DT project part 2-1

DT project pt.2-1

- what statistics can you find about plastic bag/bottle use and waste around the world (think about the sources of these statistics - reference them)
- microbeads - what are they and why are they bad?
- plastic packaging - how much is essential?
- Which countries are doing better than others (with reducing plastic use or increasing recycling) and why? How is Korea doing?
Lastly - what do you think we need to be doing to make the situation better - explain your reasoning.

We use plastic so much. just think about it, even you are not using water bottles, we use more things that plastics are hiding inside, such as toothpaste, handwash gel, LEGO, and even more! Los Angeles area alone, 10 metric tons of plastic fragments—like grocery bags, straws, and soda bottles—are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day. This problem is not in Los Angles, but what materials or cause that is forcing us to use plastic a lot? Let's find out.

Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension. They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. They are used in exfoliating personal care products, tubes of toothpaste and in biomedical and health-science research.invention of microbeads was a minor medical breakthrough; they could be used to treat cancer, help with HIV research and even form the technological basis behind home pregnancy tests. They’re also an environmental disaster. 
Because of these microbeads (a.k.a. microplastics) are very useful and effective, lots of countries started to use microbeads.

The origins of microbeads problem come by this. microbeads are good things. They don't harm people but think about some peoples that they love to throw tons of trash everywhere. microbeads are "micro", so when these go into the ocean... lots of fishes that loves to eat planktons will eat that too, just because they are small. 

in may 2015, they first found the microplastics in the gut of fish.

we need a lot of plastic packaging in our normal life. Unfortunately, I couldn't found out how much is essential statistics, but I found plastic is having 16% of whole packaging materials, it's not the HUGE number, isn't it?

In the UK 38.5m plastic bottles are used every day – only just over half make it to recycling, while more than 16m are put into landfill, burnt or leak into the environment and oceans each day; China is responsible for most of the increase in demand. The Chinese public’s consumption of bottled water accounted for nearly a quarter of global demand... these two countries are the most plastic usage countries in the world.

what about Korea? Do Korea have lots of plastic usages? korea is much sensitive to plastic or other recycles. look at your home, you have to split every single material into different bags. when you go to the market and buy a lot, you need a plastic bag, but Korea will give you a trash bag, which is very good to wasting plastics, so Korea uses much less than other countries. 

I think I don't have any sources to save much plastics... RECYCLE, because when we recycle properly, we could use more plastics without digging, and we don't need to worry about fishes because we don't have any plastics left to "feed" fish plastics if we recycle it all!