It is no shock that excessive amounts of plastic from human waste in the ocean cause many negative effects on the ocean and its communities, but the process of just one bottle from the hand of a human to complete decomposition is excruciatingly long.
Let’s say in theory today you have a plastic water bottle. You are in a rush and choose to throw it away after it is done rather than recycle it (it happens!).
That bottle is now going to sit in a trash can. It depends where you throw it away, but if it is at a university campus like UCSB, this bottle will head from the small trash can to a larger dumpster, which then is put into a garbage truck. This truck will then likely head to a processing plant, where your bottle along with tons and tons of trash would be compacted. On the way to the plant, however, your bottle gets blown out of the open truck by the wind!
Since we live so close to the coast, this bottle is now on a journey down the road, getting pushed along by cars, animals, confused birds, and even humans moving the bottle out of the way.
Now the bottle is on the beach. It gets caught by a wave and is now headed out to sea. The bottle will spend anywhere from a few weeks to a few months floating further and further out to sea.
After a few months, the bottle starts to deteriorate slightly, enough for water and salt to penetrate the bottle and sink it to the seafloor. As it sinks, it may get caught on the tail of a fish, or even stuck on the head of a turtle, but if nothing gets in its way, the bottle will fall slowly until it reaches the sea floor.
Once at the sea floor, this bottle will spend over 4 human lifetimes slowly decomposing, until finally after over 450 years, the bottle is gone at last.
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