Or rather, they are playing a big part in messing it up!
Why is that?
Petroleum-based plastics like PET do not decompose in the same way that organic material does.
Stuff like wood, food scraps and grass gets transformed into useful compounds by bacteria, but this does not happen with plastic.
Plastic never really goes away.
After hundreds of years it might break down if it is exposed to sunlight, but even those tiny pieces are still floating around.
Of course, if it gets buried in a landfill it never sees the sunlight and so it stays … and stays.
One way that we can help, even if it seems a teensy way, is to say “No, thank you” to straws.
Every little bit really does help.
Seriously!
We don’t need to use a straw to drink a cool drink.
By the way, if the cool drink is in an aluminium can that also takes 500 years to break down.
So make sure you recycle those too, please.
The problem with straws is that they are light and even if they do get disposed of in the proper way, they get picked up by the wind and carried off to places unknown.
Often they land up in rivers, dams and the sea and they cause untold damage to birds and other marine life.
Yes, I know it’s very cool to pull the paper off the straw so it’s concertinaed up, and then use the straw to drop a little bit of cool drink on the paper and watch it magically unfold all by itself.
This drives my mum crazy if I do it when we are out, so she’ll be glad to hear that I am giving up straws in the interests of helping to save the planet.
Of course, if you absolutely must have a straw in your drink, then take it home with you and in another blog I’ll share some cool stuff to do with straws. Sciencey stuff!
In the meantime, I’m sharing my book, Sibo Tackles Trash on the website (www.sibo.co.za) for everybody to read free for a few days.
Every little bit really does help people, let’s all try.
Together we can make a big difference.
Sibo
