Magic, I tell yuh!
BM
I'm afraid that I have to agree, for the most part, with your bleak assessment of our fellow species members, BM. I just read an interesting article in Mother Jones about Trump supporters and the almost impossible task of convincing others, even educated and articulate ones, that the 'facts' they hold dear are often at sharp variance with reality.
DeleteSuch does not allow for too much hope for our future, does it?