Being Spain a top place In world tourism, we can see that the volume of people who enjoy its beaches has skyrocketed, unfortunately their behavior on them has caused an increase in sea pollution.
A long procession of people, laden with umbrellas, towels, shovels, bottles of water and cans of suntan lotion make their way every day to the beaches around the country.
Summer on the Spanish beaches
Every day, tens of thousands of people they fight for finding the best place near the water that allows them to more comfortably exchange their periods of sunbathing with bathing.
Many of them eat, drink or play on the beach. In the evening, when the sun goes down, the vast majority will begin a process of withdrawal until the next day when the ritual is restarted.
Plastic pollution
At sunrise, you can see a trail of bottles, cigarette butts, empty cream jars, lighters, plastic bags and a myriad of items. forgotten They will be left on the sand of the beach waiting for the one who, helped by the tide, the great plastic monster gobbles up his daily tribute.
Unfortunately, the sea has become the largest plastic dump on the planet. Every year more than 8 million tons of plastic pollute the sea.
Once at sea, the plastic has two problems:
- One that floats
- And the second that takes forever to degrade.
These two qualities of plastic, if we join them to the marine currents, which function as an endless belt that moves the water from one place to another, causing that plastic to be collected from the coasts and moved around the globe.
Many studies identify 5 areas in the world's oceans, which generate a series of large eddies that cause much more plastic to accumulate in those areas, since the one that arrives there does not leave.
It is what has come to be called "Plastic islands". The largest of them is in the North Pacific about 2000 km from Hawaii.
Consequences of ocean pollution
One of the great consequences is that marine life mistakes plastic for food and eat it.
The problem is that your digestive system is not ready for digest plastic and it is very common to find dead animals with their stomachs full of plastic objects.
According to several organizations, if this dynamic is not changed and given the low rate of plastic degradation, by 2050 there could be more tons of plastic in the oceans than there are fish.
Raise awareness about water
It is essential that we become aware that this way of acting is really wrong and can turn against us, since we are attacking part of our own food chain.
In fact, it is important to note that we are not capable of digesting plastic either.
You have to attack the problem from both ends. On the one hand, ceasing to do our daily tribute to the god of plastic on every beach or every river. We must make sure that what goes down to the beach with us, comes back up.
We must also explain and make our children aware of the importance to take care of the beaches because the survival of our seas will depend to a great extent on it.
Initiatives to fix the problem
On the other hand, there is many initiatives to try to "fish" the plastic that is in the oceans in such a way that it can be used as a resource and, above all, to leave the sea.
One of them comes from Boyan Slat, a dutch student only 21 years old, who proposed using ocean currents and concentration points to collect floating plastic there.
Instead of chasing the plastic, what Slat proposes is to locate a series of floating barriers and let the force of the ocean currents do the work. pushing the water with the plastic particles floating up to those barriers.
Currently, they already have a first prototype 100 meters long, built by The Ocean Cleanup, the company that you founded, and that is testing its operation in the North Sea. The goal is to create 100 km floating barriers to collect plastic from the ocean.
As has been indicated, this system would allow to collect in 10 years more than the half of the plastic of the pollution in our seas.
Never in history have we had as many tools as now, but it is essential that let's take advantage of them and we use them in the proper way to build and not to destroy.