Our Plastic Ocean -- Zoe Meyer

The issue covered in this essay is very real and severe, and the author doesn't sugarcoat it in the slightest. He/she stresses this perfectly. The issue is that the ocean is polluted with trash, but more specifically, plastic. According to the author, in 2015 researchers analyzed all of the trash in the ocean (there were more than a million pieces), 99.9% of the trash was plastic. It's taking over everywhere we look or go, and what makes this terrifying issue even worse, is the fact that it may not even degrade. These are some of the causes of the issue that the author explains.

In the first paragraph, the author says that by 2050, there will be more weight than fish in the ocean. This is due to the fact that garbage full of plastic is put into the ocean every minute, and that 14 million tons of plastic have been dumped into the ocean. Where is it all coming from? Practically everywhere. The article says that plastic is appealing to people because it's cheap and almost indestructible, and the fact that it's so sturdy is also one of the major reasons that it is so dangerous. The plastic is also caused by microparticles in deoderent, toothpaste, and sunscreen that may go down drains. When clothes that are made out of synthetic fibers are washed, 200,000 fibers are released into wastewater. The author then gives an example of the Hudson River in New York can dump 150 million plastic fibers into the ocean every day from just washing clothes.
I think this is quite disturbing that we let the pollution so severe. It's damaging so many habitats for underwater creatures and that's just sad. It's crazy how it's like this, and it makes me scared for the future generations to come. Will this make animals become extinct or endangered? Probably. This is just a huge mess that desperately needs to be cleaned, and if we get a lot of the plastic out of the ocean, it needs to be prevented from ever happening again.