HELPING TO STOP PLASTIC AND PAPER BAGS
What’s worst than a plastic bag in the landfill? A plastic bag filled with oil dumped in a landfill! Oil waste that is scraped off coastal beaches is winding up in nearby landfills — and local officials and residents aren’t happy. “We’re tired of being dumped on,” one Mississippi official says.
No Plastic Day is a world wide event intended to bring awareness of the over consumption of disposable plastic goods such as plastic bags and bottles. It is well known that there are floating islands of trash in most of the world’s oceans. The huge amounts of plastic trash we all discard daily doesn’t decompose, doesn’t break down, and most of it is toxic to the animals that accidentally consume it. The current rate of plastic consumption is not sustainable and is starting to create a huge problem for marine life particularly. Fish eat toxic plastic bits. We catch the fish and eat the fish. Its only a matter of time before we’ve polluted our own food supplies with plastic trash.
No plastic bags – If you buy something from a store on No Plastic Day, bring your own bags. If you don’t have any cloth or paper bags, just reuse the plastic bags you already have. They’ll never biodegrade so you might as well reuse them if you already have them.
No plastic bottles – Drink water from the tap or buy drinks in aluminum cans or glass bottles if you must.
Limit your garbage – Almost everything you throw away is made of plastic. By limiting the garbage you create, you will reduce your plastic waste as well.
Be creative – Everyone’s situation is different and you will need to customize your own situation for No Plastic Day.
Be creative. Reuse, recycle, and reduce your waste. Consider it a personal experiment to find ways you can create less garbage and try to use no disposable plastics.
Business is great at Kepner Plastics Fabricators Inc., a Torrance, Calif., company that makes booms that help to contain oil spills. The company’s Meryl Lee told Rob Schmitz of American Public Media’s “Marketplace” program that Keper is “ordering lots of extra materials and talking about putting a second shift on.”
Kepner Plastics also makes custom plastic fabrications and a variety of specialized products including inflatables, covers and liners, and water control products.
The company got into the oil containment market in 1968, when the Ocean Eagle tanker grounded in the entrance to San Juan Harbor, Puerto Rico and broke-up, spilling 83,400 barrels of crude oil.
According to the company’s web site, “Several containment methods were tried and failed before Kepner was called upon to create a containment solution to control the oil spill. In response, Kepner designed at its home office in Torrance, California and completed manufacture in a warehouse in Puerto Rico, the first “SeaCurtain” oil spill containment boom. The only conditions of that contract were, ‘If it works, we’ll pay you.’ It worked, and they did!”
Source: plasticsnews.com
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.
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
It’s an oil spill. Only solid, and far more deadly. The average liquid spill of petroleum will kill marine life for a year, maybe 10. But it could take 400 years for that petroleum-based plastic laundry bottle to break down. Each year, undegraded plastic chokes to death some 100,000 whales, dolphins, seals, manatees, plus an unknown number of sea turtles and about 2 million birds. And once it has broken down, it becomes deadlier still.
Four hundred years is about how long the word “plastic” has been in the English vocabulary, deriving from the Greek plastikos, meaning “able to be molded.” Except modern plastics are built to be durable and have become positively unyielding. And we keep making more of the stuff: 115 million metric tons a year. Light though plastic is, that’s the equivalent of the weight of 347 Empire State Buildings. Ten percent wends its way to sea. Twenty percent of what gets to sea has been tossed off ships and oil rigs; the rest comes via floods and sewage, and much of that from ever-profligate Americans, who produce a record-setting 240 pounds of plastic per person per year.
Remote islands around the world are covered with acres of lighters, pens, bottles, tampon applicators—and tiny pellets of preproduction plastic called nurdles that compose 11 percent of beach litter. The vast eddies of the ocean basins, known as gyres—once called the Horse Latitudes and avoided by sailors—are now full of plastic and riotous with new chemistry. The Texas-sized “great garbage patch” in the North Pacific Gyre holds an estimated 3 million metric tons of mostly plastic trash, six times the mass of the plankton found there.
Most has broken into microplastics that chemically bond with PCBS, DDT, and endocrine disrupters to make this area a million times more toxic than surrounding seas. Suspended in surface waters, those plankton-sized flakes are mistakenly consumed by jellyfish and small fish that are in turn consumed by bigger fish, taking the toxic payload further and further up the marine food chain. In the end, the plastic comes back to pollute all of us, something the nations of the world, currently content to ignore a problem in international waters, should remember.
Source: MotherJones.com
A controversial ordinance in Manhattan Beach, California banning the use of plastic bags by retailers at the point of sale was struck down in the California Court of Appeals. The court decided that the government (Manhattan Beach in this case) cannot arbitrarily “ban” plastic bags without an environmental impact report proving that a ban is warranted. It sets a precedent for truth and fairness to rule as we tackle a key environmental issues in retail packaging.
The court found substantial evidence to support the argument that the ordinance may cause increased use of paper bags, which (the court stated) may have a significant negative impact on the environment, therefore an environmental impact report was required.
According to court documents: “We do not resolve the question of the ultimate merits of whether the plastic bag distribution ban should be implemented. All we are saying is that an environmental impact report must be prepared given that it can be fairly argued based on substantial evidence in the record that the ordinance may have a significant environmental impact.”
