Plastic Birds
Content
The study/research that this paper assumes is based on the examination of the effects that
permanent pollution has on the surrounding world, on its flora and fauna. I will underline and
exemplify what we, the human beings do without realizing to our planet.
Why this theme?
Taking into account that pollution became a fully and long discussed subject, I thought that
this theme may prove our capacity to adapt and protect the world we live in. This theme
inspired me because, we consume plastic materials, plastic carrier bags. In the process of
production or at the basis of each such bag petrol is used.
This idea crossed my mind once with the observation of the interest to various recycling
programs and the advantage that these could bring to the surrounding world. Recycling is a
”must” nowadays. Our fauna permanently suffers because of our everyday deeds and actions.
There are thousands of birds and fish which die every day because of the fact that we pollute
without thinking or taking anything into account. Even if being eco- friendly seems
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something strange I personally think that we can change something if we put our creativity
and minds together and make people realize what they have to do to save the planet and
moreover their lives.
Plan
-
Consult the adequate literature January- February
Collecting data January- February
Data interpretation March
Writing the paper March
Revising the paper March
Final variant of the paper March
Handing the paper to the teacher – April 2014
Bibliography
1.First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Dorling Kindersley – “earth matters”
-copyright 2008 Dorling Kindersley Limited
A Penguin company
2.EcoWatch.com
3.http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/08/28/plastic-waste-killing-birds-tens-thousands
4.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stiv-j-wilson/dead-plastic-filled-birds_b_638716.html
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Plastic Birds
Out at sea, far away from land, the human impact on the ocean can still be felt. Many of
the threats are invisible, like changes in water quality and chemistry. For example the ocean
absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It enables plankton, many
bacteria and seaweed to grow but burning fossil fuels results in more carbon dioxide entering
the ocean making it more acid. This can dissolve the shells of plant plankton and other
animals.
Even the normal flow of ocean currents may be changing as water temperatures
increase through global warming. Other effects are more obvious. Great drifts of litter collect
where ocean currents meet. Wandering leatherback turtles die out at sea after eating plastic
bags or ’’balloon race’’ balloons. As they rest, flocks of seabirds drift into oily washing from
ship’s fuel tanks.
In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific
Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure
system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few
big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and sailors
rarely travel through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash,
millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in
the middle of the ocean.
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The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash,
known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and
California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas .The Western Garbage
Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and
collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long
current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant
amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.
The garbage patches present numerous hazards to marine life, fishing and tourism. But
before we discuss those, it's important to look at the role of plastic. Plastic constitutes 90 per
cent of all trash floating in the world's oceans. The United Nations Environment Program
estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. In
some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton by a ratio of six to one.
Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 per
cent ends up in the ocean .Seventy per cent of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the
ocean floor .The rest floats; much of it ends up in gyres and the massive garbage patches that
form there, with some plastic eventually washing up on a distant shore.
In 1997 American oceanographer Chares Moore discovered by chance a vast floating
mass of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. Since then, the ”plastic soup ” has been growing
at what scientists believe to be an alarming rate and covers an area double the size of the
USA. The garbage is held on place by swirling underwater currents and stretches across the
northern Pacific. In fact the “soup” consists of two linked areas, on each side of the islands of
Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the
garbage, including everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags, gets
thrown off ships or oil platforms, with the rest of it coming from land. Plastic is cheap. We
use it briefly and then throw it away. But it doesn’t go really away.
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
photo degrades. 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 photo degradation are
called mermaid tears or nurdles.
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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 .In total, more than a million birds
and marine animals die each year from consuming or becoming caught in plastic and other
debris.
Besides killing wildlife, plastic and other debris damage boat and submarine equipment,
litter beaches, discourage swimming and harm commercial and local fisheries. The problem
of plastic and other accumulated trash affects beaches and oceans all over the world, including
at both poles. Land masses that end up in the path of the rotating gyres receive particularly
large amounts of trash. The 19 islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, including Midway,
receive massive quantities of trash shot out from the gyres. Some of the trash is decades old.
Some beaches are buried under five to 10 feet of trash, while other beaches are riddled with
"plastic sand," millions of grain-like pieces of plastic that are practically impossible to clean
up.
Most of this trash doesn't come from seafaring vessels dumping junk -- 80 per cent of
ocean trash originates on land .The rest comes from private and commercial ships, fishing
equipment, oil platforms and spilled shipping containers (the contents of which frequently
wash up on faraway shores years later).
Historically, ocean rubbish has biodegraded but modern plastics are more durable that
objects half-a-century old were sometimes found in the north Pacific dump. Most plastic
doesn’t biodegrade; it just turns into smaller and smaller pieces until it is the size of a dust.
Fish and birds mistake the plastic debris for food, and filter-feeders such as jellyfish ingest the
tiny particles. The area is a death- trap for marine life. Plastic garbage causes the death of
more than 100.000 marine mammals every year, not to mention over a million seabirds.
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Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes end up inside the stomachs of these creatures, when
mistake them for food.
In many areas of the globe, birds inadvertently feed on plastic floating on the water,
mistaking it for food, and many times this ingestion leads to death and even the death of their
young. A report by scientists studying the stomach content of Laysan Albatross chicks on
Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean revealed disturbing results: Forty per cent of Laysan
Albatross chicks die before fledging. Necropsies of the chick's stomachs found them filled
with plastic trash. (See photo to right of Laysan Albatrosses nesting among plastic debris on
Midway Atoll).
There is a risk to human health, too, as hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets,
the raw materials for the plastic industry, become lost or get spoiled every year, working their
way into the sea. These pollutants act as sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as
hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. It does not take much before they enter the food chain:
after being consumed by small fish they eventually end up on dinner plates. For example cod
used to be one of the most abundant fish in the ocean and has always been the favourite fish in
“fish and chips”. Try to imagine how many people can be poisoned every day if they consume
it.
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DDT, DDE, or DDD enter the body mainly when a person eats contaminated food.
Eating food with large amounts of DDT over a short time mostly affects the nervous
system. People who accidently swallowed large amounts of DDT became excitable and had
tremors and seizures. These effects on the nervous system went away once exposure
stopped. Tests in laboratory animals confirm the effect of DDT on the nervous system.
No effects have been reported in people given small daily doses of DDT by capsule
exposed for 18 months. People exposed for a long time to small amounts, such as people who
made DDT, had some reversible changes in the levels of liver enzymes. However, there was
no sign that DDT caused permanent harmful effects.
Animals’ studies show that long term exposure to DDT may affect the liver. Tests in
animals also suggest that short term exposure to DDT in food may have a harmful effect on
reproduction.
Studies in animals have shown that oral exposure to DDT can cause liver cancer.
Studies of DDT-exposed workers did not show increases in deaths or cancers. However, these
studies had problems or flaws so possible increases in cancer may not have been detected.
The Department of Health and Human Services has determined that DDT may reasonably be
anticipated to be a human carcinogen. The International Agency for Research on Cancer
(IARC) has determined that DDT, DDE, and DDD are possibly carcinogenic in humans. EPA
has determined that DDT, DDE, and DDD are probably human carcinogens.
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Fish and birds are the real indicators
DDT in water can be absorbed by small aquatic organisms and then concentrate in the
fish which eat these organisms. The levels of DDT in animals or fish can be higher than in the
environment because fat cells store DDT and because DDT takes a long time to break down.
The larger oil spill is plastic
Large plastic objects such as bottles and packaging has well-known effects on sea life,
strangling birds and fish and transporting alien species to new waters. Millimetre-sized plastic
pellets-the building blocks of larger products-clog U.S. harbours and soaks up toxic chemicals
from
seawater,
poisoning
the
creatures
that
swallow
them.
Because plastic pellets are magnets for toxic chemicals like DDT and PCBs, they
effectively become poison pills. Japanese researchers found that concentrations of these
chemicals were as much as a million times higher than in the water. Plastics themselves can
leach
endocrine-disrupting
chemicals
like
biphenyl.
Especially lethal is discarded fishing gear. Millions of tons of cut line, lines with
hooks, and nets litter our oceans causing cause slow, painful deaths to everything from tiny
seabirds to whales. Many of the birds that come to International Bird Rescue's rehabilitation
centres are impacted by fishing line and hooks, having ingested and/or been debilitated by
carelessly discarded monofilament line that has wrapped around their limbs and wings.
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What we know:

Plastic water bottles take 450 years to decompose;

Fishing lines and nets can take up to 600 years to decompose; and

Plastic bags or balloons in the ocean are dangerous (they can look like a jellyfish meal
to a sea turtle or a seagull.
What we all can do:

Reduce our use of disposable plastic products;

Use echo friendly material which replaces plastic

Reuse and recycle what we can;

Buy reusable grocery bags to cut down on plastic bag use;

Tell others about the dangers of marine debris;

Pick up litter;

Volunteer for beach and stream clean-ups;

Remind others not to release balloons into the atmosphere.

Talk ”rubbish” with friends and family and spread the world about the garbage Patch

Organise a team of volunteers and during holidays pick up litter at the beach

Make everybody around us aware that the earth and oceans are one huge ecosystem in
which everything is connected under one atmosphere and the way in which we live
our patch of the planet affects everything, everywhere
As a conclusion, we can’t treat the damage that we already produced, but we can diminish
the effects and try not to repeat them. The patch of garbage is something which feeds of our
carelessness so we should try to change our attitude and habits and understand that this planet
that we are living on is of great importance.
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So I’ll invite everybody who is interested in saving our planet to follow the slogan:
Let’s erase the ocean patch
Score a goal in nature’s match
Save ourselves and our world
Treasures aren’t always gold.
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