I’m sure many of you have heard about how bad plastic is for our environment. Even SF banned grocery stores from using it and many other California cities are going to ban it as well. There are 19 million plastic bags used each year in California. That’s a lot of plastic. But that doesn’t even count the plastic water bottles we use and all the other plastics that we use each and every day. An April 9, 2008, article in The New Republic stated “the United States churned out 120 billion pounds of plastic resin in 2007, double the amount produced 20 years ago.” We know it’s not biodegradable, so where does it go?
It’s a place called the North Pacific Gyre and it accumulates all the debris that doesn’t make it the recycle locations. It is also known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Lovely, huh? It is twice the size of the state of Texas! If you want more info on it, just Google “plastic in pacific ocean” and you’ll find many articles on this. Below are links to a few of the articles. Shocking!
http://www.ecocycle.org/askeco-cycle/2005/1028.cfm
http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/travel-leisure/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we.shtml
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL&type=politics
~Tiffany
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9 comments:
Going "green" with your water bottle like the Siggs I currently use can also be a benefit to your health. This has been a hot topic in the news lately and is of particular concern for children. Check out this article:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5713860.html
We recently switched from Nalgene bottles (which we LOVE, but they have BPA's) to BPA-free Camelbak bottles....and we are now researching which is the better water filtration system - on-faucet systems or Brita-style pitchers so that we can break our last plastic bottle habit, the 2.5 gallon Arrowhead spring water.....For more info on BPA - check out this article: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/chemical_found.php
What I find to be incredibly interesting is the fact that we actually PURCHASE WATER IN PLASTIC BOTTLES! When did this become a trend? And imagine how much better the environment would be if the ole fashion way of drinking water was still the way we hydrated ourselves!!! And they say marketing doesn't work!.....
Good looking blog headed in the right direction and perfect timing, today is Earth Day.
I read the blog and learned why my daughter always ragged on me to unplug my cell phone charger when I wasn't using it. I never asked why. Guess I should have. Now I know.
Growing up in the 50's PG&E used to advertise that if light bulbs were turned off with plans to turn them back on within 30 minutes to not turn them off at all, because it took more power to power them back on than to leave them glowing for 30 minutes. Little did we know. Was PG&E scamming us to make more profit or was that their thinking at the time? They've sure done a turn around. We've gone totally flourscent in our house.
sorry, I posted this on the wrong one.
Um, I appreciate all of the awareness coming about but does everyone realize that Mother Nature can get rid of us like she did with the dinosaurs so many years ago when she feels she has had enough of us?
Plastic won't kill anyone unless you inhale deep breaths with a bag over your mouth and nose. Yes, too much of things will not be good but Mother Nature does solve these things in her own way. We cannot control any of it.
And furthermore, the emissions from our vehicles emitted do not come close to the emissions from forest fires and from volcanoes, which are both natural things that the earth *needs* to cleanse things. The reason there were so many fires in Tahoe was because we were not allowed to burn things there and the smaller saplings were like kinder for the fire that did start and that caused the larger trees to catch fire and go on and on and on.
I love the earth and I appreciate all of this but you must truly think about the whole picture. There was no freeze from back in the 70's and this environmental Global Warming thing is just the same... fake.
Just imagine what all that floating plastic and styrofoam is doing to the marine environment and marine species in the area. We won't know for a long time how the ecosystem will be altered by this. Seabirds and sea turtles are dying from ingesting floating plastics, cigarette lighters and other man made materials. Then there's the pollution of beaches from plastics, etc washing up on shore. Shouldn't we care more about this? We aren't powerless to do something about it...
Well, plastic is not the enemy here, the HUMANS that throw them into the ocean and streams and rivers are... let's demonize the right thing here, the humans not the plastic. We all use plastic on a daily basis in our homes and cars and everywhere (oh yeah, computers that we are using to communicate here are made of plastic!) so let's look at the people that are doing harm not the items because people are the polluters of the plastic not the plastic itself. Like guns... guns don't kill people, PEOPLE kill people.
In many European cities the grocery stores do not provide bags for you--you either bring your own or buy them when you check out. Having to pay for something makes you think twice about it so most people bring their own bags to the grocery store. Not a bad idea. Also, many of these Europeans are not driving to the grocery store so they have to carry these bags around town. Americans have the luxury of keeping reusable bags in their cars to use when needed. (I will keep the car driving out of this debate until there are enough sidewalks in the US to handle pedestrians.) Anyway, I am glad SF is banning plastic bags and I hope other cities do it as well.
PS Krista k sounds just like her fathter!
To Krista K's comment about the people, people are going to use what you put in front of them. Using her argument, potato chips don't make you fat, it is the person eating them that is making themselves fat. Why is that person not eating the entire bowl of fruit that is also on the counter? Too full from the potato chips? Sometimes you need to remove something so people stop doing it. Stop giving out plastic bags and people will stop using them. Until them it is too easy to do to stop ('Oh, I guess I will take that bag because I forgot my own again...'). Take the ease of access to guns away and people won't use them--they will use knives like they do in the UK.... But at least knives don't accidentally kill someone. You have to be trying to do harm.
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