While famine, poverty, violence, and economic inequality continue to plague our world, the greatest threat we face is silent. The greatest killer of our environment lives among us – PLASTIC. The nice little plastic bottle that your favorite drink comes in, the mess-free plastic Styrofoam boxes that accompany every one of your Sherpa meals, even the neat little Ziploc bags you use once just to throw away later. They seem harmless, but the truth behind their transparent appearance is deadly.

A single plastic bottle takes an average of 450 years to decompose. A plastic grocery bag takes 10-20 years, a plastic Styrofoam cup takes around 50 years, and a plastic six-pack beverage holder takes just about 400 years to decompose. While these abstract amounts of years may seem irrelevant, they play a key factor in our lives because of the impact they have on our only home, planet Earth.

Plastics come in various shapes and sizes. We can all easily recognize macro plastics such as water bottles, but when was the last time you took a look at the ingredients in your face wash? Those magical little balls you find in your face wash that seem to zap your teenage acne are actually polypropylene balls – AKA micro beads of plastic. What’s the big deal? These small balls are hazardous to humans and animals alike as they are toxic. All the micro beads you conveniently wash down the drain end up in our oceans where they are easily ingested by the sea life. These micro beads then end up on your dinner plate. These immortal micro beads are only one example to the greater variety of plastics that plague our oceans.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean, a vortex of plastics, which consists of micro and macro plastics caught in the circular currents of the Pacific Ocean. It contains around 1.9 million bits of plastic per square mile. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch only continues to grow due to the fact that plastics take incredibly long to degrade as they simply fracture into smaller pieces. Furthermore, globally 7 billion pounds of non-recyclable plastics are produced every year. Many of these plastics end up in the sea where fish ingest them, are strangled by them, or face deformities because of them. Nevertheless, it’s not only fish that face the consequence of sea plastics. It’s everything that relies on sea life, including humans. As pollution continues, all marine lives are poisoned, which in turn poisons us as we consume our deliciously roasted salmon and various other marine cuisines.

Chris Jordan, a photographer, made a journey to Midway Atoll with the hope to educate the world on this invisible killer. Midway Atoll is a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from the nearest continental land. It resides near the apex of the Pacific Garbage Patch. It is also the breeding ground to many seafaring albatrosses and it is on this island that great tragedy has struck. On Midway Atoll, thousands of albatrosses die each day due to starvation and dehydration because of plastics. Why? Parent albatrosses mistake plastics for edible food and feed it to their chicks slowly filling their stomach with indigestible debris and ultimately killing them.

I interviewed thirty students with a single question, “In one week of school, what is the average number of plastic drink bottles (containing any beverage) you buy or consume at school?” The results varied from zero to a whopping twelve bottles per week! After conducting this survey, the estimated average number of bottles each Concordia student buys per week is about 2 bottles. The Concordia high school consists of around 400 students, this tallies up to a total of 800 bottles per week! Due to China’s garbage leakage issue, about 10% of these bottles will end up in the ocean. That means that every week, Concordia contributes 80 bottles to the ocean. Over a whole year of school (assuming a school year is about 40 weeks), this equals 3,200 plastic bottles that are lost at sea and will not deteriorate for another 450 years! As students privileged with high caliber education and luxurious sustainment, this is unacceptable. Clean water is accessible to us on every floor of the school. It’s time to take responsibility for our actions and hold ourselves accountable for the damage we are doing. Justice cannot be substituted for convince. I’ve already persuaded one of my friends to completely switch to using a reusable water bottle instead of buying a new plastic bottle everyday! If Concordians are able to make the simple change of utilizing reusable water bottles, we can become part of the solution, not the problem. Are you up for the challenge?

There are viable and possible options to heal what has been hurt. In the United States of America, a new ban on the production of micro beads for cosmetics has been enacted with the hopes of making micro beads obsolete by 2017. In addition to this, the United States and Great Britain have taken the extra step to enforce reusable paper bags. Now plastic bags are banned, but if you need a bag to carry your groceries, you will be supplied a paper bag that’s accompanied with an extra fee. However, if you bring your own recyclable bag, there is no charge and certain stores even give you store credit. The extra cost on paper bags has given a new meaning to B.Y.O.B ­– bring your own bag. This is due to the fact that it only takes about 1 month for a paper bag to decompose while a plastic bag takes around 10-20 years! The new bans on cosmetic micro beads and plastic bags may not solve all our environmental problems, but it’s a small step to a bigger solution.

We cannot turn our backs away from this invisible killer. It’s an ever-present problem that’s not going to disappear without intervention. However, the invisible killer of plastics isn’t so invisible if we educate ourselves on the problem. Currently, we are at a crossroad. We can either choose to stay on our destructive path or we can take the road less traveled and make the effort to change. Change is difficult, but change must happen. Anything is possible because a single person is enough to cause a ripple across the world. Caring enough and making the conscious effort to change are vitally important for a better world. Change is often times not dramatic, but it comes in small increments that have a large impact. Recognition, education, and action will create a domino effect of change. We are given this opportunity to save what we have destroyed – will you take it? We have one earth, one chance, and one life. Are you willing to let it go to waste?

E. Lyon – re-published from Zeitgeist, Concordia International School Shanghai