URGENT Statement
On The Celebration Of International Plastic Bag Free Day
The 3rd of July is International Plastic Bag Free Day. On this occasion, let us heed the call of the great and inspirational leader of the Catholic Church, His Holiness Pope Francis, in his encyclical letter Laudato Si. In this encyclical letter, he strongly calls all people of goodwill for ecological conversion and bold cultural revolution.
In Laudato Si, article 21, we hear the Pope saying, “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. Looking at plastic bags alone…it is recorded that everyday millions of plastic bags get disposed of. We see them here…there…everywhere! This problem, according to the Pope is closely linked to our throwaway culture. (LS 22) People, and maybe some of us included, just throw everything that for them is of no more use ‘away’ from their hands and their sights or away from their homes. If we all look deeply and consider Earth as our common home, there is really no such thing as ‘away’. What we consider ‘away’ is all inside our planet home. All the plastic bags that we get rid of our hands and our sights, always go to and remain in some other place which we call ‘away’ but in reality, is still inside our common home. Many of them go to our rivers, our seas, our ocean clogging and contaminating the very source of our life. And then we see them coming back to us with the floods. Worse, they also come back to us unseen in the food and the water that we take in daily.
“It is now believed that there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea. This translates to about a million bags every minute across the globe, or 150 bags a year for every person on earth.” (http://oceancrusaders.org/plastic-crusades/plastic-statistics/)
These are also some of the other facts and figures recorded by the Ocean Crusaders:
- The number 1 man-made thing that sailors see in our ocean are plastic bags.
- There are believed to be 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of ocean.
- World-wide, 13,000-15,000 pieces of plastic are dumped into the ocean every day which totals 6.4 million tons every year.
- It can take anything between 20-1000 years for a plastic bag to break up into smaller pieces. They don’t break down and those that do, break down into polymers and toxic chemicals.
- Because they take so long to disintegrate, a plastic bag can kill numerous animals. An animal that dies from the bag will decompose and the bag will be released, another animal could harmlessly fall victim and once again eat the same bag.
- At least two thirds of the world’s fish stocks are suffering from plastic ingestion.
- There are 100,000 marine creatures a year die from plastic entanglement and these are the ones found.
- Approximately 1 million sea birds also die from plastic.
- Scientists have identified 200 areas declared as ‘dead zones’ where no life organisms can now grow.
- Ocean acidification is a growing problem.
It is also being said that by the year 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish!
PLASTIC IS JUST HORRIFIC! And what we are doing to our common home is truly just horrible! We need to put an end to our mad throwaway culture and the degradation that it is causing to our common home and the death that it brings us and all creatures that live with us in this common home of ours! We need to honestly examine and ask ourselves, “How much of these plastics in the ocean come from me?” We need to challenge our ways of being and doing. As Pope Francis puts it in Laudato Si, “Today, in a word, the issue of environmental degradation challenges us to examine our lifestyle.” (LS 206)
As we commemorate this day, let us bring into our consciousness that in continually living in our present throwaway culture, we are all together destroying Earth, our common home, and killing one another and all our fellow Earthlings. We are all one in this. The things that each one of us do affect one another and all our fellow Earthlings. Let us collectively heed the call of Pope Francis for ecological conversion and bold cultural revolution – for a change of lifestyle; a lifestyle that is not destructive to any form of life but one that is life-giving for all.
~ by: Sr. Elizabeth (Bing) Carranza, SGM (Sisters of the Green Mountain) – Coordinator, URGENT Secretariat
