There’s no planet B!!!

Our plastic warriors Paulina, Tania and Marylou

Hello Whale Watchers,

Storm Lorenzo passed, luckily left São Miguel without any big damage, but still a little mess on our local beaches! For more info about the hurricane check here !!

A call for a Beach Clean up ! And so we did. A part of our team went to the beach Vinha d’Areia just next to our office in Vila Franca do Campo to clean the beach from all the litter that the ocean spit out after the storm.
Even though this part of the Atlantic ocean is very clean compared to other places and oceans around the world, it was impressive and at the same time shocking how much plastic and trash we found! Billions of kilogram of plastic can be found in swirling convergences that make up about 40 percent of the world’s ocean surfaces. And if we continue like this, there will me more plastic than fish by 2050!!

For  most of you its nothing new, but plastic pollution is one of the biggest threats and has a direct and deadly effect for wildlife !
Often you find marine life feeding on plastic bags, even beached whales with a stomach full of plastic!
Sperm Whales and also Dolphins use echolocation to find prey and unfortunately they can not differ between squid\fish or a piece of plastic 🙁
Once plastic lands in our oceans, it absorbs dangerous pollutants like PCBs, DDT and PAH and bigger pieces start breaking down into smaller pieces called microplastics that Marine life confuses with plankton and feeds on it. And so you already find evidence of it in bottom of our foodchain – and finally also in the belly’s of our fisheaters !

..But of course its always easy to talk, now it’s the time for us to ACT!! We all love our ocean and our animals, so lets protect what we love and lets change to make our oceans a cleaner place again!

 

Most of what we found was: plastic bottles, plastic bags, straws, plastic cups, menstrual products..

And this is all products that are easy to replace with reusable and non-plastic products!

So here’s a few tips for you, and actually it is not hard 😉
Just replace plastic products to non-plastic ones!
-Use reusable water bottles, paper cups or reusable ones
-Use metall or paper straws or just say no to them, a cocktail tastes good even without a straw 😉
-for the ladies: use a menstrual cup instead of tampons, or pads
– Use beeswax paper instead of aluminium foil or cling wrap
– Buy less (even clothes shed out microplastic fibers into the oceans with every wash)

And in general : REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE… sometimes less is more 🙂

Paulina Kalita

About Paulina Kalita

Paulina is completing a degree in Zoology and is very passionate about the Ocean and Wildlife. Joined the TERRA AZUL team as Volunteer Marine Wildlife Guide in 2019, enjoying out at sea with wildlife, accompanying and informing visitors, and collecting field imagery and data for local Cetaceans and Sea Turtles Research & Conservation projects.

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