In Israel, Sharon Barak has made a new plastic alternative that looks like plastic and functions like plastic, but is not plastic at all, even though it looks and feels like plastic. I will biodegrade in nature and dissolves within minutes in water. You can even drink the water afterwards. Development is in the early stages.
See more at https://www.solutum.co/
It only took a few months for a young environmental scientist from the Bahamas to create a youth movement to ban single-use plastics in her country.
At age 22, on an expedition in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Kristal Ambrose witnessed a horror she couldn’t unsee: a vast patch of garbage, made up mostly of plastics.
She was onboard the ship of the 5 Gyres Institute, a Los Angles-based nonprofit that studies gyres, ocean currents that trap marine debris. What she saw inspired her to take on the problem of plastic pollution back in her home country of the Bahamas.
She was in Seattle recently to address the regional office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about her group’s work. She sat down with Fran Korten to talk about how she took on plastic pollution in the islands.
Korten: You have mounted a successful campaign to reduce plastics in the Bahamas. What inspired you to do that?
Ambrose: In 2008, when I was 18, I was working at an aquarium in the Bahamas. We had a sea turtle that had some internal blockage. For two and a half days we had to go inside the rectum of the sea turtle. We pulled out one piece of plastic after another. My role was to hold down her front flippers. Now, sea turtles have salt glands to protect their eyes from the sand, so it looks as if they’re crying. So while I’m holding down her fins, she’s crying and I’m crying. I’m saying to myself, “I’ll never drop a piece of plastic on the ground again.”
Kristal Ambrose, founder of Bahamas Plastic Movement. Photo by Elyse Butler.
Then in 2012 I met Dr. Marcus Eriksen, who cofounded the 5 Gyres Institute, which studies the huge circulating ocean currents that trap marine debris. He was mounting an expedition that would sail from the Marshall Islands all the way to Japan to study the Western garbage patch. I wanted to go.
So I raised money to get to the Marshall Islands and back home from Japan. I lived on the boat for 20 days with all these strangers who were trying to understand the problem of plastic. We were out there where there were no landmasses, just us, wildlife, and the garbage. We pulled this huge discarded net onto the boat. There were all these different types of plastic. As we looked through the waste I realized that everything there were things that I was using at home—plastic bags, Styrofoam, plastic cutlery, straws. I realized I was the biggest offender that I knew.
“Recycling is not the most viable option for plastic. Not all plastic can be recycled.”
Korten: How did you deal with the realization that you were part of the problem?
Ambrose: Once I got back from the trip, I started doing research. I wanted to see how plastic was moving around the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, where I lived. How much was out there? What size was it? Where was it coming from? In the spring of 2013, I started taking my students with me to collect data on the beach. I would jokingly say, “This is the Bahamas plastic movement.” Then in November I realized I wanted to start a nonprofit and call it the Bahamas Plastic Movement.
I started a summer camp for Bahamian youth focused on plastic pollution. The camp is really about engaging young people in environmental education and helping them understand that they have the power to make a difference. They do surveys of the plastics on the beach and go out in boats where they see how much microplastics are on the sea surface. They dissect the stomach of mahi-mahi, a popular fish that we eat in the Bahamas. They’re finding plastic in the stomachs. They’re making the connection between how their lifestyle on land impacts animals in the sea—especially animals that they like to eat.
Kristal Ambrose identifying plastic debris during a beach survey. Photo from Bahamas Plastic Movement.
Campers investigate plastic ingestion in the stomachs of mahi-mahi fish. Photo from Bahamas Plastic Movement.
Korten: In addition to the surveys, what actions did the students take?
Ambrose: One was the project where they went to different restaurants and got them to commit to only giving straws out upon request. And we’ve been pushing the message of refusing to use. We changed the “three R’s” to the “five R’s”—refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, recycle. You ask anyone on the street, “What’s one thing you can do to go green?” The first thing they’ll say is recycle. But recycling is not the most viable option for plastic. Not all plastic can be recycled. And in the Bahamas we don’t have the capacity for recycling.
Korten: Tell me about your efforts to change government policy.
Ambrose: The theme of our 2017 summer camp was gearing the Bahamas to ban single-use plastic bags. The students made a video that named the government ministers that the students thought needed to hear this message. So they said: “Minister of environment and housing: The fish are eating the polluted toxic plastic and we’re eating that, too. We need your help. Minister of education: People in the country need to know about this issue. We need your help. Prime minister of the Bahamas: This is happening all around our country. We need your help.”
“That’s my role, making sure this is effective and that people are engaged and they have viable options.”
Then we put on a three-day youth activism workshop focused on how we were going to get the Ministry of Environment and Housing and the prime minister to agree to ban single-use plastic bags. We wanted something easy that would be a springboard so that the government could later add on other single-use plastic items. We had a social scientist talk to the students about how to get attitude and perception measurements of the public. We learned a lot of people were receptive but they just wanted something that was affordable and practical. With the help of a lawyer, the students created a bill for a single-use plastic bag ban.
Korten: What happened with your draft bill?
Ambrose: On Jan.3, 2018, we got a meeting with the minister of environment and housing. I had my idea of what the presentation should be like, but the students said, “That’s boring. We need to sing a song to really get his attention.” So we went in beating on the desk and singing, “We are the change, we are the solution, we can fix this plastic pollution.”
We talked about the environmental implications and the economic impacts of plastic on shorelines, especially with tourism being our number-one industry. And the minister was onboard. And then he said, “You guys just want to ban plastic bags? Why not all single-use plastic?” So we were like, “OK! We were trying to make this easy for you. But, yes, let’s do it.”
Campers remove scores of plastic from a Bahamian beach. Photos from Bahamas Plastic Movement.
Korten: Did you ask the minister for anything else?
Ambrose: We gave him three things to do. We said by the end of March, we need you to run this proposed law in the Parliament. Second, we need the Bahamas to sign on to the United Nations Clean Seas initiative, which gets countries to commit to reducing their plastic output. And third, we want a partnership between the Bahamas Plastic Movement and the Ministry of Environment and Housing to do public education on plastic impacts around the country. On Earth Day 2018, the minister made the announcement to the whole country that the Bahamas would ban single-use plastics and join the U.N. Clean Seas initiative.
Korten: That’s a huge success. And amazingly fast. So what’s next for you?
Ambrose: My job as an activist now is to hold them accountable. They made this commitment, which is great. And they’re going to have to see it through. And that’s my role, making sure this is effective and that people are engaged and they have viable options.
Featured image: Eighty percent of the Bahamas Plastic Movement summer leadership team consists of youth ages 14 to 16. Photo from Bahamas Plastic Movement.
Fran Korten, Yes Magazine,
March 2019
Darrell Blatchley received a call from the Philippines Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources early Friday morning reporting that it had a young Cuvier’s beaked whale that was weak and vomiting blood. Within a few hours it was dead.
Blatchley, a marine biologist and environmentalist based in the Philippines city of Davao, gathered his team to drive two hours to where the whale had washed up. When the necropsy was performed, Blatchley told NPR, he was not prepared for the amount of plastic they found in the whale’s stomach.
“It was full of plastic — nothing but nonstop plastic,” he said. “It was compact to the point that its stomach was literally as hard as a baseball. That means that this animal has been suffering not for days or weeks but for months or even a year or more,” Blatchley added.
He noted that among the 88 pounds of plastic were 16 rice sacks — similar to potato sacks — and plastic bags from local Philippine grocery chains, Gaisano Capital and Gaisano grocery outlet.
Blatchley is the founder and owner of the D’ Bone Collector Museum, a natural history museum in Davao. In the coming days, the museum will post a list of all the items found in the whale’s system, the museum said in a post on its Facebook page. Blatchley and his team work with the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and other organizations to assist in rescue and recovery of marine animals.
“Within the last 10 years, we have recovered 61 whales and dolphins just within the Davao Gulf,” he said. “Of them, 57 have died due to man — whether they ingested plastic or fishing nets or other waste, or gotten caught in pollution — and four were pregnant.” In 2019 alone, Blatchley said, he and his team have found three whales or dolphins with plastic waste in their systems.
The Philippines has been deemed one of the “world’s leading plastic polluters.” According to the U.N. Environment Programme, some 9 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year. According to a 2017 study from the environmental group Ocean Conservancy, more than half of that waste comes from just five countries in East and Southeast Asia — China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The study found that more than half a million metric tons of plastic waste from the Philippines makes it into the ocean each year.
Blatchley said he hoped that the latest incident with the Cuvier’s beaked whale would launch the issue of plastic pollution in the Philippines, and across the globe, to the forefront. “If we keep going this way, it will be more uncommon to see an animal die of natural causes than it is to see an animal die of plastic,” he said.
Featured image: Darrell Blatchley, environmentalist and director of D’ Bone Collector Museum, shows plastic waste found in the stomach of a Cuvier’s beaked whale near the Philippine city of Davao. AFP/Getty Images
By Dalia Mortada, National Public Radio,
March 18, 2019
SEE ALSO: Dead whale found with stomach full of plastic: 115 cups, 2 flip-flops and much, much more
The deadliest ocean garbage for seabirds is balloons, not plastic straws.
In a recent survey of over 1,700 dead seabirds, more than a quarter of the deaths were linked to eating plastic. Four in 10 of those deaths were caused by soft debris such as balloons (which are often made of plastic), even though it made up only 5 percent of the inedible trash in the birds’ stomachs.
Seabirds frequently snap up floating litter because it looks like food; once swallowed, it can obstruct birds’ guts and cause them to starve to death. If a seabird swallows a balloon, it’s 32 times more likely to die than if it had gulped down a piece of hard plastic, researchers reported in a new study.
“Among the birds we studied, the leading cause of death was blockage of the gastrointestinal tract, followed by infections or other complications caused by gastrointestinal obstructions,” lead study author Lauren Roman, a doctoral candidate with the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia, said in a statement.
With an estimated 280,000 tons (250,000 tonnes) of floating marine debris worldwide, about half of all seabird species are thought to ingest plastic on a daily basis, the study authors reported. Birds are especially likely to swallow dangerous balloons because they closely resemble squid, according to the study.
The findings were published online March 1 in the journal Scientific Reports.
Black Albatross entangled in party balloons and string
Featured image: Gannet entangled in balloon and string
By
As reported in another study, 90% of seabirds now have plastic in their stomachs. Unless we drastically reduce the flow of plastic entering the ocean, by 2050, 99% of seabirds will have plastic in them.
The ‘Seabin’ can hold up to 20 kg of ocean debris and the Australian city of Perth is using this device to clean its harbour.
This is an example of a good plastic collector – collecting plastic debris at the source and not upsetting the ecosystem out in the deep ocean.
SEE ALSO: https://oceanchampions.ca/wasteshark-collects-marine-debris-enters-ocean/