This article was very interesting to me because ever since I was little, I was always taught to recycle. My parents always told me about how bad plastic was for the environment. While I was reading this article, I grew more and more frustrated at how bad the problem actually is. However, I was happy to see that, as stated in the article, our landfills are actually made up more of newspapers and other biodegradable products than plastics. I thought of this as a plus because those products, like newspapers, will one day breakdown.
What I did not understand was why Thompson would wait so long to act on his discoveries of those small plastic beads in the ocean. For example, it said that he started finding these beads around the 1980's, and soon after the article mentioned other findings around the 1990's. Why would Thompson continue to collect these plastic beads for research instead of going to the public and trying to put an end to the source of these beads?
Adam is right in stating that Thompson should have released his findings earlier. However, how often do we as a race yield to warning or signs against danger or any other warnings were given. Like you i was taught as a kid to recycle. I never understood why people wouldn't help save the environment by reusing items that could be reused. Yet not everyone was raised or has thought processes like this. Instead they have an out of sight out of mind perspective on cleaning and helping out. If there isn't a visible problem they won't fix it, which unfortunately means (to me at least) that even if Thompson would have made his discovery more present, what would people really have done? Sadly i think it would have only changed a few peoples thought processes. Even with the few people that would have followed, not that big of a difference would have been made. Even though a little difference is better then none. Hopefully we can find some way as humans to make this problem more present to everyone so people know what they are doing to the world. Only then can we actually help this problem
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