save the ocean

 Have you ever thought about all the beautiful marine life swimming in the ocean, a turtle swimming by, swimming through the coral with a bunch of fish, and finding a tropical island with coral reefs all around you. Except I’m here to tell you… NO! Because there is so much trash in the ocean! Instead of doing all the things I said before you’d be swimming with a plastic bag, swimming through a pile of trash with a bunch of plastic water bottles, and no tropical islands, just an island of trash! Ok maybe I exaggerated a little bit, but people are throwing away too much trash, one piece of trash kills a lot of animals, maybe some fish you want to eat will have plastic in them, and the beach you go to is littered with trash.

People are throwing away too much trash into these landfills. You may be thinking ¨wait landfills are on land, and we are talking about saving the sea.¨ Well the trash from the landfills drifts in the wind from the landfill and into a river that then goes into the ocean. And this causes a lot of trash in the ocean. There is so much trash in the ocean that there is an island of trash the size of Texas in the ocean, and Texas is 268,580 sq mi.

There are a bunch of sea creatures that die from trash in the ocean. Here is an example of how many animals can die from 1 piece of plastic, A fish eats plastic and dies then a bigger fish eats that fish, an eel eats that fish then a shark, then a killer whale eats the shark! Which kills all 5 of those animals; and that is just 1 piece of trash. Also a scientific study showed that 100 million sea animals die each year from plastic alone.

Imagine you are at a fish restaurant, and you order fish, and when you cut it open, there is a piece of plastic inside! That probably won't happen but still that would be pretty weird. Another bad thing about trash in the ocean is it’s hard for us to catch fish to eat because they have plastic inside of them and no one wants to eat plastic. So you’ll lose the tasty fish you like to eat. Also it’s hard for fishermen to catch good fish, none with plastic inside of them. So fishermen may not catch enough good fish to make a living. Be a friend to fishermen and  throw away less trash.

Ok some of you may not like fish, or you have something against fishermen, then what if you knew how much dirty trash is going into the beach you like to swim at.  You probably have a beach you like to swim at, and an estimated 12 billion pounds of plastic is dumped in the world’s oceans every year and a lot of plastic ends up on the beaches that you swim at, and that could make them close. You don’t want your favorite beach to close, do you?

Through all these examples I hope I convinced you to not throw plastic into the oceans. To help the environment, the sea creatures, the fishermen, but most importantly yourself.