When your garbage is thrown away, many people think that the finished bag of chips and the empty cans are no longer their problem. "If you do not see it, then it does not exist." That is the motto we seem to all live by. Whether we are throwing away our garbage in the proper trash bin or on the floor, the garbage does come back to us in a positive or negative outcome.
When you are driving your car, or if you are in the passenger seat, have you ever seen the drivers who throws their trash out of the window? Their gum wrappers, even their empty soda cans, they drop to the ground and roll down the street to the city sewer or the wind picks it up and the gum wrapper lands on a nearby bush. Wherever that garbage goes, it is a danger to wildlife or household pets.
You may be thinking, "Household pets? I walk my dog and I see what he/she eats." Well, my reader, you would be surprised, many dogs eat food off the ground; chips, bread, gum, any food available that can be tracked by a dog. In many cases, their owners are too busy on their phone, texting, taking pictures, etc. that they are not aware of what their dog maybe eating.
Most of the time animals do not know any better than to eat a bright wrapper or play with a sharp can of soda. Although wildlife has certain traits and instincts humans do not have, they are victims of our garbage. Broken glass bottles and soda cans are traps for wildlife creatures, and animals can easily approach it because of its sweet soda smell. They can cut themselves, or play with them resulting in cuts on their paws, face, or a severe cut in general may cause death. When a wildlife animal is hurt, there is no way a vet can easily help them because they maybe hiding or living in an environment away from human help.
Not only are land animals in danger, but marine animals are affected by our daily decisions. Fish digest pieces of plastic causing a blockage in their digestive tract. A dead fish is a bigger fish's meal, therefore if a whale eats hundreds of fish with, hypothetically every single one of those fishes having one piece of plastic, a whale can soon die due to a mass amount of daily plastic consumption in its meals. Another example can be seen with baby sea turtles, or pinnipeds. Their small bodies can be entangled in a piece of plastic, as a result the baby animals grow up deformed in body feature or never grow up at all.
Lastly, it is not just the animals that are in danger, so are we. In some cases, the fish that are captured from fisheries are filled with pieces of plastic, and those same fish my be found in restaurants or seafood markets. If we continue to throw contaminated liquids in to our city's water system, it will only be returned to us, and it may not be cleaned properly by the time it is inside our cup.
Think about it, if the animals we eat are consuming plastic and garbage, won't we be eating those same small pieces of plastic, too? This article was not meant to scare you from eating at all, or make you sue the restaurants or market places that are selling contaminated food. If we become aware of where our garbage is going, we will know how to fix it. We wouldn't be having this problem in the first place if we all threw our garbage in the proper bin, or kept that bag of chips until the end of the block and placed it inside a garbage can. Think of the baby animals next time you want to throw your garbage on the ground.
