Plastic Pollution - What Can We Do?

We've spent three weeks examining some of the issues glaciers and now rivers. This is a long enough time to get a basic overview of the issues, but not nearly enough time to become an expert. Hopefully though, this unit has piqued your interest, and this might be something that you investigate further in the coming months.

Why Aren't These Problems about Plastic Waste and Pollution Being Solved?

Great question.

Why should we be the first to do something? We'll wait until someone else (normally USA or China) does something first.
If we take a stand and don't overfish, then other people will take the fish that we were going to catch and we'll lose out. Classic Tragedy of the Commons mind-set.
The world is going to s**t anyways, so let's just make money while we can
These problems are too big for us to solve, so we just won't do anything

What's the Key to Successful Solutions?

In order for us to help conserve our oceans, we need to think about solutions on three levels:

CORPORATIONS GOVERNMENTS AND COMMUNITIES. INDIVIDUALS

This is our focus for Week 4. We can't save the oceans on our own, nor can we wait for big corporations to do all of the heavy lifting. Change will not happen in a capitalist society unless consumers and citizens demand it.

Let's remind ourselves of some of the key principles of sustainable solutions - 'REAL G' SOLUTION

R ealistic & culturally appropriate solutions

E ducation is the key, and should be tailored to specific communities, languages and cultures

A lternatives - think outside the box, research and development is key!

L egislation and regulations - we need laws, treaties, and protected marine areas (like national parks) and then we need those laws to be enforced with fines and penalties

G - Grassroots solutions will be effective. The small acts that individual citizens and communities commit to do, actually matter.

The other things that we need to remind ourselves is that these problems are incredibly complex. For example, the past three weeks we have discovered that:

If you litter on the street, precipitation will carry that waste as surface runoff and it will end up in streams, and then carried into rivers, and then make its way into the ocean. The ocean is base level - all things end up there eventually.
8 of the 10 most heavily polluted rivers carry the majority of the plastic waste into the ocean, and so clean up plans for plastic waste needs to happen upstream, and not just along coastlines and in the ocean
8 of the 10 most polluted rivers are in Asia, but many of those countries have been accepting plastic "recycling" from North America and Western Europe, and its not entirely their waste
Citizens that live in Canada have open channels to their governments, and also many corporations - your voices matter in the day and age of social media and communications.

But above all, humans will protect things they love - we need to get people to remember how connected we are to our oceans and rivers and how important they are to our survival.

The Ocean Cleanup Technology Explained | System 001 | Cleaning ...

Your task is to investigate solutions facing our oceans. As you do your research, you will investigate a corporate/large scale solution, a solution that you can do personally, as well as a new 'invention' or technology that is currently being tested.

You will describe the solution, and give a bit of a critique. There are no perfect solutions, so it's important to analyse the positives and negatives and to determine whether or not the actions are effective. I understand that you aren't an expert, but this is a good starting point to at least understand some of the possibilities.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR YOUR RESEARCH: