Continuing our new series of stories from our Young People’s Voices project – funded by Victorious Festival and supported by the University of Portsmouth – J. Cosgrove, a pupil at St Edmund’s School, explores how humans are damaging the planet due to plastic waste.
Straws, bottles, wrapper packets, containers, cups, plastic bags are everywhere. It’s in every room in every house, it’s in the streets, it’s in every shop, but most importantly, it’s in the sea and it must be stopped. As humans, we are often careless and perhaps abusive to our planet and to those living on it. Plastic is cheap and durable, so we are now using it at an extremely rapid pace, but its durability is due to plastic being a non-biodegradable material; meaning it will not naturally fully break down, it will build up endlessly. ‘100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution annually‘ due to us.
Living in a sea side city like Portsmouth, the issue of sea pollution is as prominent as ever due to the water being right on our doorstep. Therefore the issue is right on our doorstep. Whether you’re a child, teen, adult or elder it’s not too late to start fixing the damage being done to the Earth.
Not too long ago a friend of mine told me that there was no point in saving the planet as the damage had already been done, but that is not the case, we can’t give up now, we need to save our planet and that’s what matters to me.
Futher Reading
Surfers Against Sewage, PLASTIC POLLUTION – FACTS AND FIGURES
Star & Crescent, ‘Plastic-Free Good News’: The Package Free Larder, Portsmouth
Star & Crescent, Portsmouth One of the ‘Worst Performing’ Councils in South East for Recycling
Star & Crescent, Sustainability & the City: What Can We Learn from the South Downs Green Fair?
Star & Crescent, How to Recycle in Portsmouth Part 1: Kerbside and Beyond
Star & Crescent, How to Recycle in Portsmouth: Part 2, Recycling the Unrecyclable
Star & Crescent, How to Recycle in Portsmouth Part 3: Recycling the Unrecyclable…Again
The Young People’s Voices project aims to provide young people with a platform to share their opinions, report on topics that affect them and advance standards of literacy. We worked with students from St Edmunds School and Havant and South Downs College to investigate and write their own stories, in a variety of styles and mediums – from creative memoir and opinion pieces to their own investigations. All their work will be published on S&C throughout July, and all participants have the chance to enter their work into a competition to read their story on the Spoken Word Stage at the 2019 Victorious Festival. You will find all the Young People’s Voices stories here as we publish them.
This project is supported by the University of Portsmouth, with thanks to the teams in Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI). It was delivered by University of Portsmouth MSc and PhD researchers Maddie Wallace and Lauren Jones.
