Plastic is everywhere. Plastic bottles, cups, bags, straws, wrappers, and other random plastic rubbish are found all around. Just stop for a second and look around, you will see material made of plastic littered around, throughout the streets and throughout the beloved parks that you walk through. “But how bad can it be?”, you may ask yourself.

Well, it’s bad. Really bad. Around 59 percent of American in the U.S. are unaware of the problem behind plastic in parks. In a year, American uses 100 billion plastic bags for an average time of 12 minutes. In addition, up to 80 percent of plastic made and used is littered. That is a lot of plastic that end up polluting the parks and roads.

The animal who lives in our parks and streets, are affected by the plastic in their environment. Animals can easily mistaken plastic as food. When any animal consumes a plastic item such as a plastic bag, the plastic can’t be digested and stays in the animal gut. Unfortunately, this leads to a painful and slow death for these animals because the plastic prevents the animal from digesting actually food. At least 270 different species were affected by plastic pollution in their environment and around 100,000 animals are killed by consuming plastic annually.

What is a solution to stop this plastic problem? There are many ways to help out the problem. Firstly, remember that saying? “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” That is a really effective way to end plastic pollution. Reducing your plastics will make it less likely for your plastic garbage to be littered. Reusing bottles, bags, straws, etc. will lead to less plastic being made. Recycling will make your unwanted plastic to become a useful piece of plastic for something else. There are also many NGOs (Non-government organization) sole purpose is to end the use of plastic such as 5 Gyres, Algalita, Clear Blue Sea, and Earth Day Network, just to name a few. In addition, many cities are working on reducing the amount of plastic use. In Washington, D.C, some local businesses are no longer using plastic straws and are switching to washable straw and disposable straws made of paper or hay. Many other cities are also working on reducing the plastic items. Plastic is a big problem, but there are many solution to stop this problem and maybe one day the use of plastic would be insignificant.