EVENT 2 | Jess Irish | Quinn Winter

The event by Jess Irish played a wonderful film, “This Mortal Plastik,” focusing on the drastic damages that plastic has done to our environment. Plastic has completely dominated our world today and can be seen every single place we look. Every single product is displayed in plastic, which can especially be seen in grocery stores. As Jess discussed in the film, “the average person in the U.S. generates 243 points of plastic waste per year” (Irish, 2022).

As seen above, plastic dominates every store and almost every item we buy involves plastic as its container. (Samantha, 2020).
What’s harming us most are single use plastics, meaning it has one purpose and use, and a majority of which ends up being a pollutant that is not biodegradable. These single-use plastics, like plastic bottles and bags, “have a lifespan of mere minutes to hours, yet it may persist in the environment for hundreds of years” (Parker, 2019). A majority of these non-biodegradable plastic items end up in our oceans, and it has been found that in Australia “50 million garbage bags end up as litter yearly, and the ‘plastic soup’ patch in the Pacific Ocean is roughly 80% of the ocean” (How Does Plastic, 2019). Plastic pollution has a drastic effect on our environment and especially our oceans, causing many animals to die when they ingest these plastics or get stuck in them. 

Ocean garbage patch. 
(Great Pacific Garbage, N.d.)

As Jess pointed out, microplastics are a problematic result of plastic pollution, which are now being found in water, sand, air, stomachs, blood, rain, and so on. Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic that are difficult to identify by the naked eye. Microplastics are created as a result of “plastic items becoming degraded by heat, UV light, oxidation, mechanical action, and biodegradation by living organisms like bacteria,” (Beaudry, 2021) leaving behind tiny pieces of plastic that end up affecting our health and are major polluter. Microplastics being found in soils are worrying researchers more that marine microplastics, finding that terrestrial micro plastic pollution is “estimated at four to twenty three times higher, depending on the environment” (Lamizana, 2021).

Discussing the film, Jess pointed out that it is not up to us to stop the plastic problem, because corporation’s production of these products make it inescapable. In order to push them to stop, everyone needs to decide to stop buying one time use plastics as a message to the corporations to stop producing it. What brings art and technology together to work against the problem of pollution is people creating art and inventions with the plastic pollution that they have collected.  Solar water heaters have been created containing plastics, which “can provide up to two-thirds of a household’s annual hot water demand, reducing energy consumption” (Knoblauch, 2022).

People are bringing art and technology together to work against
the plastic pollution problem, such as using plastic water bottles
to make a solar water heater. 
(Zilli, 2010).

Works Cited

Beaudry, F. 2021. What are Microplastics? Treehugger. https://www.treehugger.com/what-are-microplastics-1204133


Great Pacific Garbage Patch. N.d. 10 Rivers 1 Ocean. https://www.10rivers1ocean.com/en/journal/great-pacific-garbage-patch/


Samantha. 2020. What You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Plastic in Japan. Tsunagu Local. https://www.tsunagulocal.com/en/47587/


How Does Plastic Harm the Environment? 2019. Nonplastic Beach. https://nonplasticbeach.com/blogs/latest/how-does-plastic-harm-the-environment


Irish, J. 2020. This Mortal Plastik. Jess Irish Event. 


Knoblauch, J. 2022. Environmental Toll of Plastics. Environmental Health News. https://www.ehn.org/plastic-environmental-impact-2501923191.html


Lamizana, B. 2021. Plastic Plant: How Tiny Plastic Particles are Polluting Our Soil. UN Environment Programme. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/plastic-planet-how-tiny-plastic-particles-are-polluting-our-soil


Parker, L. 2019. The World’s Plastic Pollution Crisis Explained. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/plastic-pollution


Zilli, G. 2010. How to Make a Solar Water Heater from Plastic Bottles. The Ecologist. https://theecologist.org/2010/may/06/how-make-solar-water-heater-plastic-bottles


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