Recycling Reminds Us How Our Actions Affect The World At Large / Eurogroup Recycling

Recycling Reminds Us How Our Actions Affect The World At Large

It may be tempting to adopt an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality with regard to recycling, rationalizing that someone else should worry about the problem, but that can manifest even larger waste-management problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the middle of our seas, where our disposable culture has yielded such a monumental plastic problem that it has infiltrated multiple oceanic gyres. 

Despite popular belief, these debris-covered regions don’t actually look like floating trash islands. In fact, constantly pulsating and rotating ocean currents have transformed our post-consumer plastic waste into tiny bits and pieces (see References 9), many of which are inadvertently consumed by countless marine species since the garbage often resembles plankton. Eurogroup Recycling beyond the unfortunate increase in mortality rates among seabirds, turtles, seals and other types of fish, scientists are now concerned that the endocrine-disrupters found in our bisphenol A-laden plastic waste ultimately move up the food chain to humans where they bioaccumulate in our bodies (see References 10), resulting in assorted health issues and reproductive challenges.