HELPING TO STOP PLASTIC AND PAPER BAGS
Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever. While climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, it also presents the greatest opportunity – an unprecedented opportunity to build a healthy, prosperous, clean energy economy now and for the future.
Earth Day 2010 can be a turning point to advance climate policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy and green jobs. Earth Day Network is galvanizing millions who make personal commitments to sustainability. Earth Day 2010 is a pivotal opportunity for individuals, corporations and governments to join together and create a global green economy. Join the more than one billion people in 190 countries that are taking action for Earth Day.
Earth Day is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970. Earth Day is celebrated in spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. Many communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues. The first Earth Week originated in Philadelphia in 1970 (starting April 16 and culminating on Earth Day, April 22.) Earth Day Network, a group that wishes to become the coordinator of Earth Day globally, asserts that Earth Day is now observed on April 22 on virtually every country on Earth. World Environment Day, celebrated on June 5 in a different nation every year, is the principal United Nations environmental observance.
Assemblymember Julia Brownley’s bill to ban single-use bags, AB 1998, passed out of the Natural Resources Committee on a 6-3 vote Monday. If the Heal the Bay-sponsored bill is signed into law, California retailers (grocery, drug and convenience stores) would phase out the use of single-use plastic, bioplastic and paper bags by 2012.
Support for the bill followed party lines, with the ayes coming from Chesbro, Brownley, Huffman, Skinner, De Leon and Hill. Gilmore, Knight, and Logue dissented.
The supportive discussion focused on the detrimental environmental and economic impacts of single-use bags. Environmental groups, recyclers and local governments all testified in support. Chico Bag, the makers of those cool, compactable reusable bags, discussed the green job potential of the bill. Chico estimates that California has 20 reusable bag companies.
The usual suspects spoke in opposition: The American Chemistry Council, plastic bag manufacturers, and the paper industry. (Just once I’d like to be on the same side of an issue with the ACC – maybe green chemistry is a possibility?)
Plastic bag manufacturers and the ACC urged increased education and recycling. (That strategy has been ineffective to date. Some 19 billion reusable bags a year are still used in California.) They also played up potential employment impacts, probably in the hopes of getting the bill placed on the California Chamber of Commerce’s job killer list.
Meanwhile, the paper industry presented its new life-cycle analysis research showing that environmental impacts from paper bag impacts aren’t as bad as shown in previous studies (those sponsored by the plastic bag industry).
In the end, the bill passed committee after being deftly championed by Assemblymember Brownley. Her efforts were buoyed by Assemblymember Chesbro talking about the environmental impacts of single-use plastics being a major concern for the state, and Assemblymember Skinner outlining the economic impacts of plastic bag pollution.
AB 1998 now moves on to the Assembly Appropriations committee, and will be heard by the end of May.
Event starts 8am PST
PHILADELPHIA – Keep Philadelphia Beautiful led the kick-off event today at Temple University of the new “Bring it Back Philly” public education campaign, sponsored by local retailers and business groups to increase the recycling of plastic bags and wrap among the city’s residents.
The new initiative is spearheaded by Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, who sponsored a resolution adopted by the Council in December to establish the program.
As of today, 232 stores are participating in the program—making it the largest voluntary urban plastic bag recycling program in the country.
Coalition member retailers outlined the public education and outreach activities they will be undertaking over the next several months to increase awareness of shoppers of the recyclability of plastic bags and locations for recycling bags and wraps.
“We believe that all retailers and consumers should be responsible for improvement of the environment, and we are committed to working with the city of Philadelphia to develop ways to effectively address recycling issues,” said Richard McMenamin, owner and operator of two ShopRite stores in northeast Philadelphia.
Other Philadelphia area retailers participating in the program include Target, Kmart, Sears, and Fresh Grocers.
PBA member Hilex Poly, which is the world’s largest manufacturer and a major recycler of plastic bags, has a facility in Milesburg, PA. Earlier this year Hilex doubled the capacity of its recycling facility in North Vernon, Indiana, to help meet the industry goal of 40% recycled content in all plastic bags by 2015.
Plastic materials are recycled into many useful products, including durable backyard decking, fencing, railings, shopping carts, and new plastic bags. One company that makes outdoor products from recycled plastics is Trex Company.
Source: http://bringitbackphilly.org/
For more information, and/or to get in touch with one of the people above, please contact:
Lauren Manelius – 717.525.6262 – Manelius@thebravogroup.com
When the 5 Gyres team made it to the Azores after our North Atlantic marine debris investigation they took the opportunity to see who on the Faial (the island where we landed) worked on ocean issues and if anyone was working on plastic. This led them to give a presentation at the University of The Azores where we met researcher, Marcos Santos. Marcos works on tracking sea turtles and he’s noted in the necropsies he’s done on juvenile sea turtles that many have lots of plastic in their guts. Santos says that juveniles will eat anything looking for a meal, while adults are more particular.
Source: www.5Gyres.com
Knowing that plastic pollution is an environmental and potential human health hazard, and that current recovery and recycling efforts are inadequate, we must manage production and recovery of plastic responsibly through legislation. Bans and fees on disposable plastics are working to protect people and the environment worldwide. When businesses take responsibility (EPR) to recover products from consumers after use, they make more durable products, create less waste, and reduce the financial burden on municipalities and taxpayers paying to reduce waste.
Necessity and we are in need of a huge change! Our capacity to come up with smarter approaches, ideas, and materials is limitless. Businesses must continue reinventing the way we make and consume our products, helping to forge a more sustainable world, and supporting communities that demand better alternatives.
Responsible legislation creates opportunity for these alternatives. Steel water bottles and cloth grocery bags, biodegradable plastics and green chemistry, closed loop product lifecycles – these innovations and reinventions move us towards a more sustainable society, where the concept of “waste” has no place.
Source: www.5gyres.org
Walk into any grocery or department store and try to fill a grocery cart with individual products that are not made from, packaged, or labeled with plastic. Though some products, like plastic bottles, have a recovery plan, most do not. Even fewer are truly recycled. Plastic lost at sea is an environmental and potential human health hazard. We must demand zero tolerance for plastic pollution. Reducing our consumption and production of plastic waste, and choosing cost-effective alternatives will go a long way towards protecting our seas- and ultimately ourselves.
Inspire your company, community, school, and home to consider what they make and consume. Know the lifecycle of what you buy- what happens to your products when you’re through with them? Shift some habits as you go along- commit to put your bags in the car, to not use plastic bottles, etc. Support legislative efforts to manage waste in your local community- your voice must be heard! Bring your own bag, bottle, cup, To-Go Ware, and inspire others to do the same. Be a leader in your industry and community for sustainable living. Knowing the impact of plastic pollution on the world, inaction is unacceptable.
Source: www.5gyres.org
Take a look around you- most of what we eat, drink, or use in any way comes packaged in petroleum plastic- a material designed to last forever, yet used for products that we then throw away. This throwaway mentality is a relatively recent phenomenon. Just a generation ago, we packaged our products in reusable or recyclable materials – glass, metals, and paper, and designed products that would last. Today, our landfills and beaches are awash in plastic packaging, and expendable products that have no value at the end of their short lifecycle.
The short-term convenience of using and throwing away plastic products carries a very inconvenient long-term truth. These plastic water bottles, cups, utensils, electronics, toys, and gadgets we dispose of daily are rarely recycled in a closed loop. We currently recover only 5% of the plastics we produce. What happens to the rest of it? Roughly 50% is buried in landfills, some is remade into durable goods, and much of it remains “unaccounted for”, lost in the environment where it ultimately washes out to sea.
Around the world, plastic pollution has become a growing plague, clogging our waterways, damaging marine ecosystems, and entering the marine food web. Much of the plastic trash we generate on land flows into our oceans through storm drains and watersheds. It falls from garbage and container trucks, spills out of trashcans, or is tossed carelessly.
In the ocean, some of these plastics- Polycarbonate, Polystrene, and PETE- sink, while LDPE, HDPE, Polypropylene, and foamed plastics float on the oceans surface. Sunlight and wave action cause these floating plastics to fragment, breaking into increasingly smaller particles, but never completely disappearing- at least on any documented time scale. This plastic pollution is becoming a hazard for marine wildlife, and ultimately for us.
Cetaceans, all sea turtle species, and a growing list of fish species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies (link to meta analysis). When marine animals consume plastic trash, presumably mistaking it for food, this can lead to internal blockages, dehydration, starvation, and potentially death. (cite?)
Also of deep concern for societies are the potential human health impacts of toxic chemicals entering the marine food chain through plastics. Science is beginning to ask the question: do chemicals such as PCBs and DDTs that sorb onto plastic pellets get into the tissues and blood of the animals that eat plastic? Do these chemicals work their way up the food chain, becoming increasingly concentrated and potentially entering our bodies when we eat seafood?
Source: www.5gyres.org
Photo: Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Rebecca Asch dissects fish and looks for traces of plastic inside of them.
Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography are surprised by the sheer amount of plastic they’re uncovering in hundreds of samples they hauled back from the North Pacific Ocean last August.
A team of graduate students sailed a thousand miles west of California to a rarely-traveled but much-hyped area called the North Pacific Gyre — a continent-sized, slowly swirling stretch of water where oceanic currents have deposited tons of plastic trash. The Scripps team set out to find how much debris is really there and whether it’s having a major impact on marine life.
Scripps is the first major scientific institution to study the large accumulation of plastic, dubbed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” in the becalmed waters of the North Pacific. The Long Beach-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation introduced it to the public a decade ago, with photos of an albatross carcass littered with bottle caps and tangles of fishing tackle, bath toys, bags and jugs.
Now, with the Scripps study, the emphasis is on tiny bits of plastics, about the size of a grain of rice — but potentially toxic to smaller organisms. While the researchers found plenty of large pieces, they’re more concerned with the confetti-like shards broken down by sun and waves over many years.
Chief scientist Miriam Goldstein put it this way from her UCSD lab, while holding two jars filled with jagged bits of blue, green, yellow and pink: “Scientists are floored when I show them these samples. Regular people are usually not very impressed because they’re like ‘Where are our islands of trash?’ This is a huge amount of plastic to get in a manta tow [net].”
In 100 years of sampling the world’s oceans, previous Scripps researchers never found so much plastic. Goldstein can’t quantify it yet, since they’re still sorting through jars of zooplankton, crustaceans and fish.
Not only did Scripps find a lot of plastic, they’ve found that fish are eating it. “We did indeed find some indisputable pieces of plastic in their guts,” said Pete Davison, a Scripps graduate student dissecting the fish.
Scripps researchers found tiny plastic bits in about 5 to 10 percent of the fish they opened up, mainly small swimmers common in the deep ocean, like lanternfish and hatchetfish. Davison added that some fish could have eaten plastic in their nets, although others definitely consumed it in the wild.
While people don’t directly dine on these species, larger commercial fish do. “If tuna is eating a lot of lanternfish, it is indirectly ingesting the plastic that might be in the lanternfishes stomach,” Davison said. Plastic also absorbs toxins like PCB and DDT that could be leaching into sea life.
Scripps researcher Rebecca Asch, studying the fish with Davison, added that plastic could be getting caught in fish intestines. “If that’s the case, it would be a similar thing to what happens in sea birds where they get this stomach full of plastic and they stop eating regular food,” she said. “They feel full because their stomach is full of plastic and they end up starving.”
The Scripps team also found juvenile yellowtail — the kind you find at sushi bars — and blue muscles — again, a variety that people eat — in the far-away gyre. Both are typically found in coastal regions, which means sea life could be hitching rides on plastic rafts to places they don’t normally live.
The gyre is considered a biological desert. There are rare and old species there, many smaller in size because of the lack of food. But these remote waters are becoming a graveyard for plastic discards — which never fully break down — from industrialized Asia and North America.
Goldstein said plastic may be supporting life forms that wouldn’t normally thrive in the gyre, harming others and possibly transporting invasive species. She plans to publish her research in a science journal later this year.
For now, Goldstein confirmed Scripps found plastic in 1,700 miles of open ocean. “We definitely think there’s a lot of plastic out there.”
Source: voiceofsandiego.org
While there was briefly 100 percent compliance with the city’s first-of-its-kind plastic bag ban, some chain supermarkets have in recenter months been exploiting a loophole in the law in order to continue offering its shoppers plastic as well as paper.
Yes, it is still possible in San Francisco to bring home one’s groceries in a landfill-choking, high-polluting plastic bags, although those halcyon days will soon be over for good.
Some chains, like Lucky and Delano’s, offer bags of higher-grade plastic — thicker and stronger than the typical shopping bags seen in exotic locales like the Target in Daly City. They can legally do so in San Francisco by calling the higher-grade plastic reusable.
That’s it: thicker “reusable” plastic, and you’re good to go.
The bag ban’s author, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, on Tuesday called for an end to this “loophole” in the original bag ban’s language. Mirkarimi asked the Department of the Environment to strengthen the existing language in a way that would really, truly and for real this time prevent all supermarkets from using plastic bags.
Still exempt from the law: liquor stores, who will still happily wrap your six-pack in black plastic, lest the world at large be filled with envy over your tasteful choice of Mirror Pond IPA or other libation.
The Surfrider Foundation is a non-profit grassroots organization dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of our world’s oceans, waves and beaches. Founded in 1984 by a handful of visionary surfers in Malibu, California, the Surfrider Foundation now maintains over 50,000 members and 90 chapters worldwide.
Visit: The Surfrider Foundation
