The idea that I got for my senior project was inspired by the trip I made to Alaska. I want to make people understand about the use of plastic and its damage to humanity. When I use plastic, the thing I worry about the least about is its impact on the environment. Then when I went to NOLS, I had a conversation with my group about the effects on plastic. One of our instructors began to tell us how not only were humans becoming too depended on plastic, but also she told us about the bad impact that we had on the environment. She began by telling us how plastic could not be destroy as we know "matter can not be created or destroyed". She explained how plastic was thrown in the ocean, and there it just broke down into to really small pieces. Pieces so small that animals were beginning to eat this. Plankton is one of the main specie that has been affected by this because the plastic is broken down so small that is food for plankton. Plankton then is eaten by bigger animals and plastic is passed on an on from animals to animals. This is beginning to killed enormous amount of animals from the ocean.
I thought this topic was extremely interesting to me because I know I never pay attention to plastic. This meant that I was part of the problem as well since I was educating myself. I was just using plastic and being careless about where this plastic ended up. I then began to look at some websites and found a quite interesting one http://www.iwma.com/programs-events/Impact%20of%20Plastic.html. In this website I learned a little more about plastic and also was able to see a few shocking pictures of waste and animals that are dying from ingesting plastic. As soon as I saw this I thought about the animals I saw in Alaska, and how careless use of plastic can lead to more animals being killed.
Another thing that shocked me was that there an island known as Great Pacific Garbage Patch that is located in the Pacific ocean and contains all sorts of trash mostly plastic. This page gives a little more information about this island http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/. The patch is "as big as the state of Texas" the website states.
I know this project will be extremely hard to get your hands on because it does not only take one person to make a difference, but a group. I will do my job by beginning to inform people about the issue and we will see what happens next.
