Have you ever wondered where all the plastic and other rubbish you throw away goes? Most of it isn’t put to any good use at all. Only nine per cent of the plastic that Europe throws away is recycled properly. The other 91 per cent meanwhile is either dumped into a landfill or into the ocean. If we can’t cope with the amount of rubbish we recycle, the only other alternative is to use less plastic in the first place. But how?

Well, you could always swap your plastic toothbrush for a bamboo one, (if you haven’t already). Or you could always go to the bakery to buy your bread instead of going to the supermarket. They usually wrap your food in paper instead of plastic.

If everybody just made one or two little changes, we would save a lot of plastic reaching our oceans. This would be great and we may even prove scientists, and other specialists, wrong in predicting that by 2050 there’ll be more plastic in the oceans than fish (by weight).

Did you know that every single minute, the equivalent of one garbage truck full of plastic is dumped into the ocean? This is bad, bad, bad! Please help in trying to decrease this amount.

Something you must know about our problem is we aren’t innocent. That shampoo bottle you threw away the other day might’ve killed a couple of sea creatures by now. That bottle will now be part of the no doubt thousands, maybe even millions, of bottles that have been thrown away in the UK. The total amount is astounding. If all of the plastic bottles from the UK, (including that shampoo bottle) were placed side by side in one long chain, they would wrap around the earth 31 times.

Our earth was created so perfectly that we cannot make it a second time. It’s not too late, we need to act now. The future of our planet depends on us.

Erin (aged 9 and a quarter)

By email