Not So Plastic Fantastic

TRUE (Plastic)

FALSE (Fantastic)

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TRUE

FALSE

Bottled drinks are small business nowadays.

FALSE

Americans get through two million plastic bottles of drink every five minutes, while in the UK one million pounds is spent on them every day. The sad fact is that only one plastic bottle in five gets recycled.

TRUE

FALSE

Plastic takes more than 400 years to decompose.

TRUE

Our 'disposable' plastic bottles are likely to remain with us for a very long time... not only on land. Over the past decade huge areas of 'plastic soup' have been discovered in our oceans. Much of the billions of pieces of floating plastic rubbish is bits of plastic bottles and bottle tops.

TRUE

FALSE

Most of the rubbish in the oceans comes from boats or oil and gas platforms.

FALSE

Most of it comes from the land and enters the sea from rivers and sewers. We believe that 10% of the plastic rubbish we throw away on land ends up in the sea. Globally, that's about ten million tonnes of plastic each year.

TRUE

FALSE

On Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean plastic is harming the wildlife.

TRUE

Scientists found dead albatross chicks, fish, turtles, whales and dolphins whose parents had fed them bottle tops, cigarette lighters and other pieces of rubbish from the sea. People might soon end up consuming their own rubbish.

TRUE

FALSE

The problem with plastics in the oceans will definitely get better in the future.

FALSE

It will definitely get worse, because plastic takes hundreds of years to break down in sea water and people are unlikely to stop using plastic bottles. One area of floating rubbish in the north Pacific is twice the size of France.

The author is a marine biologist who is currently working for the charity Action Ecology (New Success Intermediate students' book)