Plastic Bottles & Ocean Pollution

Plastic Bottles&

Ocean Pollution

Oceans make up 97% of Earth’s water

Oceans feed us and sustain us

Most of the oxygen in our atmosphere is generated by the sea

Oceans drive our climate and weather

Our very lives depend on the ocean

Yet we’re poisoning the ocean with hundreds of millions of tons of plastic

Over 2 million plastic beverage bottles are used every 5 minutes in the U.S.

As little as 10% of plastic bottles

are recycled

As little as 10% of plastic bottles are recycled

The rest end up in landfills or in our oceans

There is a garbage patch twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific

100 million marine mammals and turtles in the north Pacific are killed every year by plastic in the ocean

70-100% of North Pacific sea birds are affected by eating plastic. This albatross starved to death because it ate too much plastic trash.

Plastic fragments concentrate pollutants up to one million times ambient levels in sea water - making ingested plastic into poison pills

So what? Think the ocean isn’t important?

Imagine Earth without it

Plastic is killing the ocean

Plastic is poisoning the fish you eat

The fish you eat have likely ingested contaminated plastic. Nature can no longer produce organic fish in the ocean.

What can YOU do?

Stop using plastic beverage bottles!

8.8 billion gallons of bottled water were consumed in the U.S. in 2007

That’s 232 16 oz. bottles per person a year

Only a small fraction are recycled

Up to 63.4 BILLION plastic bottles are dumped into landfills and the ocean a year

That’s 173,589,041 bottles every day

120,548 plastic bottles end up in landfills or the ocean every minute

THE CHALLENGE

Use reusable water bottles filled with filtered tap water

If each person in the U.S. replaced their disposable bottled water with a reusable container filled with tap water, we’d keep BILLIONS of plastic water bottles out of the ocean

It’s easy to doIt will help save the oceanIt will save you money

Where to learn morehttp://savetheocean.wordpress.com

http://www.rozsavage.com/index.php/environment/pacific-stage-1-plastic-pollution

http://www.filterforgood.com/

http://www.algalita.org/

http://www.healthebay.org

Photo CreditsSlide 1: Doug James, Cornell UniversitySlide 2: NASASlide 3: NOAASlide 4: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 5: Environment Canada Satellite ImageSlide 6: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 7: Heal The Bay, www.healthebay.orgSlide 8: Doug James, Cornell UniversitySlide 9: Jeff Bennett, DigitalSplashMediaSlide 10: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 11: Jeff Bennett, DigitalSplashMediaSlide 12: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 13: www.sanrafaelvolunteers.orgSlide 14: Algalita Marine Research Foundation, www.algalita.orgSlide 15: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 16: NASASlide 17: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 18: Adam Laverty, www.endoverfishing.orgSlide 19: NOAASlide 20: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 21: Jeff Bennett, DigitalSplashMediaSlide 22: sstock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 23: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 24: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 25: Doug James, Cornell UniversitySlide 26: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 27: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 28: stock.xchng, www.sxc.huSlide 29: Jeff Bennett, DigitalSplashMediaSlide 30: stock.xchng, www.sxc.hu

www.DigitalSplashMedia.com

an online visual explanation by