Let's sweep it under the rug

On the tenth edition of the political biology series, Dr. Charlie Trick professor from the department of biology at UWO, talked about using our oceans for waste disposal. The overall point of the lecture is that we humans use the ocean as a place to put our garbage and chemicals without thinking what this could cause to the oceans’ health. For me this practice seems like an easy way out to get rid of all the garbage that we produce. We humans are lazy by nature and because we don’t know about other methods of cleaning or waste disposal, we use our oceans as a rug, shoving all the waste that we can find under it.

One of the main concepts that Trick talked about is how putting the waste on the ocean is decreasing the biodiversity, also CO₂ in oceans has increased and all these links back to what happens on land as lower biodiversity causes more problems in our overall health, also our water becomes more toxic to consume and the more we are exposed the more we get diseases as well.

Another concept mention was carbon sequestering which is the process of removing CO₂ form the atmosphere and placing it to a reservoir. He showed us graphs of how CO₂ was increasing exponentially in oceans. Trick told us that the way the CO₂ in the oceans is dealt with is by adding phytoplankton into the ocean. Phytoplankton is very much involved with the process of photosynthesis and people think that by adding this diatom or algae it will fix all the oceans problems. But they don’t count that it cannot be any type phytoplankton in the ocean as there are many different types depending on the environment. Dr Trick showed us a study where the phytoplankton didn’t do anything on the ocean and left the ocean with an opaque colour. The addition of this phytoplankton causes the production of a molecule called domoic acid and this molecule causes amnesic shellfish poisoning in our local water causing us to have disease such as diarrhea.

Finally, there is no degree of success in this practice, no benefit is shown, increases the stress on the surface of the water and worst of all you get neurotoxins are produced. In my opinion waste is a big problem in our world and we cannot make it disappear just like that, we need other ways to deal with this problem perhaps burning it or finding a chemical to disintegrate. We need to think about the animals that live in the ocean and us because we consume water and fish and by us dumping this waste we are not going anywhere. And lastly we need to be smart and recycle because it makes it easier for the waste handlers and eventually our biodiversity as it is easier to handle. And everyone will be better as no more toxicity in our environment and our oceans will be decreased.