Continent Sized Trash in the Ocean

[Racoon]

Out of sight, out of mind, eh??

 

Not really anymore. Nor has it been a secret for a long time for that matter...

 

Theres a continent sized drift of plastic trash and debris that chokes off marine life between San Fransico and Hawaii! :shrug::eek:

 

You hear words like 7 BILLION pounds of plastic trash per year! :eek2:

 

Read:

Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean

 

and watch the video

YouTube - Toxic: Garbage Island - Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-CVRFzLoEY

[Racoon]

Hopefully I don't get another f*ing copyright infringement infraction on this Thread from the admins. :shrug:

[palmtreepathos]

This makes one ashamed of being human... I wish I could never use another piece of plastic after seeing these video clips, I am pretty far off the norm now but can still see an ocean size room for improvement ... And this is just one type of pollution!

YouTube - Oceans becoming a garbage patch

 

Rev 11:18 "the appointed time...to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

[Moontanman]

This a very terrible thing, one of the things I have been trying to point out is the inevitability of humans trashing the planet no matter how hard we try, there are just too many of us. It is very difficult not to use plastic in our everyday lives. Even something as simple as not using plastic bags and using reusable bags is really not possible for most people. In my area and many others going to the grocery store is a at the least a weekly event for many it is a monthly event. Can you imagine carrying two dozen cloth bags with you when you go shopping? I usually try to use paper bags which are not made from virgin timber as some would have you believe but made from trees grown in tree farms just to be made into paper, New trees replace the ones harvested. But paper bags are also not wanted by the people who seem to know it all. so plastic is what we ended up with instead of those terrible paper bags! Try to go to the grocery store and not buy things packaged in plastic. If you have limited funds it is almost impossible. We seem to shot ourselves in the foot in many ways, changing from glass to plastic or from paper to plastic is just two ways we have insisted on better packaging and ended up with pollution!

[Ganoderma]

Can you imagine carrying two dozen cloth bags with you when you go shopping?

 

why not? its not that much heavier than 2 dozen plastic ones....and all we need to do is carry the cloth bags from our car to the buggy.....life aint that hard if we use cloth. luckily where i live tehre are fresh vegetables and food, and almost everything right here....so i walk to get most things and use no bags. for me the thing thats hard to avoid is buying prepacked stuff.....buy some cd's....they got that round case thing....buy food its wrapped in plastic (at grocery stores anyway). its not easy, at first, to avoid but i do think it is easier than most of us think.

[Moontanman]

why not? its not that much heavier than 2 dozen plastic ones....and all we need to do is carry the cloth bags from our car to the buggy.....life aint that hard if we use cloth. luckily where i live tehre are fresh vegetables and food, and almost everything right here....so i walk to get most things and use no bags. for me the thing thats hard to avoid is buying prepacked stuff.....buy some cd's....they got that round case thing....buy food its wrapped in plastic (at grocery stores anyway). its not easy, at first, to avoid but i do think it is easier than most of us think.

 

Well for one thing cloth bags would be several hundred times as heavy as plastic bags, require more energy to make and keep clean and take up at least a 1/4 of the grocery cart. Not to mention be expensive to buy, paper bags are much better solution, biodegradable and less of an impact on the environment. I do ask for paper when the store provides it but the only stores in my area that do are significantly more expensive than the stores that offer only plastic. Some stores do offer to recycle plastic bags, that is a viable alternative. I use my plastic grocery bags as trash bags and for other things to insure I get as much use out of them as possible. That way I don't have to buy as much or in some cases no plastic trash bags. As for Food not in packages, fresh food is the gold standard unfortunately I don't have the gold to buy much of it. I do try to avoid as much processed food as possible but again the fresher it is the more expensive it is. We have done much of this to ourselves by insisting on alternatives to breakable glass and paper bags. Watch out what you ask for you just might get it!

[DougF]

this is truly a very bad situation and I no longer accept plastic bads from any store, but the more I want to get away from plastic the more I find it at every corner,

Yes plastic is good it protects the food we eat so what can we do? maybe tis could be the answer.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months' date=' he figures.

 

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

 

Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life. [/quote']

 

 

TheRecord.com - CanadaWorld - WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags

 

We can only hope that someone have found a way to clean up our mess!

[Jay-qu]

For anyone that wants to see the rest of that series: TOXIC  - GARBAGE ISLAND - Part 2 of 12 - VBS.TV

 

Amazing, a real eye-opener! Its also very sad to watch, knowing there is nothing we can really do about the present state, all we can do is stop polluting starting now.. but even that is an incredibly tall order!

[Ganoderma]

buying local will help as well. when i was in canada (and when i travelled around in the US) i found that MANY foods are imports. especially in canada....its cold and things grow poorly in comparison. Many plant foods are from california where i come from (western canada). which means lots of packaging!

 

here in taiwan (which is far worse at packaging than anywhere in canada as far as being wasteful goes!) you can always buy local. meat, vegetables, fruit etc. when it comes to food its always available, often grower direct! the corner of my street has a fruit vendor, and a fresh fish vendor (often alive). afternoons the vegetable vendors come out along with some chicken and pork....thats just my tiny 100 meter street!

 

i know its not like this in many places, but even back home in canada there were farmers markets, local produce available etc. the more local the less energy used.

 

as for bags. i realise that per bag cloth uses much more resources and weighs more...but is reusable. my mother brought a stack of hemp "green bags" when she first visited us here. i ahve been using them for 3 years now and they are great....i wonder how many plastic bags that has saved? sometimes a little more upfront saves a lot in the long run.