The purpose of Earth Day is to draw attention to the importance of environmental protection through protest actions, which is held for the 53rd time worldwide, and the 33rd time in Hungary.
The publication of Rachel Carson’s bestseller Silent Spring in 1962 was a watershed moment, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries, the book drew public attention to the inextricable link between environmental pollution and public health.
In January 1969, following the devastation of a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, Senator Gaylord Nelson announced the idea of teaching environmentalism on college campuses and convinced Pete McCloskey, a Republican congressman committed to conservation, to support the initiative. The senator asked Denis Hayes, a young activist, to organize university education and involve the wider public in the action. Earth Day inspired 20 million Americans – 10% of the total US population at the time – to take to the streets, parks and auditoriums to demonstrate against the effects of 150 years of industrial development, which had left an increasingly severe legacy on human health due to adverse effects on Today, the movement he initiated covers almost the entire Earth. More than a thousand organizations participate in it. In response to the call, environmentalists in Hungary founded the Earth Day Foundation in 1990 and also created a news center to coordinate the events of the first Hungarian Earth Day. Many people responded to their call, both in small villages and big cities. It supports local initiatives – emphasizing the role of schools and, of course, teachers – by publishing environmental books and organizing contests.
On the occasion of Earth Day on April 22, 2024, the focus of the earthday.org organization is on eliminating plastics. For the health of people and the planet, they demand a 60% reduction in the production of all plastics by 2040.
Plastics pose a threat to humanity and all living beings, disrupting the balance of life on earth. Therefore, they are urgently calling for the banning of single-use plastics and the conclusion of a UN convention in order to build a plastic-free world.
Facts about plastics:
- We have produced 8.3 billion tons of plastic since the spread of plastics in the 1950s, the weight of plastics produced annually is the same as the weight of all humanity.
- Every plastic ever produced and discarded still exists somewhere, in some form, on earth (except for the small fraction that has been incinerated).
- 91% of the plastics are new products, i.e. they are not made from recycling, as the majority of plastics do not decompose completely, so their pieces remain with us for hundreds, even hundreds of years.
- 500 million straws are used in America every day, and if you put them in a row, they would circle the earth twice.
- Almost 2 million tons of single-use plastic bags are sold in the world every time.
- 100 billion of plastic bags are used in the United States every year. If these bags were tied together, they would circle the earth 773 times along the equator.
- Every minute 1 million plastic bottles are consumed in the world, less than half of the bottles are recycled.
- There are more microplastics in the ocean than there are stars in the Milky Way.
- If the pace of plastic production does not slow down, then by 2050 the weight of plastic waste will exceed the weight of fish.
- We consume an average of two thousand microplastics per week, which is approximately the size of a bank card.
- Plastic has already been detected in human blood. The blood sample of adult donors also contained PET plastic, polystyrene and polyethylene.
Source: Earth Day Foundation http://fna.hu/ EARTHDAY.ORG https://www.earthday.org
Cover image: freepik.com
