Plastic is a very useful thing. We package food with it, we carry supplies, plastic makes our everyday needs like a hair comb. Without plastic we wouldn’t be alive because we need bags for food and we need bottles to hold our water. Though, according to recent studies, it is slowly killing us. Plastic is poisonous and it lives in your gum, you are absorbing it into your system by chewing it. Plastic is made out of oil and when we make it, it pollutes the air. It is quickly flooding our landfills overflowing to the point we run out of space, It is being thrown into oceans, killing innocent sea creatures and polluting our water sources. About 400 million bottles are thrown out a day. 78 percent of that 400 million goes into a landfill, while the rest is recycled. All of our plastic should be recycled! Besides, that fact is only for bottles, other materials are thrown out instead of recycled too. All of our plastic in the pacific ocean is twice the size of America. 5 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide each year. About 60 to 100 million barrels of oil to make our plastic bags each year, and that is only for plastic bags! Not one plastic bag on earth ever biodegraded, it takes about 400 to 1,000 years for a plastic bag to biodegrade so none have biodegraded yet. Oil shouldn’t be used to make plastic. Oil is very valuable and plastic is very common. Besides, plants can produce natural, non-polluting plastic. It may not produce as much as oil, but humans aren’t supposed to use this much plastic. Some plastic appliances are easy to replace, such as: bottles (metal bottles), bags (reusable bags), toothbrushes (wooden toothbrushes), lighters (matches), toy building blocks (building games on the computer), chairs (wood), and crates (cardboard boxes) etc. Also if natural fires find a way to reach a landfill then humans would all be dead because when plastic is burned it turns into toxic fumes. This is an accident waiting to happen, with all of the plastic in our landfills this could annihilate the human race, if all of our plastic was recycled than this will never happen. Unfortunately, not all plastic should be recycled. This kind of plastic should not be used, if at all, a minimum so our landfills will be safe and it won’t overflow. The solution for our plastic problem is simple, Recycle! Pollution stops once everyone recycles because we won’t need to make anymore plastic. Also people could stop using recycled plastic at all and just use reusable materials. Once people stop using landfills for plastic if all of the plastic in our landfills were picked up and recycled we would have about 4 billion more bottles to make more bottles out of causing less pollution and less waste. Of course this plan is very fictional, but slowly we will conserve space. Gum is very popular and because so many gum companies are trying to keep up with all of their customers, that plastic is used in gum except for plants. Maybe gum companies could switch back to plant gum when gum is chewed less, and less. So much gum is wasted in school when a teacher catches a student chewing gum because when that person spits out their gum they just open a new pack and continue in this process. Supporting plastic would waste a lot of money for something of terrible quality. Every day plastic bags break, they are easy to replace, but you save more money if you just buy one indestructible bag. If plastic were actually be banned, all those major unhealthy soda companies like cocacola would run out of business and the world would be free of plastic as well as obesity. If all these businesses stopped using plastic and used different materials then it would show that they care for the environment this could start a very big cause because since everybody knows about these companies they will all learn about this movement. A big plastic problem is in the cell phone business. When people buy cases they are all made of plastic, when they break, people throw them out because it isn’t the recyclable plastic. A way this could be stopped is by maybe knitting your own. The soft, cushiony feeling will comfort while you are texting or typing. Also if your phone is to drop, that same dense cushion will break its fall without it making a scratch. The central government should take some action in the three r’s situation because they are our leaders. It is their job to protect us and with plastic slowly killing the world they must do something. The government supports the plastic industry because like corn, plastic is cheap. The government knows very well that we aren’t recycling, but they don’t bother making a law banning plastic in landfills. The government is responsible for the production of plastic. It is up to them to make oil into plastic. It has to be the government to make the decision to use plant made plastic instead of man made plastic. Maybe for Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s campaign they could advertise reusable bottles with their names on it symbolizing that they care. That would definitely boost their votes because some people agree with me that plastic is something we need to limit. The government also wants to put an end to global warming.The government could make a lot of money for this cause if they tried. Many people have already made the switch to reusable items. They try to convince others. They could triumph with the government’s help. For instance, my friend’s dad always tells him not to get anything with plastic when he buys a snack or lunch. For his lunch he gets gatorade with his pizza, for his snack he gets a cupcake protected by an oversized plastic shell. I warn him about it and he tells me, “Yeah, yeah, nerd!” My friend’s dad could use some help from our country’s leaders now.