Once upon a time, there was a soda bottle
There was nothing particularly interesting about it. It wasn’t as big as the big one-liter bottles, or as expensive as the imported drinks. It was just a plain, ordinary soda bottle. For most of its existence It was content to be what it was, where it was.
One day, a man bought the bottle and took it to his car. With a few quick twists, he unscrewed the bottles cap, licked his lips, and chugged it down. Though it was an inanimate object, the bottle felt something like a deep sense of satisfaction as it was drained of its contents. After all, that was its purpose in life: to be used.
Once the bottle was empty, the man looked around for a trash can. When he couldn’t find one, he shrugged and tossed the bottle onto the side of the road. Sure it was littering, and sure the roadside was already cluttered with trash, but hey, it was just a little plastic bottle; what harm could it do?
Day turned to night. The sky clouded over, and a massive rainstorm rolled in. Rivers of muddy oily water swept down the street, dragging the bottle across the asphalt and into a storm sewer.The bottle bobbed down the stream of dirty, trash-filled water; a plastic boat in a raging river. On its way, it met a pair of six-pack rings, discarded from a college frat party. A little further on, it was accompanied by a waterlogged grocery bag, limp and soggy. Together with its new companions, the bottle drifted through the sewers on its way to the local wastewater treatment plant.
The weather had other ideas. Thanks to the torrential rains, the plant was overwhelmed, and the bottle and its compatriots were all carried into the sea; another couple of ounces added to the eight million tons of plastic that flow into our oceans every year. From there, the ocean currents carried the bottle and his friends toward the mid-pacific, spreading them along a massive oceanic gyre- a swirling vortex of trash known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Currents eventually forced the group to go their separate way. A sea turtle mistook the plastic bag for a jellyfish and tried to eat it, choking itself on the inedible plastic.The six pack ring was carried to a distant beach, where it became entangled around the neck of an unsuspecting seabird, neatly garroting it.
All the while, the bottle continued on its way, gently bobbing in the bottle-green waters. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun slowly broke the bottle down into small fragments. Some of these fragments were mistaken for fish eggs by a passing albatross and fed to chicks. Stuffed with indigestible plastic, the chicks slowly starved to death.
Time passed. The polymers broke down further and further. Soon, all that were left of the bottle were tiny microparticles, some less than a millimeter in diameter. Some of these particles mixed in billions of other plastic particles; plastic bags, lighters, discarded toys, microbeads from cosmetics; the detritus of modern civilization broken down into a cloudy soup. In some places, these bits of plastic waste mixed with the local plankton populations, sometimes outnumbering them six to one.
In one of the little paradoxes that the universe loves, the particles small size made them even more destructive. Passing whale and other filter feeders, unable to differentiate the particles from krill, swallowed them. Some of the particles absorbed potent hormones from birth control pills. Others provided a comfy home for cholera and other infectious diseases, or provided a raft for invasive species
By sheer coincidence, a few microparticles from the soda bottle were accidentally ingested by a passing fish. Deep within the fish’s body, the particles began to leach harmful chemicals; poisonous cadmium and mercury. Carcinogenic BPA and DEPH. Hardly the kind of stuff one wants in a fish.
One day, the fish was caught by a passing trawler. It was scaled, gutted, processed and packaged, both the particles and their poisons still inside. Soon, the fish wound up in a freezer, wrapped in shrink wrap. Sitting on a shelf in the seafood aisle, waiting to be sold.
A little while later, a man entered the store; the same man who had purchased the bottle so long ago. He was feeling like fish tonight...
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Remember: be careful what you throw away. It might come back.