If you look back through my YouTube content for 2019 so far, you will find the first video that I posted called: What Happened to the Aquaculture Facility? That Friday the first Weekly Update video was also posted. It’s titled 1 Million Subs for Conservation. In that video I explain why I am trying to reach 1 Million Subscribers on this channel. I also explain a bit of who I am and what I have done so far with this channel and the Aquapparel brand.
Since last week the first of several “potential viral videos” as I call them went live and had a really good response both here on YouTube as well as on Facebook.
For this week’s video, I decided to give an update on my pursuit of 1 Million Subs For Conservation to take a closer look at what a “Large Positive Impact” really looks like and why it is so important.
Since it is a popular topic right now and I personally find tons of these during my trash clean ups, let’s take a look at plastic straws.
In the United States alone there are ~329,000,000 people. On average, each person in the United States uses 1.6 plastic straws per day. That means that ~526,400,000 plastic straws are used in the United States every single day. That’s 192,136,000,000 plastic straws per year. No wonder I find at least a few every time I do a trash clean up.
Recently while filming an upcoming Star Wars themed beach clean up video I – for the first time – found a paper straw on the beach instead of a plastic one. I was pretty stoked to say the least! These guys and girls were as well.
If this YouTube Channel ends up getting 1 Million Subs by the end of 2019, if even 10% of the subscribers do something as little as stop using plastic straws on a daily basis, that’s 100,000 people or 160,000 plastic straws per day that will not end up somewhere in our environment in 2020. Out of the 192.1 Trillion plastic straws there would then only be 192 straws that might end up in our environment per year.
Here are the numbers for up to a Million people participating in not using plastic straws on a daily basis here in the US over the period of just 1 year:
You’ll notice that at the 100% mark or 1,000,000 people mark, the number is reduced by 1 Trillion. Every day people are out in our environment cleaning up trash. Whether it’s our government funded city workers, ocean conservation based organizations or individuals who are participating in a solo beach clean up at our local beaches, these people are all removing straws among the rest of the trash from our environment.
So at this mark, there are 1 Trillion less straws that are entering the environment per year. That means that over a period of time, the clean ups and lack of additional straws will start to make that number go down. At some point, there can be virtually 0 straws left in our environment. And that’s just 1 type of non-biodegradable plastic.
Just think if all 329,000,000 people in the United States did not use plastic straws for 10 years, we would be able to reverse 10 or even 20 years worth of damage. How? With so many clean up efforts already under way, we could make such a huge improvement in just a decade of not using plastic straws.
To me, that’s a huge positive impact! So even if you are not cleaning up the beach personally, if you stop using plastic straws, you are helping in a huge way! It’s as simple as that.