HELPING TO STOP PLASTIC AND PAPER BAGS
Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles (17,700 km) through treacherous seas.
You’d have to be crazy, or trying to make a point. David de Rothschild is trying to make a point.
De Rothschild hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, now being built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic.
“It’s all sail power,” he said. “The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish.”
You have been on the ocean for 54 days now. How is it going?
Really well. I have to keep pinching myself that we are floating on a boat made out of 12,500 2-litre reclaimed plastic bottles.
Why is your boat, the Plastiki, built out of these bottles?
We thought they would make a tough hull but we also wanted to highlight the bottle’s status as one of the most disposable plastic items we buy. This project is about taking a symbol of dumb plastic 1.0 – the single-use, throwaway kind – and making it functional. The Plastiki gets 68 per cent of her buoyancy from the bottles.
Environmentalists’ knee-jerk reaction is often to vilify plastics. Instead we need to differentiate between the throwaway kind – the bottle, the bag, the polystyrene foam – and the smarter materials like the laptop I’m using now or the lifesaving machinery in hospitals. The latter have a valued place in our society and a longer life cycle but we need to re-engineer them to have a closed-loop life cycle, so that they are recycled over and over.
Is this kind of smarter plastic incorporated into the design too?
Yes. The structure of the boat is made out of a material called self-reinforced polyethylene terephthalate (srPET). It is a single-substance material which means it is easily recycled.
What is srPET used for today?
Not much. It has been around since the 1980s but there hasn’t been the desire to take it out of the laboratory. It is slightly more expensive than less green alternatives, but I think the market is starting to move on. People want to know where their materials come from and how they affect the health of the planet.
Did you offset the carbon footprint of manufacturing the boat?
Our footprint was a lot smaller than it could have been because we manufactured a lot of the boat ourselves off-grid, using solar power. When we got into tracing the carbon footprint of all the stuff we had ordered, it actually became financially restrictive for us to do the analysis. We got a quote from one company that was of the order of $100,000 to do a full analysis of our carbon footprint.
A lot of firms brand themselves carbon neutral but they don’t say when their neutrality began – you have to go all the way down the supply chain.
Have you seen more plastic than fish in the water during your time at sea?
Yes, by a long way. The issue is far more ominous than people imagine, as the Pacific garbage patches are not just floating islands of trash. They are mainly subsurface – tiny pieces of material in the process of breaking down and floating in the top layer of the ocean where most species live and breed. When we look underneath the boat, the hull is covered in a fine, extra layer of plastic. It is tragic. From above, the oceans still look beautiful and untouched but just below the surface is this toxic stew that could quickly end up on our dinner plates.
Source: newscientist.com
The Assembly approved a bill today that would ban single-use plastic bags at supermarkets, pharmacies, convenience stores and liquor stores.
AB 1998, which would take effect for some stores as soon as January 2012, bans single-use plastic bags in hopes that consumers bring or buy their own reusable bags. Stores could also provide paper bags made of at least 40 percent recycled materials at a charge of 5 to 8 cents per bag.
The measure squeaked through the lower house with the bare minimum of 41 votes it needed to pass. It now heads to the Senate.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a statement after the vote Wednesday praising the effort and pointing out that it would make California the first state in the nation to enact such a ban. Several cities — including Malibu, San Francisco and Palo Alto — have passed their own bag bans.
The bill’s author, Democratic Assemblywoman Julia Brownley of Santa Monica, called the measure “an effective policy approach that will move customers to use more sustainable alternative.”
“Keeping California’s oceans, beaches and parks pristine is vital to protect our marine life, our tourist industry and our fisheries,” she said in a statement. “Single-use carryout bags pollute our waterways and injure or kill marine life.”
But Republican Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Irvine said on the floor that forcing consumers to use specific products wasn’t the job of the state, adding that he was worried about the spread of E.Coli, salmonella and other food-borne illnesses through reusable totes if single-use plastic bags are scrapped.
“We continue to go down the road of making more and more instructive laws, prescribing and dictating to the people of California precisely how they are to live their lives,” DeVore said. “I believe in these tough economic times, we should be focused on the basics.”
Several members, including Republican Assemblyman Jeff Miller of Corona, said they were concerned about pushing the cost of reusable and paper bags under the bill on to consumers.
“Hard-working families are struggling just to pay for their groceries, not bag them,” he said.
The bill is backed by retailers and environmental groups, among others, who argue that Californians already foot the bill through higher prices for generation and disposal of the more than 19 billion plastic grocery bags distributed annually in the state.
Opposition comes largely from the plastics industry and business groups, which say the ban would eliminate manufacturing jobs, raise consumer costs and put an extra burden on smaller stores.
Tim Shestek, director of state affairs for the American Chemistry Council, cautioned that the bill would create a “bag bureaucracy,” costing consumers $1 billion annually with the paper bag fee and stripping the state of $1.5 million in implementation costs.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/science/earth/03bags.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/02/BAOE1DOUFF.DTL
Even though some snack bags are now biodegradable, they shouldn’t be placed into the yard-waste bins due to Cheyenne’s heavy winds.
CHEYENNE — After you’re done crunching on Sun Chips, is it OK to toss the bag into the city-issued yard-waste bin? After all, its new bag is designed to quickly break down if placed in a “large, professionally managed” composting facility, according to the nonprofit Biodegradable Products Institute.
That describes the municipal composting facility. But the city’s sanitation director doesn’t want them. Dennis Pino said in our wind-swept city, the bags would end up forming an ugly pile of trash along the fence of the Windmill Avenue facility, Pino said. Or they would blow across the road to the golf course.
“For us, right now, (compostable plastics) are not acceptable,” Pino said. And that goes for other compostable products, such as pen casings, plastic cups and paper plates that are out on the market. With no way for crews to quickly differentiate these from regular trash, they will be regarded as trash. And when crews find trash in the yard waste bins, the homeowner could get slapped with a fee.
For the time being, those who want to use plastic that can be turned into compost will have to put them to work in their own backyards. Normally, we think of these petroleum-based plastic products as staying intact in the landfill decades after we’re gone. But more disposable products that are designed to break down in a compost pile at the same rate as grass clippings and leaves are starting to hit the shelves.
The local King Soopers grocery store sells a line of plastic beverage cups made from corn, and paper plates made from sugar-cane fiber. These can be composted when their short, useful lives are spent. Also, Frito Lay recently launched a massive campaign that shows the empty chips bags dissolving in the dirt.
The new Sun Chips bag is a highly engineered product, said Steven Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute. It’s made from a corn feedstock that is further processed into a polymer — something that can keep the chips crispy until we’re ready to eat them. Then the microbes in the compost pile eat the carbon-based bag, which gives off carbon dioxide.
However, if this chip bag ends up in the landfill, that’s worse for the environment, Mojo said. This is an anaerobic breakdown, meaning it will release methane instead of carbon dioxide, which adds to our greenhouse gas troubles. In the past, Pino has said Cheyenne has a composting facility to be proud of and is one of the largest in the region.
That’s owing to the city’s mandatory yard-waste policy. Because the landfill was getting full, the city barred leaves, branches and grass clippings from going into the regular trash stream. The city collects yard waste from separate bins and hauls the loads to the composting facility off Windmill Road.
Right now, there’s no system in place to accept these new plastics. In fact, it’s a situation that is ripe for contamination. For one thing, unless all plastic products on the market could be composted there could be a lot of mix-ups. In addition to the wind problems, Pino confirmed that, yes, the city would have to rely on residents being informed and diligent enough to keep the wrong kind of trash out of the yard-waste bin.
The Biodegradable Products Institute does offer guidance to consumers. If a company claims that the product can be composted, consumers should look for the BPI logo on the label, Mojo said. That means it was laboratory tested by a third party and meets ASTM (formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials) standards.
But at the Cheyenne facility, if there were cups, plates and chip bags allowed in the mix, it would require more sorting, which would add to the labor costs.
“I hate to say it, but when it costs the city money, we have to pass it on,” Pino said. “I don’t want to be charging any more than I have to right now.”
Source: wyomingnews.com
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.
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.
Green Car of the Year® jurors appreciated the Audi A3 TDI’s rakish styling, upscale appointments, and 42 mpg highway fuel efficiency – a 50 percent improvement over the gasoline A3 variant that makes the car very economical to operate with low relative CO2 emissions. Plus, this compact luxury car’s quiet, 50-state certified clean diesel engine delivers substantial torque starting at a low 1,750 rpm, contributing toward a spirited and fun-to-drive nature. The A3 TDI is approved by Audi for operation on up to B5 biodiesel fuel.
Project GreenBag teams up with Heal the Bay to promote a fun new campaign called ‘Trash your friends, not the ocean’. It’s an interactive website that let’s you have fun while spreading the word about plastic pollution.
We all know plastic bags (and other objects) suck. These dirty little pests are trashing our oceans and environment. Well it’s time to fight back! Here is how it works:
- Visti the Heal the Bay website www.trashed.healthebay.org
- Click ‘Trash your friends’ button to start
- Enter a website URL to which you would like to trash. Tip: Send your friend to a site you know they like and visit often. This will payoff during the prank.
- Enter your friend(s) email address(es) and yours. They will not reuse or sell your info in anyway.
- Choose a plastic bag monster/character
- Send and enjoy
Heal the Bay has a cool page with widgets & banners that you can dress up your own website, blogs, Facebook or MySpace accounts with to help get the word out about the plastic pollution. Visit: www.healthebay.org/trashyourfriends
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
