WHY.

Tomorrow (Thursday 8th of June) the 25th edition of the World Oceans Daywill be celebrated. This year it will be on the same day as the United Nations Ocean Conference; a 4 day UN-conference bout pollution, conserving and sustainable use of the oceans.

The oceans are under a bigger threat than ever by pollution, over-fishing and the effects of climate change. Our own interest in having clean and healthy oceans is massive; 70% of the oxygenwe breath comes from seaplants, 97% of the water on Earth is stored in the oceans and about 30% of human caused Co2 is absorbed by the oceans. And not to start about the essential bio- and ecosystems that the oceans behold.

Plus, Donal Trump. It doesn’t help that the ‘world-leader’ calls climate change fake newsand last week with a minor hand movement has put a fat red line through an important agreement. The Paris Climate Agreement; an agreement between all countries in the world except for Syria, Nicaragua. Well, and the USA now.

FACTS.

Now pollution of the oceans may sound abstract. Hereby a couple of facts & figures (brace yourself)

• 50% of all plastic packaging is only used once. Even worse, plastic bags are on average only used for 15 minutes
• Plastic takes 400 to 1000 years to dissolve completely
• This means every plastic object you, your parents and grandparents ever touched still exists in some form. Besides the 5% that gets recycled
• 8%of global oil production gets uses to produce plastic
• That is 300+ million tonnes (also no clue how much that is? –> 300.000.000.000 kg!)
• There is more than 8.000.000.000kg of plastic ending up in the sea annualy

UNDERWATERPROJECT.

This underwaterproject is about our ‘throwaway-culture’. The focus within the project is on three of the top most used plastic products: the plastic bag, the plastic bottle and the to-go coffee cup. Three products we usually only use for just a few couple of minutes, but after that stick around on this planet for another 400 to 1000 years. More and more people seem to view them as ‘not so good for the environment’ but the real impact stays a bit abstract. Goal of this campaign is to make people more aware of our daily plastic use. How this got stuck in our lifestyles and what impact this has on our planet’s environment.