Month: July 2017

michelle.mech@gmail.com

A Mission to the Pacific Plastic Patch in the South Pacific Gyre

Capt. Charles Moore, a mariner who has spent years travelling “hundreds of thousands of nautical miles” to measure the impact of plastic waste in the ocean has estimated that a “raft” of plastic debris spanning more than 965,000 square miles (2.5m sq km) is concentrated in a region of the South Pacific.  He was part of the team which discovered the first ocean “garbage patch” in the North Pacific gyre in 1997 and has now turned his attention to the South Pacific gyre.

Moore has just returned from a sampling expedition around Easter Island and Robinson Crusoe Island.

  Capt. Charles Moore has been researching the ocean for plastic since 1997. Source: ALGALITA

Although plastic is known to occur in the Southern Hemisphere gyres, very few scientists have visited the region to collect samples.

Oceanographer Dr Erik van Sebille, from Utrecht University, says the work of Capt Moore and his colleagues will help fill “a massive knowledge gap” in our understanding of ocean plastics.

“Any data we can get our hands on is good data at this point,” he told BBC News.

Capt Moore explained that the space occupied by sub-tropical gyres – areas of the ocean surrounded by circulating ocean currents – is approximately the same size as the entire land mass of the Earth, but they are now being “populated by our trash”.

… “It’s hard not to find plastic in the ocean any more,” Dr van Sebille said. “That’s quite shocking”.

  Our plastic rubbish has floated to islands that are thousands of miles from the nearest human population. Source: SPL

Capt Moore is the founder of Algalita Marine Research, a non-profit organisation aiming to combat the “plastic plague” of garbage floating in the world’s oceans.

For more than 30 years, he has transported scientists to the centre of remote debris patches aboard his research ship, Alguita.

Dragging nets behind the vessel, the crew sieves particles of plastic from the ocean, which are then counted and fed into estimates of global microplastic distribution.

Although scientists agree that plastic pollution is a widespread problem, the exact distribution of these rafts of ocean garbage is still unclear.

“If we don’t understand where the plastic is, then we don’t really understand what harm it does and we can’t really work on solving the problem,” said Dr van Sebille.

Eating rubbish

Capt Moore and his crew hope to address this lack of data through their research trips.

On this latest voyage, Capt Moore and his colleagues are also investigating how plastic in the South Pacific Ocean may be threatening the survival of fish.

Lanternfish, that live in the deep ocean, are an important part of the diet of whales, squid and king penguins and the Algalita team says that plastic ingestion by lanternfish could have a domino effect on the rest of the food chain.

Little lantern fish are smaller than your finger and live so deep that very few people have ever seen one alive.  Every night, all around the world, this false bottom of fish rises up just a bit from the depths of the sea, eats heaps of carbon-rich plankton, and then drops back down again and poops carbon.  In a world in which carbon emissions have become an enormous ecological threat, and in an era when great minds are searching for ways to achieve carbon sequestration to remove it from the atmosphere, it is amazing to consider that these tiny lantern fish sink far more carbon than all of the world’s forests combined.
 

… Christiana Boerger, a marine biologist in the US Navy, has seen the impact of oceanic garbage patches first hand, aboard the Alugita and she says that some fish species “have more man-made plastic in their stomach than their natural food”.

… Capt Moore says the South Pacific Gyre garbage patch is different from those in the Northern Hemisphere, because most of the litter appears to have come from the fishing industry.

Elsewhere, scientists are shifting their attention away from remote mid-ocean garbage patches to locations closer to home.

“If you think about plastic in terms of its impact, where does it harm marine life?” Dr van Sebille posed.

“Near coastlines is where biology suffers. It’s also where the economy suffers the most.” …

FEATURED IMAGE:  South Pacific garbage patch – Most of the plastic is made up of tiny pieces floating at the surface.  Source: ALGALITA

 

READ FULL ARTICLE AND WATCH VIDEO AT:

A mission to the Pacific plastic patch

By Dr Charlotte Brassey, Science writer, BBC News
July 16, 2017

 

michelle.mech@gmail.com

Plastic drinking straws may be the most unnecessary plastic product we use

Of all the plastic products we use and take for granted, plastic drinking straws are among the most unnecessary. Designed to be used once and discarded, their only real purpose is to keep your mouth from touching a glass or ice. It made more sense in the days when contaminated vessels were more of an issue.

Now, there’s a movement to get people and businesses to ditch the straws. It may not seem like a big deal, but it is. In the U.S. alone, people discard 500 million straws every day, or more than 180 billion a year. That’s about 1.4 million kilograms of plastic sent to landfills and into the oceans every day!

Drinking straws have a long history and weren’t always a big problem. The first ones were made from straw, or any strawlike grass or plant. That changed in the 1880s when Washington, D.C., resident Marvin Stone was drinking a mint julep through a rye grass stalk. He didn’t like the residue it left in his drink, and so he wrapped paper around a pencil, removed the pencil, glued the paper together and a straw was born! In 1888, Stone patented a version made from manila paper coated with paraffin.

… The explosion of plastic’s popularity in the 1960s and into the ’70s spelled the demise of the paper straw. After that, most drinking straw innovations were as much about marketing as function — including the twisty Krazy Straw and the wide straw-and-spoon combo used to drink slushy drinks.

Plastic straws are now ubiquitous. Whether you’re ordering a takeout drink, cold coffee beverage, bar cocktail or glass of water in a restaurant, you’ll likely get a plastic straw unless you request your drink without it. And you should. As a Treehugger article notes, they don’t biodegrade, they’re difficult to recycle, they leach toxic chemicals into the ground and they can end up in oceans. Often, they’re incinerated, which puts toxins into the air.

Numerous campaigns have sprung up to get people to forgo drinking straws — or at least to use less environmentally damaging alternatives. Some restaurants have stopped automatically putting them in drinks, and others are using compostable straws, but most still offer plastic. International spirits company Bacardi has joined with the Surfrider Foundation for a “no-straw movement” as part of its Good Spirited: Building a Sustainable Future program. Surfrider, which has led campaigns against plastic bags, discarded cigarette butts and other ocean threats, has a “Straws Suck” campaign that encourages businesses to get rid of straws. In doing so, bars, restaurants and stores can save money as well as reduce environmental impacts.

As for alternatives, several companies sell re-usable and biodegradable straws made from metal, glass, bamboo, straw or paper. Some come with cleaning brushes. One company is even making straws from pasta, which can be cooked later!

… Avoiding plastic straws won’t save the oceans or the world on its own, but as we’ve seen with plastic bags and public smoking, when people start thinking about their habits and making small changes, they can bring about shifts in consciousness that lead to wider societal changes. Ordering your drinks without straws is a small sacrifice but a big step to reducing the amount of plastic we produce and waste. Giving up disposable drink bottles, plastic grocery bags and other unnecessary plastic items, and encouraging businesses to offer alternatives, will also help.

David Suzuki ~ Plastic Straws Suck

David Suzuki ~ Plastic Straws Suck

michelle.mech@gmail.com

Why aren’t the bottles Coca-cola uses 100% recycled?

If you care so much, Coca-cola, why aren’t your bottles 100% recycled?

Coca-Cola sells more than 100bn single-use plastic bottles a year – that’s more than 3,000 every second. Its plans to increase recycled plastic in its bottles to 50% are startlingly unambitious.

Coca-Cola’s grand announcement on plastic packaging is a lot of PR fizz. But when you look at the detail, it’s all a bit flat.

The news that the company is to increase the amount of recycled plastic in its bottles to 50% shows a startling lack of ambition from the soft-drinks giant to tackle one of the greatest environmental challenges facing us: the plastic pollution choking our oceans.

Turns out when Coca-Cola’s distinctive bottles turn up on beaches, and contribute to the rubbish truck of plastic (pdf) entering the ocean every minute, that isn’t so good for brand image.

The soft drinks giant has come under attack for its meagre recycled content and failure to move away from single-use packaging that is devastating marine life.

This new plan is no game changer. Limited to operations in the UK, Coca-Cola’s plans amount to increasing its existing target for recycled content by a mere 10%, launching yet another public awareness campaign to keep the focus on litterers, and trialling what appears will be little more than a promotional scheme for buying more Coca-Cola bottles.

The company’s plans, which it says it will reveal later this year, may feature a money-off voucher scheme to reward customers returning small Coca-Cola bottles to shops. This would be a cheap gimmick to try and move the story on from Coca-Cola’s major U-turn on deposit return schemes after Greenpeace revealed the company had been lobbying against these in Holyrood, Westminster and Brussels. If the vouchers can be redeemed on yet more plastic Coca-Cola bottles, this will only boost the already staggering global plastic bottle sales of a million a minute.

[One thing that doesn’t seem to get discussed are the plastic bottle labels, which readily come off and end up littered on beaches.]

It’s also worth pointing out that Coca-Cola’s mildly higher goal to source 50% recycled content should be taken with a pinch of salt given the company’s history of failing to keep its promises. Coca-Cola got less than half way to meeting its global 2015 target to source 25% of its plastic bottles from recycled or “renewable” material, for example plant-based plastics. Globally the company reached a pitiful 7% recycled material.

Even putting these doubts aside, is reaching 50% recycled content in three years’ time significant? The truth is that 100% recycled bottles are feasible and have been rolled out for a number of soft drinks products over the past decade. In 2007, for example, Suntory’s Ribena became the first major UK soft drink brand to use 100% recycled plastic. Coca-Cola, the world’s biggest soft drinks company, is lagging far behind.

Featured image:  Coke bottles found by Greenpeace volunteers on a beach in Mull.

READ FULL ARTICLE AT:  If you care so much, Coke, why aren’t your bottles 100% recycled?

By John Sauven, Guardian Sustainable Business

July 13, 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/13/coca-cola-plastics-pollution-oceans-bottles-packaging-recycling-pr-fizz-greenpeace-john-sauven?CMP=share_btn_fb