Using straws
Although pretty straws seems to fill Pinterest in some sort of Martha Stewart dream drink like world, plastic straws are actually lethal.
Here are some scary facts:
-We use 500,000,000 straws EVERYDAY! Just because we are to lazy to reach for the actual glass
-Straws are amongst the top 10 of marine debris
-Straws are made of polypropylene, which is one of the things we put in our car, so why put it in our mouth!
They cause a lot of injuries to sealife and seabirds and really we don’t really need straws everyday. So let’s be kind to the ocean and remember next time you order a drink:
“A gin & tonic, no straw please”
Eating fish
I will make another blog to go more in depth into this, but I will say one thing.
If you buy your fish from the supermarket, you cannot say you care about the ocean.
Overfishing is a monumental environmental issue and commercial fishing is making a huge dent in the health of our ocean.
But what if it says it’s “sustainable”? Beware of labels! Marketing and accreditations does not mean that the product you are consuming is any good.
The U.N states the following :
“Over 70% of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted. “
Not only the fish stocks are depleting but the by-catch from the overfishing is horrific, 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die each year after becoming entangled in fishing equipment. How do you like your cod? With a side of dead turtles?
For every pound of prawns fished out, 26lb of marine creatures were killed and the surviving ones tossed back. This is due to the way they fish using nets as big as several boeing drop into the ocean then dragged along the seafloor.
We need a healthy balance in our oceans to see it thrives. In unless you have seen the way it has been caught, where it has been caught and know the local marine life, you are not helping the ocean by eating commercially caught seafood.
Using exfoliating products with micro beads
Toothpaste, skin product, shower gel, micro plastic beads are everywhere! And while they might give you that smooth like a baby’s bottom skin you wanted they are also slowly killing the ocean… and actual all of us.
The fact they are tiny (well, yeah, micro) makes them really hard to be cleaned up and just end up in the ocean. The problem is that the marine life ends up feeding on them, which as discussed in the previous paragraph is an issue since we are ourselves eating the fish.
Would you snack on a lovely soup of micro plastic beads? Probably not, but yet we are when eating sea life.
Earthtalk takes this example to raise awareness:
“An average of 43,000 plastic microparticles per square kilometer in the Great Lakes“.
So for your next beauty treatment it might be worth to check the label.
Sources:
Greenpeace.org
Oceana.org
Earthtalk.org
UN.com
Sea Sand & Fins 