So what to do about all that plastic in our oceans? In Algae Marine Research Foundation founder Charles Moore’s words, the only thing we can do is stop polluting and hope the system can clean itself up in the in hundreds of years…[and give the ocean] time to spit it out.” It does seem the general consensus of experts is that there’s not a whole lot that we can do to clean up the mess that’s already there. Plastic does not really biodegrade, but instead just keeps breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces.
David de Rothschild’s (Sundance channel host, author, and founder of Adventure Ecology) has said, “Since Leo Hendricks unveiled the first fully synthetic moldable hard plastic called Bakelite to the American Chemical Society in 1909, except for a very small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic ever manufactured still exists somewhere in our environment… Plastic is impervious to enzymatic breakdown. It’s literally jamming up the code of nature.”
Apparently trawling the oceans to remove this trash is impractical both in terms of budget and logistics, and would end up hurting plankton and other marine life in the process. Not to mention the areas of cleanup are colossally huge – as in the size of a continent and 100 feet deep. So better they say to try to manage the plastic on land. After all, that’s where 80% of it comes from, with the rest from commercial and private ships, oil platforms, fishing equipment, and spilled shipping containers.
Recycling at least helps, and even unsorted waste apparently can be turned into synthetic ‘lumber’. So options exist. But no matter what we try to do with the plastic that’s already here, more and more new plastic is being created every day – 300 million tons of the exceedingly durable material are produced each year worldwide. Plastic has some indisputable benefits and wonderful uses, but not all of them are really thought through it seems. Just because we can make something out of plastic, do we need to every time?
Let’s send the message to manufacturers and legislators that we don’t want or need all this wasteful waste. Do we really need items packaged in that annoyingly tough to open molded plastic? Or one-time use water bottles? And what about all those little pieces of plastic that add up when it’s billions of users each using a few? What about feminine hygiene applicators, Teflon coated dental floss, plastic bags, bread bag plastic fasteners, or all those cotton swabs made with plastic PVC sticks? Plastic where plastic alternatives already exist is all around us, so much so sometimes, we don’t even see it.
As Rolf Halden (associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University and assistant director of Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute) said, “Today, there’s a complete mismatch between the useful lifespan of the products we consume and their persistence in the environment.” A few seconds of use for some pieces of plastic, and then waste for millennia.
And as David de Rothschild said, “If we can shift a common perception of plastic from waste to a valuable resource, we can slow and, in some places even reverse, the alarming environmental damage occurring around the planet. Meeting this challenge doesn’t even need to be a chore. It can be an adventure, an honest-to-goodness, swashbuckling adventure. The kind that gets you out of your car, your office, or your bed and into nature, so you understand exactly, even viscerally, what it is you’re trying to save.”
Let’s make it an adventure, instead of being a pirate looking for treasure, let’s treasure the treasure we already have, before we lose it.
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He also brought a display of some of the plastic items removed from albatross chicks. A different view from the slideshow posted yesterday showing the plastic objects in the decomposing guts of the chicks. I don’t know which was more overwhelming.
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Charles Moore also explains the plastic problem and solutions in more detail in the following 3 minute video.
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Synthetic Sea – Plastic in the open Ocean is another video from the Algae Marine Research Foundation showing the exploration and results found in the North Pacific Gyre about 10 years ago. It’s not the greatest quality video, pixilated and a bit jerky in motion, but the information contained throughout these 9 minutes sure is greatly informative.
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