Dear Editor,
See a piece of trash lying on the sidewalk, or a plastic bag being carried across the park by a light breeze? Think twice before ignoring it and continuing on with your day. When we leave plastic lying around outside, our watershed deposits all of the trash into the Chesapeake Bay, harming many animals who live there. Most notably out of all of them, though, is the Green Sea Turtle. We’ve all heard that the Green Sea Turtle has always been struggling against plastic pollution, but how much do you really know? According to World Wildlife, Green Sea Turtles eat plastic 62% of the time they encounter it, and that 52% of all sea turtles have eaten plastic at some point.
Plastic has a devastating effect on Sea Turtles. This includes clogging critical intestines, piercing internal organs, and cause the turtle to have a false sense of being full making them neglect eating and ultimately starve. Turtles can also get tangled in the larger plastic materials, negating their swimming ability causing them to drown. Additionally, Research Gate states that the average Green Sea Turtle body contains 1.5 grams of plastic per kilogram. Since the average Green Sea Turtle weighs about 147 kilograms. After some simple math, we can concur that on average, the Green Sea Turtle body contains 220 grams of plastic. And knowing what we know about the effects of plastic on the turtle, 220 grams is devastating. That’s equivalent to 220 plastic pen caps!
However, not all hope is lost for the Green Sea Turtles. There are several things that we can do to reduce the plastic that the sea turtles are consumed, such as:
- We can pick up trash on the ground. Most of the trash we leave outside gets washed into our local streams and creeks, which eventually flows into the Chesapeake Bay where the turtles live.
- Another thing we can do is reduce your use of single use plastics such as straws, plastic bags, and disposable utensils, properly dispose of your waste in appropriate bins, and picking up any loose plastic waste you come across, you can have a massive impact on the sea turtles and other ocean wildlife.
- And finally, consider taking part in community cleanups. Clean Fairfax provides cleanup programs anyone can join. For some people, a more organized activity increases their productivity. And as a bonus, cleaning up our environment helps several other species outside of the Green Sea Turtle too!
Let’s save the sea turtles.
Sincerely,
Eli Cheung-Nguyen, 13
Fairfax, Virginia