This article will be a bit different than other articles, because each paragraph has a small story about my experience with plastic, and/or trash in general. If you are reading this in your email, I suggest that you go to the page on the website for better formatting, and because this might be a longer one than usual.

About a month ago, I once again had to go to the dentistry for another checkup on my teeth. After the appointment was over, like every time, the office handed over a bag with floss, and a brand new toothbrush. That bag, however, was not paper, nor reusable. It was single use plastic, created to simply hold two items. I left the small bag at the office, hoping it would be used for a different patient, and that it wouldn’t be thrown out.

On July 5th, 2019, I was in Florida enjoying the weather, when my mom and sister had come back from the beach. She informed me about the abundance of trash that lied all over the white sand from the previous night. Everywhere she looked, there was at least one piece of garbage in her view. Back home, after the celebrations had ceased, bottles and cans were lined below the surface of the water. It was a saddening sight to see the picture of below the waves, and I really do hope that someone did something to help out that lake before it was too late.

At around 10:00 PM on a day in July of 2018, I was on the beaches of Florida for one of the first times in over four years. We were looking at the crabs that were all over the beach, going into tiny holes every once in a while. Two teens were tossing a glow stick to each other, when, all of a sudden, one of them had tossed the stick into the water, and they went off. Neither one bothered to go get the blue light that had just been thrown into the gulf. I ended up going into the waves to retrieve it, and we brought it back to the house to properly dispose of it.

Thank you for reading these three short paragraphs of my experiences with our situation of trash in waterways, and plastic in general. Keep looking at GLOBR for more articles related to this topic. Here’s a question-what’s one piece of plastic that you use each day that you can also give up?