plastic oceans
i recently told someone about this huge island of plastic trash twice the size of texas that is floating out in the middle of the pacific ocean as part of explaining why i don’t like getting plastic containers for take-out or using plastic bags for shopping (why do cashiers try to force them on you? more than once when i’ve said i don’t want a bag for something i can carry out the cashier has asked “are you sure? why not?” and then when i say “i try not to use plastic” they look at me like i’m crazy) and why i literally carry a fork in my purse so that i never have to use a plastic one when i get some food to go, and i don’t think they believed me. i think they thought i was making it up, because, really, it does sound like some fantastic lie that some treehugging environmentalist would make up to try to scare people into recycling.
but really: it’s true. i posted about it before, but it’s still amazing to me that so many people have never heard of it, or if you tell them, that they don’t believe you. i guess it’s one of those things that people don’t want to know about, and even those who do know about it admit there’s little or nothing that can be done about it except try to prevent it from growing.
“At this point, cleaning it up isn’t an option,” Parry said. “It’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. … The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits.”
Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren’t wrapped in plastics is another.
After the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the use of plastic grocery bags earlier this year with the problem of ocean debris in mind, a slew of state bills were written to limit bag production, said Sarah Christie, a legislative director with the California Coastal Commission.
But many of the bills failed after meeting strong opposition from plastics industry lobbyists, she said.
Meanwhile, the stew in the ocean continues to grow…
The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.
Chabot said if environmentalists wanted to remove the ocean dump site, it would take a massive international effort that would cost billions.
But that is unlikely, he added, because no one country is likely to step forward and claim the issue as its own responsibility. — SFGate
Filed in environment | Tagged with plast, plastic | Comments (4)4 Responses to “plastic oceans”
Leave a Reply
What do you do about take out? I would love to get take out in my own containers (or heck, even bring my plate to the place next door), but restaurants tell me it is a health code violation.
generally, i will only allow myself to get takeout from places that don’t use plastic. which there are several in berkeley/oakland that use cardboard boxes and the chinese-style takeout containers because it’s compostable. i also find that take-out does not generally save you much time; it just means you’re eating somewhere else. for the restaurants that i really like that i know use plastic (or even styrofoam, which was made illegal here but people still use it), i always just eat in. or, at the deli where i eat lunch most often, they have the option of paper or plastic containers. the deli defaults to putting everything in the plastic ones, but you can ask for paper, and i do.
and yes, it is technically a health code violation to bring your own food containers, which SUCKS, but i have a few restaurants i go to that still allow me to do so.
of course, sometimes i can’t get around it and end up with a bunch of plastic containers, but then i try to recycle and reuse them as much as possible.
morford’s got the witty commentary on this: Come see our giant toxic stew! (LINK)
“1,500 miles wide, floating in the Pacific, made of all your plastic crap. Bring the kids!”
uplifting recent news on the plastic island in the ocean: someone is going to try to recycle it!
http://cleantechnica.com/2009/.....ectricity/
“Now that Oprah has turned her spotlight on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that great mass of garbage floating in the ocean has finally caught the public eye. An upcoming ocean garbage expedition to the patch, dubbed Project Kaisei, should draw even more attention when it launches this summer. Project Kaisei’s aim is to explore the feasibility of collecting and recycling the garbage patch, which mainly consists of plastics, into diesel fuel.”