The Life of a Plastic Bottle
About 4 ounces of oil, 20 ounces of carbon dioxide and 1.4 gallons of water later, I am used only once and then promptly thrown into the trash. You don’t remember me, but I am one of over 60 million polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic water bottles thrown away every day in America. I swim off the coast of California and join billions of water bottles, plastic bags, fishing nets, and more in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, standing at 1.6 million square kilometres. As you may have guessed, my journey doesn’t end on this island of trash; I’ll slowly decompose over the span of 500 years and cause irreversible harm to ecosystems far and wide.
Over time, I break down into tiny pieces and microplastics to be inevitably consumed by fish and other aquatic life. To my left, a sea turtle mistakes me and my brightly coloured friends for jellyfish, his favourite meal. To my right, the albatross feeds me to her newly hatched chicks, thinking the small bits of plastic are fish eggs. As the microplastics travel up the food chain, you humans eventually consume the toxic properties stored in the particles.
What’s more, I have the potential to change the ecosystem around me by blocking essential sunlight. Three times the size of France, my home, the garbage patch, blocks energy from the sun from reaching algae and plankton, the foundation of the marine food chains. Even after I disappear from the naked eye, I will continue to break down into microscopic pieces and indefinitely wander rising waters and through extensive food chains.
For a plastic water bottle such as myself, there were countless possibilities for my future: some better than the one I got, others definitely worse. Sure, I saved you the few seconds it would have taken to refill a metal water bottle, but I took decades from the lives of animals and humans. The good news? While my story is an unfortunate and not uncommon reality, almost 30% of my fellow bottles have been recycled and given new lives in different forms! They are broken down, melted, and reformed into a new product; hopefully a more reusable one!
Works Cited
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%20it,use%20water%20or%20soda%20bottle.
https://media.wired.com/photos/60be3c2f70d107b3e767d5a1/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/AdobeStock_377847
