Plastic Podcast Part 6- Plastic at Christmas

In this week’s episode of our Plastic Pollution Podcast, we looked at what we are doing as a school during the festive period to reduce our use of plastic in school.

We looked at microplastics, such as glitter, which we have used in the past for making our Christmas decorations and Christmas cards in school.

Microplastics are small, barely visible pieces of plastic that enter and pollute the environment. Microplastics are not a specific kind of plastic, but rather any type of plastic fragment that is less than five millimetres in length. They enter natural ecosystems from a variety of sources, including, but not limited to, cosmetics, clothing, and industrial processes.

As we have highlighted every week on our podcast, plastics degrade slowly, often over hundreds if not thousands of years. This increases the probability of microplastics being ingested and incorporated into, and accumulated in, the bodies and tissues of many organisms.  

Worsening matters, microplastics are common in our world today. In 2017, it was estimated that there were between 15 and 51 trillion individual pieces of microplastic in the world’s oceans, which was estimated to weigh between 93,000 and 236,000 metric tons.

Now it’s your turn. How will you be making a difference this Christmas?