Explainer: What is the problem with plastic? [KS1]

Narrator: Plastic is useful and we use it everyday.

It's found in games, clothes, drinks bottles, bags computers, phones, food trays, signs, pipes, multicoloured plastic bananas… err what? Well yeah, the point is we use plastic A LOT!

Plastic can be made in to anything and it's super strong. But that also makes it really difficult to break down if it gets into the environment

Over time, a real banana will turn brown, rot and break down into the soil. A multicoloured plastic banana, like this, could take hundreds and hundreds of years to break down. And even then, it's still plastic just in smaller bits.

So what do we do with our plastic? Well, we can throw it in the bin and it gets collected by a lorry. But with so much plastic around, Some of it, unfortunately, ends up in the sea.

The sea creatures can confuse those colourful plastics with a tasty meal, or even get trapped in plastic waste. But plastic doesn't only end up in the ocean. Sometimes that waste plastic is burnt. Which pollutes our air and harms wildlife. Or we dump it somewhere and pretend it doesn't exist.

We need to make a change together. We can use less plastic to start with. I never should have bought this plastic banana.

The best thing we can do is reuse it.

A plastic drinking bottle makes a great… Plastic drinking bottle. Or we can use it for something else, like turning it into a planter for your garden. But if we can't reuse it, we can recycle it.

Recycling is taking waste and turning it into useful materials for something else.

We can send the waste plastic to recycling centres. Here it's sorted, shredded and used to make new things. This can be expensive and difficult, but it does mean some old plastic can become new bags, rugs, plant pots, dog collars even shoes.

We can help the planet because we're reusing what we already have. Use less plastic, make less waste and no more 400 year old bananas in the sea.