Some months ago I wrote about Trashlantis - the emerging kingdom of plastic, but drew no comments, while the subject is not one that pops up much in the mainstream media.
But while checking the WordPress Tag Finder today, I was amazed to find someone else outside the oceanographic community has found Trashlantis and considered the implications.
The new One Eye Open blog asks:
“When do we start getting active and try out the options that are already available but not chosen?”
It goes on to say: “I’m not pointing any fingers. You all know just how lazy I am, so I’m as guilty as every one else. I’m just not sure where or how to begin.”
Well, I’d answer by saying that identifying the problem is a start and making it known to other people is a good next step.
After that, it’s time to start curbing plastic use, both individually and collectively, as well as time to start cleaning up all the plastic that’s out there.
Of course, that assumes that more than a handful of people even care about the problem in the first place.
There is more than a handful that care, isn’t there?
While I haven’t blogged on “Trashlantis”, I have watched a docu on it which The Community Channel repeats on a regular basis. If I see it in the schedules soon then I’ll let you know.
Someone who has blogged about it though is La Marguerite, firstly as a guest post at Environmental Graffiti and then on her own blog.
Thanks for those links.
And here’s a plastic bag thread on Selfsufficientish. Remember, a plastic bag for life is still a plastic bag and will still find its way into the rubbish at the end of its life.
If you’re in the UK and looking for a sturdy, canvas shopping bag free of marketing slogans, Best in the Country have the Quadra QD23 Canvas Shopper in 14oz cotton canvas, with carry/shoulder straps and a capacity of 19 litres. Price is £4.11 including VAT. You can find quite a few cheaper bags using Google, but they almost always market something and I prefer not to carry an advertising slogan around with me.
I had no idea how bad things have become. We live in a world that is truly insulated and blind. I just hope it’s not too late.
My voluminous handbag contains about half a dozen cloth bags… some given in Europe as souvenirs. They fold up very small but carry all I need.
The reactions when I refuse a plastic bag can be mixed to say the least! At the library, I was recently applauded for being well prepared, in other shops, people ask ‘Why’…. which gives me an excellent opportunity to get out my soap box (metaphorical, not plastic!)
For many years now i have objected to being party to free advertising, and must have been among the first always to turn early plastic bags inside out to annoy shopkeepers…. and that was before we realised we were building a plastic mountain
I have not worked out why plastic bags are such a big villan ? when if you look on any beach its the little bits that are the problem from plastic straws to polypropelyne rope, bottle tops. and a miriad of asst disposable products . The smaller the piece the potential for more damage to increasingly smaller wild life and the greater the difficulty in removing it .
All plastics are a problem.
As I described in my earlier post on Trashlantis, photo-degradation, wave action and abrasion serve to break larger items of plastic down into every smaller pieces until they form nurdles. Nurdles are the pieces that carry toxins into the food chain.
But nurdles aren’t the only plastics doing damage to the environment.
Between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags are produced globally each year. Millions and millions of those end up not in landfills, but scattered throughout the environment. In Australia, the Government estimated that of the 3.92 billion plastic bags consumed in 2005, between 50 and 80 million ended up as litter.
Plastic bags become entangled around wildlife, from birds to fish to mammals; animals eat things like plastic lids, pen tops, pieces of Lego etc and then die; nylon fishing line gets tangled around wildlife, and so on. It’s been estimated that more than one million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic.
It all has an effect.
So, when someone asks how they can make a difference, it’s much easier to get them started by pointing them in the direction of a small step than to tell them to cut all plastics now.
People on Selfsufficientish were discussing plastic carrier bags in the context of whether to choose a plastic bag for life instead. My response is that if you want to replace plastic carrier bags, it would be better not to replace them with another plastic product but with something made of natural fibres that decompose when the fabric finally reaches the end of its useful life.
Plastic bags are one of many villians, along with all the other discarded plastic detritus, but the biggest villain is humanity. Unfortunately, many people aren’t prepared to see the truth and don’t want to see their plastic bags full of goodies as being part of the problem.
When we were sailing, we dreaded seeing plastic bags floating in the water as we approached a port, lest they might get wrapped around our propeller. There is an expression in the Med. : ‘Navigation by plastic bag’, meaning that as you approach a port, you can identify the town by the writing on the plastic bags thrown / blown into the water
However, I have to admit that we hoisted them out of the water, and used them to empty the waste-bin and hang from the taff rail to keep the pong down in warmer climes…. and no doubt eventually contributed to the local landfill at the same time.!
I agree with you about it being ALL plastics that are the problem. In fact, I blogged about the danger to wildlife last June :
http://gowen.org/think-whilst-you-drink
We have seen so many examples of birds and animals hurt and/or killed by plastic; be it fishing line, the ubiquitous bag, polyprop rope (which does indeed break into tiny and very sharp pieces), or those horrid plastic holders of four or six packs.
I see alot more of the worlds wet bits then most folk due to my job as an engineer on ships. we have big strainers that we use to stop stuff getting to our pumps etc.
Now the most common thing we remove from these strainers is plastic normally in sheet forms so there is plastic out there but i don’t think it is quite as bad as these reports make it out to be.
Many would say that ships are a huge source of pollution but when you get away from land there is alot less stuff floating around on the surface. Also it is far worse in areas like asia etc then it is in waters nearer europe. But the worst by a long margin is the Singapore straights as that is filthy
I agree with thinfourth about larger plastic sheets.
Much of the vegetable produce sold cheaply in Europe (including the UK) comes from the Almerimar region of southern Spain where much of the countryside is covered by enormous plastic greenhouses so that a constant turnover of crops is achieved. We lived in the marina there for nine months and dubbed it ‘Plastic City’
During the gales that often blew there during the winter, huge pieces of greenhouse would find themselves wallowing at sea. We spent hours helping to save a catamaran which was almost sunk by one.
Oh, and BTW, The amount of pesticides used to grow things under the plastic defies belief !
I loved reading about the use of natural materials in The Brendan Voyage book by Time Severin. He built a leathger-covered boat and sailed from Ireland, across to America. Instead of using modern thermal coats, he found that furs worked much better (he gets a lot more specific about what fur, and fastenings, and why they’re better than plastics in the book). He wasable to repair the boat whilst at sea because of the materials they used. They did use some plastic, don’t get me wrong, maily to wrap up the electronic equipment they took, but the book was an eye-opener for me when I used to think that plastic was the answer to all our needs.