Year 5 - The final straw

Year 5 had a thought provoking visit from the plastic warriors at the Final Straw Foundation. They shared with us lots of interesting facts about how plastic decomposes and ends up in our seas. Not only did they share some scary facts, they also shared lots of solutions to the problem of plastic! Did you know 12 million tonnes of plastic ends up in our ocean every year?

Mystery item, what is it? Cotton buds! They end up in our ocean by being flushed down the toilet. Don’t worry though, our government has banned the sale of plastic cotton buds which is helping to reduce the problem.

Have you ever seen a nurdle? Well these are what plastic items are made from. They have even been found in uninhabited beaches!

We played the decomposing game and were able to correctly sort the plastic from the shortest to longest time it takes to decompose. A plastic bottle takes 500 - 1000 years to decompose! That means every piece of plastic ever made is still here, on our planet.

We then became sand detectives and cleaned sand from Wittering Beach. We then sorted the rubbish into micro plastics (smaller than 5mm), bigger bits of plastic and non plastic rubbish. Look at what we found!

All of the amazing things we learnt we will be using in the speeches we are writing to prevent plastic pollution. We will use less single-use plastic! We will recycle what we can! We took the pledge to prevent plastic pollution, will you?