Are you posting about the environment, AGAIN?

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic this year is climate change.

Yesterday, Barbara posted about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The wikipedia description:

"The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean...estimated to be twice the size of Texas."

Wow, I was thinking, that is huge, why haven't I seen pictures of that? I imagined a vast floating patch of trash similar to pictures like this one from a river in Morgantown, West Virginia:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidg/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

It turns out I would have know that if I had read the Wikipedia entry closely:

"Despite its size and density, the patch is not visible from satellite photography because it consists of very, very small pieces, almost invisible to the naked eye [2] and most of its contents are suspended beneath the surface of the ocean."

I was expecting visually compelling swathes of trash floating on the ocean surface. What a documentary crew (part 1, part 2, and part 3) found after trawling through the area is that the water is a plastic soup, with lots of small particles floating around.




Here is a good overview of the situation from Good Morning America:



Some important points:

- some samples show six times more plastic than plankton
- small fish and birds are eating small plastic bits ("As the plastic flotsam photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces, it concentrates in the upper water column. As it disintegrates, the plastic ultimately becomes small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms which reside near the ocean's surface. Plastic waste thus enters the food chain through its intense concentration in the neuston."-from Wikipedia)
- so far there is no good solution for cleaning it up - the best we can do is to stop dumping plastic in the ocean
- less than 5% of all plastic is recycled globally.

Here is the point I am taking away from reading about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The world needs to stop using plastic. No big deal, right?

Jeez, the thought of it is incredibly overwhelming. So many of the things I buy come in plastic containers. I mean, you know - toothpaste, for instance. How do you get that stuff to your house if it is not in a plastic tube? In the olden days they did it somehow... right?

Also, have you been to a hospital recently? Every single thing they use is a single use disposable thing made of or wrapped in plastic. And when I am in the hospital that is probably how I want it to be, but imagine how much waste that must generate.

So how do we do it? I am going to redouble my own efforts to avoid plastic. Here are some things I have done so far:

- I have reusable shopping bags that I carry in my bag and use at the grocery store, hardware store etc.

- I do not use plastic wrap or foil (though there is some in my house that my boyfriend bought when I was away). For food storage I save glass jars and have reusable plastic containers which I will replace with glass when they are no longer functional. For pan liners I use silicone mats or grease the pan well and hope.

- we get our drinking water in the refillable 5 gallon jugs so that we do not buy bottled water. I do dearly love fizzy water and have been trying to avoid buying it. I am thinking of getting a fizzy water maker.

- I avoid all single use products, like plastic forks and plates, disposable razors, pre-moistened wipes, etc.

Now I have to figure out ways to reduce my plastic usage even more. I think my challenge for myself will be to avoid buying anything that is packaged in plastic for one month, to see how difficult it is and to figure out what some replacements are.

I'd love to hear thoughts on this from anyone reading this.

If you are interested in learning more about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography recently sent an expedition called Seaplex to study it. They have a bunch of photos here, you can follow them on Twitter here and their site has some great videos.