Pollution Essay

You can’t walk across a college campus, past an office building, or through a park without seeing one, two, or ten empty bottles. Many are plastic water bottles. Trash bins overflow them. Those water bottles are a problem. Why? Because only one out of five bottles actually makes it to a recycling bin. Plastic bottles take centuries to decompose and if they are incinerated, toxic byproducts, such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals, are releasing into the atmosphere. The rest are littered on our streets or over filing our landfills. They degrade our landscape and damage our environment. In addition the plastic water bottles are not biodegradable that is, they don’t decay. They remain as trash a hundreds of years.

The plastic around the world is building up to become a huge world problem. Each year eight million tons of plastic

“When was the last time you spent an entire day without using a piece of disposable plastic?” This quote is used by Kitt Doucette in her article, An Ocean of Plastic (412). It shows that using plastic water bottles are becoming a part of people’s lifestyle, regardless people don’t think about the consequences of using them. Water is a necessary part to human life and without water we cannot survive. Humans need at least eight glasses of water to make up for the fact that we lose an average of ten glasses per day throughout normal functions such as sweating and breathing. We must drink the right amount of water in order to stay healthy. There are millions of people worldwide who use plastic water bottles, and there have been massive sustainability

We as consumers have been lied to as far as them being recycled and safe for the planet. Plastic bottles are not sustainable, no matter what we've been told. Using vast quantities of fossil fuels and water, these bottles are manufactured, filled, and shipped around the globe. (Not a

plastic bottles end up in landfills each year.” (Solvie Karlstrom and Christine Dell'Amore 2010) Water

“One of the biggest challenges facing the bottled water industry is how to respond to the environmental claims levelled against it” (Grocer). Every time someone throws a bottle away, they have taken up more space in a landfill for the next four hundred fifty to one thousand years. Besides the long decomposition rate, water bottles are the cause of several more environmental issues. Overfilling landfills, health hazards caused by refilling, and the economic stresses due to the constant and inconvenient repurchasing are just a few of the negatives water bottles have on us. These plastic pollutants are doing more harm to both the environment and their users than good.

There are so many reasons why and how plastic bottles can be bad for the environment. I couldn’t find a statistic about water bottle litter but I mean if you go outside your house you’d probably see a water bottles everywhere. Especially in our bodies of water. There’s a “Great Pacific Garbage patch” that is bits and pieces of plastic from all sorts of products that just floats in the Ocean’s because of people not disposing of these plastics

Furthermore, plastic water bottles create unnecessary pollution throughout the world, and being that they have a tremendously slow decomposition rate, this issue is very frightening. It takes on average 1,000 years for plastic water bottles to decompose entirely. With only around 20% of the bottles being recycled, these bottles can be found littering landfills and oceans throughout the world. It is estimated that by 2050, more plastic will be found in the ocean than actual fish, with plastic water bottles being one of the biggest contributors to this statistic. (The Washington Post). Worse yet, bottles containing the compound PET are the only bottles that are recycled, meaning that if other bottles are not composed of this compound, they are simply discarded. This issue is very difficult to tackle and although preventative methods, such as recycling programs and thinner water bottles have helped, the issue still remains unsolved.

We should stop using plastic water bottles in schools because they are very difficult to recycle. With plastic, it takes over one thousand years for the decomposition process to even begin! Plastic also releases toxins into the ground when it decomposes such as phthalates which can hurt the native soil making the soil around the area tremendously substandard to other natural soils. One environmental group also discovered that 75% of all large named brands that

It is important for you to know the facts about plastic water bottles and some of the alternatives available, because it is destroying our planet and our health. Plastic water bottles are one of the major causes of global warming. (adopt-a-watershed.

Plastic water bottles are seen and consumed everywhere. Without knowing the deadly effects that water bottles have on the environment, consumers will keep buying them and contribute to the problem. About 17 million barrels of oil are used each year solely to make water bottles

We must preserve our planet by adapting to sustainability. We should recycle in our everyday lives, and be environmentally conscious of how the items we utilize impact our planet. According to Sarah Kaplan, “by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s ocean.” (1). Of course, it is evident that recycling, is one option to reduce our ecological impact on the planet, but a good place to start is to minimize our usage of plastics. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA),

The next time you are out for a run, walk, or bike ride, count the number of plastic bottles you see on the ground. I have done this and it is mind boggling. The environmental concerns caused by producing, distributing, and disposing of plastic water bottles is under scrutiny by various public interest groups. The negative impact of plastic water bottles on our environment is real and requires action. The production of these bottles needs to stop because they pose an ongoing threat to the health of the environment. One main reason plastic water bottles should not be produced is because they create a health risk to the environment. Plastic bottles are made of a petroleum product known as PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) and these bottles require large amounts of fossil fuel to make and transport them. Even though fossil fuel is a major energy source used in the world today, overconsumption can lead to serious environmental issues such as air pollution. According to the journal article “Message in the Bottle,” it is estimated that the total energy needed to make, transport, and dispose of one plastic bottle of water is equivalent to filling the same bottle one-quarter full of oil. This is a great deal of oil to produce just one nonreusable water bottle. It also takes three liters of water to produce a one-liter plastic bottle of water (“Message in a Bottle”). In addition to this, it can take plastic bottles up to five hundred years to decompose, and during the decomposition

Early 1950’s marked the introduction of the plastic industry and has in the last 67 years become a useful and versatile material with a wide range of applications, due to its durability, lightweight and low cost. Plastic comes in many different variations such as Nylon, Acrylic, PVC, Polythene, Polypropylene, Polycarbonate and much more. These are created using a combination of cellulose, coal, natural gas, salt and crude oil forming chains of like molecules linked together named polymers (Le Guern, 2009). In many cases plastics are disposed of after one use, especially packaging, water bottles, plastic bags, straws and cutlery, however, these same attributes that make plastics such a versatile material also pose a threat to ecosystems due to their durability and persistence in terrestrial, aquatic, and marine environments adversely affecting wildlife, wildlife habitat and humans globally (Plastic Waste: Ecological and Human Health

Pollution is the introduction of harmful substances or products into the environment. It is a major problem in America and as well as the world. Pollution not only damages the environment, but damages us also. It has cause many problems ranging from lung cancer to the greenhouse effect. It is all among us but we continue to live in our own filth. What is the reason behind this flawed logic? In this paper I will examine the problems and solutions for this issue.