How Plastics are Choking our Seas - Ecology notes by Capt Paul Watson

[Annces]

The Plastic Sea

On the beach on San Juan Island, Washington, Allison Lance walks her dogs every morning. She carries a plastic bag in her hand to carry the bits and pieces of plastic debris she picks up. Each morning she fills the bag, but by the next morning there is always another bag to be filled. Joey Racano does the same in Huntington Beach further south in California. The harvest of plastic waste is never-ending. Allison's and Joey's beaches and practically every beach around the world are similarly cursed.

Not so long ago in the Galapagos I retrieved plastic motor oil bottles and garbage bags from a remote beach on the island of Santa Cruz. Every year during crossings of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, spotting plastic is a daily and regular occurrence.

The United Nations Environmental Program report estimates that there is an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the surface of every square mile of ocean. We live in a plastic convenience culture; virtually every human being on
this planet uses plastic materials directly and indirectly every single day.

Our babies begin life on Earth by using some 210 million pounds of plastic diaper liners each year; we give them plastic milk bottles, plastic toys, and buy their food in plastic jars, paying with a plastic credit card. Even avoiding other babies by using contraceptives results in mass disposal of billions of latex condoms, diaphragms, and hard plastic birth control pill
containers each year.

Every year we eat and drink from some thirty-four billion newly manufactured bottles and containers. We patronize fast food restaurants and buy products that consume another fourteen billion pounds of plastic. In total, our societies produce an estimated sixty billion tons of plastic material every year.

Each of us on average uses 190 pounds of plastic annually: bottled water, fast food packaging, furniture, syringes, computers, computer diskettes, packing materials, garbage bags and so much more. When you consider that this plastic does not biodegrade and remains in our ecosystems permanently, we are looking at an incredibly high volume of accumulated plastic trash that has built up since the mid-twentieth century.

Where does it go? There are only three places it can go: our earth, our air, and our oceans.

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[BlooInBloo]

1. Also, I just saw the tire-coral reef thing in Florida....

What a bunch of jackasses.

http://www.coralreefalliance.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=503

"FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA - A mile offshore from this city's high-rise condos and beachside bars, where glitz and glamour mix with spring break revelry, lies an underwater dump - up to 2 million old tires strewn across the ocean floor.

A well-intentioned attempt in 1972 to create what was touted as the world's largest artificial reef made of tires has become an ecological disaster.

The idea was simple: Create new marine habitat and alternate dive sites to relieve pressure on natural reefs, while disposing of tires that were clogging landfills.

Decades later it's clear the plan failed miserably."