A very powerful video highlighting the damage plastic bags do to marine wildlife was made by National Geographic for the World Oceans Day 2016, in Washington, D.C.
Every year, millions of marine creatures, birds and animals die from plastic waste. So many things we do wrong and we don’t even realize how much damage we do. Like litter tossed from car windows even if its a fruit and we think it’s fine, will decompose, but in fact is an indirect killer, putting curious animals in the path of oncoming vehicles.
Floating balloon with streamers looks much like a jellyfish with tentacles and like so many other things, get ingested and don’t degrade. whales, turtles, dolphins, and manatees have been found with plastic bags in their stomachs or dead from entanglement. In Hawaii, more than 1,000 small pieces of plastic were found in the stomach of a sea turtle. In Florida more then 14.000 animals a year are fighting for their lives.
Renata Schneider – SPCA Wildlife Care Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. – remembers one of the worst case she ever seen, was a raccoon whose paws were stuck in beer cans.
“The cans had been on his limbs for so long that he had tried to learn to walk with them, and both front limbs were completely damaged,” a veterinarian at the “We sedated him and took the cans off his hands, which were nothing but raw flesh anymore. There was no fur, no skin, and he was alive and getting around, but thin.”
“The statistic highlights the lethal dangers posed by some of the 250 million tons of trash discarded by Americans every year. While much of this garbage is hauled to landfills, a large amount makes its way into the natural environment. In West Virginia alone, according to the state’s transportation department, a two-mile stretch of highway yields around 32,000 pieces of refuse. Debris also clogs the oceans; the Ocean Conservancy’s 2008 International Coastal Cleanup garnered 3.7 million pounds of trash along 9,000 miles of U.S. shorelines in a single day. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge conglomeration of plastic and other nonbiodegradable flotsam swirling off the California coast, is estimated at anywhere from twice as big as Texas to larger than the U.S.”Humane Society Org
National Geographic
