Our Personal Choices Can Help!

 

Dolphins swimming underneath oil on top of the water in the Gulf of Mexico

Each day you have the opportunity to choose, and to change your behavior. Support responsible manufacturers by choosing their products - even if it means spending a little more. Do not support the production of wasteful or harmful products by contributing to the demand. 

By using recycled or recyclable items, buying in bulk instead of many little packages, and whenever possible, simply reusing what you can, you can significantly reduce the amount of waste YOU create. For example, if all our newspaper was recycled we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year. 

Industry creating large-scale pollution is not the greatest cause of the ocean's decline. Industry responds to the needs of the consumer. We use an incredibly amount of plastics most for packaging. Currently only about 3% of the plastic waste stream is recycled. Where does the rest of it go? It is believed that hundreds of millions of pounds of plastics are lost or dumped into the oceans each year.

Household chemicals that go down our drain, and toxic chemicals commonly used for weed and pest control for your lawn, can contribute to groundwater contamination and eventually affect the health of our oceans. The average American home generates 20 lbs of household waste annually that contains hazardous material.