SOURCES & RESOURCES

Hi folks- welcome to my blog. It's less bloggy than most, it's more of a tool for looking up information on PLASTICS, especially as related to marine debris. Plastics have become a big problem for the planet because there is SO MUCH of it and it doesn't go away... ever. Over time it gets brittle and breaks apart into smaller and smaller pieces, but the strong synthetic plastic polymers continue to exist. The oceans are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon because the cold water and lack of bacteria make it even more difficult for breakdown to occur.
Maybe by now you have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area roughly 2 times the size of Texas in the middle of the N Pacific Subtropical Gyre which is becoming a plastic soup. It's a sad state of affairs, but fixable in that all we have to do, I mean ALLLLLL of us, is be more sensible in our habits and consumer choices. Bring Your Own Bags to the grocery store; Bring Your Own Mug to the cafe; choose less packaged products when possible. It's doable, for a worthwhile cause...
Poke around below to find out more.

Nurdles (pre-production plastic pellets)

Nurdles (pre-production plastic pellets)
Manufacturers need to be responsible for cleaning up their own spills

Thursday, March 27, 2008

It's an Affair

More and more data is coming out about this whole sordid plastics affair. Indeed, it IS an affair we're having with plastics- we love it more than we know, use it more than we care to admit, and throw it out the minute we're done with it, and hardly look back before we go on to the next piece. Check this out about plastics' absorption of pollutants in the oceans. Pollutants that last lifetimes are floating around too, we just can't see them. As soon as they find a little piece of something to hold onto, they do, and boy do they do. The link is a BBC article, the Brits are on it too.

1 comment:

Douglas Lober said...

Check out this info graphic regarding plastic bag consumption in the USA and the World!

http://www.reusethisbag.com/reusable-bag-infographics/plastic-bag-bans-world.asp

Thanks!
Doug
http://reusethisbag.com