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Sundial

Junk Raft

By: Sundial


One of our conservation goals that our troop has been working on for years is to reduce plastic in the environment. This is both a goal inside the troop between each person encouraging the others to make sure to reduce their use of single use plastics as well as outside the troop working to help encourage the public and businesses to reduce their use of single use plastics. So, this book ties perfectly into our mission because it discusses the negatives associated with plastic on the environments as well as on humans and their bodies. This book follows the story of plastics as they have developed and how people have tried to fight them and how industries have reacted but it also follows the author's personal story as he sailed from California to Hawaii on a raft made out of Junk that had been thrown away. 

I really liked this book for a few reasons. It gave a very good outline on the history of how plastics have gone from nothing to everything in our daily lives. It is important to know how our dependence on plastics developed so that we can reduce that dependency on plastics. This book stayed focused on plastics throughout, after giving a thorough history of plastics the book elaborate on how plastics can harm humans which is definitely not talked about enough in mainstream culture and even in science despite having been chemically proven in studies. Following that, the author discusses how people have worked to fight plastics and enforce bans on some single use plastics such as plastic bags but have been stopped by plastic industries trying to reduce bans as that would possibly reduce their profit. The author of this book makes a very good argument that there should be a way to balance these different needs so that we can both protect the planet by reducing plastics and plastic industries can continue to make a profit because while plastics are a problem there is no way to get rid of them. Rather we need to restructure the system of plastic creation to create a closed system rather than the linear system that we have right now. 

While I really liked most of this book there were some things I think could have been elaborated on or explained better to give the reader a better understanding of plastics and their impact. While the author did give details on the solutions I think there could have been more information given on how they would work. While the author spoke against the incineration of plastics and touched on the negatives it causes he did not elaborate on how those negative impacts the environment which was definitely something that needed to be addressed to complete his argument. This was done with the explanation of the other solutions when he talked about creating a closed solutions but did not touch on what would happen for discard trash thrown out the window and that was not put into landfills because it was already in the environment through litter, or the trash that we had already put into the environment that while cleaning this up will not solve the problem, it does need to be addressed eventually to help sustain the environment. Finally, while not necessarily a negative this author was definitely biased. While his bias is explained through experiences this can be a negative if this is the only source you are going to look to in plastics. I would recommend coupling this book with not only your own experiences with plastic but looking at more scientific literature which has been peer reviewed to help eliminate bias in these papers. 

  Overall I thought this book was both engaging and very informative telling a story of plastics and an adventure on a raft to spread awareness. It kept me interested in how plastic was impacting me and impacting the world. I have given this 4 out of 5 stars for the information I have learned and how it was presented in an engaging and interesting way which is important to keep an audience entertained throughout a book. While I would recommend this book to everyone for the informative factor, I think this book will have the greatest impact on people who already know about the ocean and have some Idea of what is going on with plastics in the ocean and find that they care about it. But, if after reading this blog you are interested in this book and want to know how you can help the environment this is a great place to start and if you are not interested in reading a book there is plenty of information found on the 5 gyres institute website here: https://www.5gyres.org/ which is the organisation started by the author of this book to increase research surrounding plastics in the environment.  

After reading this blog, or after reading the book I have a call to action: try and reduce your single use plastics. Humans have found that plastics hurt both ocean and terrestrial animals and it is even possible the plastic you hold could be leaching toxic chemicals into your body. A good website that was mentioned in this book is https://www.chicobag.com/ which has many options for reusable bags, Tupperware, and even backpacks that can replace single use plastics and maybe save a life. 



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