Collaborative Explanation - Plastic Pollution

         Why is plastic pollution a problem for our coastlines?

Did you know that over 1,000,000 sea animals lose their lives each year due to the huge amounts of plastic waste in our oceans and coastlines?! Mistaking it for food, the animals will eat the plastic...but as it takes years to break down, it stays trapped in their body and they will eventually die. From our actions, they are forced to suffer and we create a bigger problem for ourselves in the future...How would you feel to be swimming in plastic?

Plastic makes up 90% of the pollution on the ocean’s surface; a large majority of that ends up inside our sea animals or wrapped around their neck, and intoxicating the waters. The plastic we leave lying on pathways and throwing on the street ends up in drains and leads to the sea. About 97 percent of New Zealanders have admission to plastic facilities, but why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Plastic is biodegradable but it takes around 1,000 years to break down based on the type of plastic it is. Plastic NZ says that every New Zealander takes in about 31kgs of plastic packaging a year, but only around 5.8kgs get recycled. “Love Your Coast” is one of the many projects that is taking action by bringing together groups of people to help clean the shores of New Zealand. This project decides to clean the shores of New Zealand as they want the next generation to be cleaner.

We should take action now for a better and healthier future!

For one of our writing sessions, we were practicing planning and writing an explanation for one of our future tests the following week. We were worked collaborative to get a better understanding of the purpose of an explanation and how to write one. Our topic was about plastic pollution, and one of the ways we looked at this was by watching a few videos. Love Your Coast is one of the many projects in New Zealand that is making a change on this huge environmental issue. For this activity I worked with Florence, Haylee and Sakina to create our collaborative explanation.