A Message on a Bottle

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By: Christine Marie

Two simple words, on the back of a Snapple bottle that most people overlook; PLEASE RECYCLE. If not recycled the glass and metal which makes up the flavor bursting Snapple bottle you enjoy will go into a landfill. Glass in a landfill can take up to a million years to breakdown. Does a million years sound extreme? By contrast, it takes a little as 30 days for a recycled glass bottle to leave your recycle bin and appear on a store shelf as a new glass bottle. Glass is 100% recyclable, which means that it can be recycled over and over without loss of purity.

Trash and our Oceans

H. Josef Hebert of the AP states, "volunteers scoured 33,000 miles of shoreline worldwide and found 6 million pounds of debris from cigarette butts and food wrappers to abandoned fishing lines and plastic bags that threaten seabirds and marine mammals." 6 million pounds translates into nearly 7.2 million individual items. In all that trash - what were the ten most common types of debris found in our oceans?

Most Common Debris

* Cigarettes and Cigarette Filters - 1.97 Million
* Food Wrappers and Containers - 693,612
* Caps and Lids - 656,088
* Bags - 587,827
* Beverage Bottles (Plastic) - 494,647
* Cups, Plates, Forks, Knives and Spoons - 376,294
* Beverage Bottles (Glass) - 349,143
* Cigar Tips - 325,893
* Straws and Stirrers - 324,680
* Beverage Cans - 308,292

In the ocean these items are deadly to marine life. Pollution in our oceans kills more than one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles each year. A large percentage of our most common forms of debris are recyclable. Why do we choose to waste precious resources, polluting our oceans and killing our marine life? Instead of polluting, we need to protect our oceans and their eco-systems. How? By making sure your recyclables and trash and are disposed of properly.

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