Voices is the Dorset Echo's weekly youth page - written for young people by young people.

Unless you have been living under a rock for these past years, then you will have noticed the terrors caused by the most murderous material ever created: plastic.

Our county has a lot to offer, with many beaches and coastal landscapes, along with vast stretches of countryside, and this will be ruined if we all do not act instantly.

In fact, one family in Dorset have lived plastic-free for one whole year, excluding medicines for the four children. They have chosen an attitude that we all need to emulate. What’s better: not having a bar of chocolate, or permitting an innocent turtle to suffer by suffocation?

According to the World Economic Forum, one truck of rubbish is dumped into our oceans every minute. That is sixty truck loads every hour, of every day, of every month, of every year.

Of course, it would be tricky for the average person to stop this, but we can act in our own way. Reuse anything you can, recycle all that you can and refuse to waste any more than what you already must.

As we act on our part, equally, companies and governments must act too. The five pence charge on plastic bags has been proven to be effective, but not effective enough. Why should the blame be put on us when companies slap anything in any packaging – big or small.

If we do not act rapidly, then our planet will no longer be a planet – it will be a dump. The 2008 Disney Pixar motion picture, Wall-e foreshadowed our future, but that was over a decade ago and think about how much our planet has degraded since then.

The next thing we know, five-hundred arrests will be made on demonstrators about land and water pollution.

By James Sullivan