the council here are pretty good, we've had two different bins for years, one for certain recyclable items and the other for everything else, they gave people who wanted them these composter things you put all the old food and garden cuttings into, if you leave your glass bottles out they collect them, plus we have a few recycling points around town where people take all sorts, clothes, papers etc
what needs to happen is supermarkets etc need to seriously cut down on there packaging, and manufactures need to be more careful in there use of certain materials and less wasteful - look at easter eggs for example, how much packaging?!
i have these hemp sandals and the soles are made from old car tires - they will never wear out and i bet theres zillions of old car tires
Lord don't get me started on the bins in Germany! Went to visit friends and I kept putting the wrong stuff in the wrong bins. Could ya mark them for the novices please?!
Anyhoo ... here in Pinellas county we have county wide drop off points for some items ... glass, plastic, paper, cardboard. Some cities have curbside pickup for glass, plastic, newspaper - they only give you one large bin for weekly pickup ... luckily I inherited 5 from my Mother in law ... she worked at the library of a local town and "appropriated them for countless uses. I just have to remember to put them out Saturday am.
As for grocery shopping. I use the bags for the cat box cleaning. I have about 4 canvas bags and a large insulated bag that I use. If I forget them in the car I just tell the bagger not to bag my stuff. That always gets a "huh?!" really pointless having them bag my stuff anyways since I usually get to van and rearrange and condense from what they bagged. Drives me nuts when they put ONE ITEM in a bag!!!
good to see this story getting coverage in a more mainstream paper
Quote:
Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean
Justin Berton, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007
At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie "American Beauty," a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life's unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a "most beautiful thing."
To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.
In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.
"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said. "There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."
The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.
Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans."
The report found that 80 percent of the oceans' litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.
That's what makes a potentially toxic swamp like the Garbage Patch entirely preventable, Parry said.
"At this point, cleaning it up isn't an option," Parry said. "It's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. ... The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits."
Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren't wrapped in plastics is another.
After the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the use of plastic grocery bags earlier this year with the problem of ocean debris in mind, a slew of state bills were written to limit bag production, said Sarah Christie, a legislative director with the California Coastal Commission.
But many of the bills failed after meeting strong opposition from plastics industry lobbyists, she said.
Meanwhile, the stew in the ocean continues to grow.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.
Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.
"These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs," Chabot said. "It doesn't pass, and they literally starve to death."
The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.
Chabot said if environmentalists wanted to remove the ocean dump site, it would take a massive international effort that would cost billions.
But that is unlikely, he added, because no one country is likely to step forward and claim the issue as its own responsibility.
Instead, cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is left to the landlubbers.
"What we can do is ban plastic fast food packaging," Chabot said, "or require the substitution of biodegradable materials, increase recycling programs and improve enforcement of litter laws.
"Otherwise, this ever-growing floating continent of trash will be with us for the foreseeable future."
How to help
You can help to limit the ever-growing patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. Here are some ways to help:
Limit your use of plastics when possible. Plastic doesn't easily degrade and can kill sea life.
Use a reusable bag when shopping. Throwaway bags can easily blow into the ocean.
Take your trash with you when you leave the beach.
Make sure your trash bins are securely closed. Keep all trash in closed bags.
Trash is also a problem in parts of San Francisco Bay. For an interactive map showing some of the worst locations, go to www.savesfbay.org/baytrash.
I'm sure some enterprising Chinese recyclers will be on the case when it becomes profitable... but 3.5 million tons doesn't seem that huge an amount really.
finally some coverage in the independent! anyone else noticed anywhere covering it?
Quote:
The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan
A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.
The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.
He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"
Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.
Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.
"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."
Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.
Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.
According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.
Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,
Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.
Here's the Wikipedia page on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch...
I live in a building that does quite a bit of recycling. Separate bins for plastics, tins, newspapers and different types of cardboard. Besides the big bins at major shopping malls, this was the most recycling I'd really experienced. I've gradually started to use the bins and nos am throwing something in them nearly every day.
Cloth grocery store bags are also a recent innovation. Unfortunately, some stores use them as a gimmick, charging $3 for the bags.
I live in a building that does quite a bit of recycling. Separate bins for plastics, tins, newspapers and different types of cardboard. Besides the big bins at major shopping malls, this was the most recycling I'd really experienced. I've gradually started to use the bins and nos am throwing something in them nearly every day.
we have to do recycling over here, lots of people complain about it, but i really don't see the problem. ours isn't as good as yours sounds, we just have a bin for non-recyclable and another for some types of recyclables ( paper, cans etc ) but theres also quite a few recycling places about with loads of different bins for all types of materials, different glasses etc
edit - i've just seen i pretty much said this same thing at the top of the page - 4 years ago!
it makes me really sad that nothing's recycled here in GA.
Plastic bags are taken back to the supermarkets... everything else is trashed!
In the UK everything was recycled.....I feel everything's just wasted here in the USA !!!
We're pretty good here in NC. We have two large wheelie bins - one for recycling, one for regular trash. They collect the recycling once every two weeks. Regular stuff every week. We've been using canvas bags for shopping for quite a few years now. Much better than all those plastic bags. :-)
Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Location: Death Valley, California
Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2011 7:36 pm Post subject:
I live in a very old, (by the standards of the invaders), and very empty - pop. 37 - ghost town. Once upon a time, the town of Darwin, Ca., USA, was a thriving mining town of 10,000 people, back in the 1800's. The operators of the various mines here in the west, imported Chinese workers/slaves to do the cleaning, cooking, and hard labor. How many of them were simply killed and put in mass graves when they were no longer needed, is not known, but estimates range from 5,000 to 50,000 murdered Chinese workers over a 70 year period, in the Mountains and deserts of boom time California - of course, most of the records, if even kept, records have conveniently disappeared - according to my sources. The Jesuits probably kept track of that kind of thing....(any Jesuits reading this might want to tell the real story before the coming rapture...or else!!!) This particular type of imported labor-to-be killed-later-horror-story, happened all over California, at the various mining camps and water and power camps, well into the 1930's. But that is a bit off-subject here. So on to plastic trash!
Everywhere I go, in the Mohave high desert that surrounds my home - I can see white and black and brown plastic trash bags and just plastic stuff, on the ground or moving with the wind - sticking to the various desert brush, clinging to the Joshua trees, breaking up very slowly of course, into the sand in all the desert washes, and being used amongst the nests and holes made and used by the millions of reptiles, birds, and mammals that occupy this huge open area that makes up a quarter of California's space. This area is one of the America's only spaces left where there are very large areas of sky that have zero light pollution - but when the beautiful desert sunrise ends, our eyes are not able to avoid the plastic pollution that is seen everywhere - even when one follows a tiny lizard's trail through a field of sand, there are small bits of white plastic everywhere...often seemingly these white bits look to be just part of the environment. In some spots there are big odd sheets of various black and brown and white plastic mingled into the natural and man-made piles of desert rock - and geologists have found that every single type of rock, from every part of this planet, can be found all over this desert - from Death Valley National Park, to the Long Valley Caldera of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains near Yosemite and Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks, and down to the tiny town of Mojave at the southern end of this vast desert environment. Our area has no light pollution and no noise pollution...but PLASTIC? Oh Yeah!
Which brings me to George Carlin - the Real True Prophet(?) of our time and place - everything he said about American stuff - from politics to advertising to empire to airlines to language has come true -or it was already reality - but nobody was talking about it like- George Carlin was! One awesome routine went something like this (please forgive any errors in my interpretation - and kindly correct me):
Humans just might have been brought into being by the Mother Earth Herself, just to create plastic! In his scenario, we have done our work, the planet will rid itself of us now like a dog shaking off the fleas - maybe by allowing us to create a new methane friendly environment, in which we will slowly choke to death, making room for the next 'dominatrices' of this globe. These new inheritors of the earth, breathing in the pretty green(?) unpolluted methane atmosphere, will no doubt be found dredging and mining and scraping up all that fine plastic bounty, found all over their new world, in order to burn it for it's sweet PCB's(?), or to power their technologies(?), or to use as clothing (?). . . or for their shelters (?). . . . . and on and on it goes.
I know that is a very cynical view - but hell, I just heard that today Naomi Klein was arrested while walking outside of her house in N.Y.C...How cynical is that? (That is what inspired my overly long post here)...No, she was not arrested for protesting - she was dressed in her house robe - quite a proper one, I hear - so what will they charge her with? Promoting Terrorism? Telling the truth about POWER? All the stuff she wrote of in "Shock Doctrine" is now openly being done here, not in some far away third world state by the many "John Perkins" type CEO's so beloved by Herman Cain (owner of Godfather Pizza...no play on words intended - eh, Mr. Rove)...and her book reveals more as to how they do it - and why - and what they gain....and they do not like being outed!
Well, at least she wasn't hit by a drone!
Got to go - I hear the loud noises over-head - yes, they practice flying those mean things up in the sweet clear blue oxygen of the desert sky, so now we do have noise pollution...I can't keep up with the reality of this non-reality based world our power mongers are creating! . . .
I am just an old retired musician...but into the 1950's built nuclear bomb shelter I must go, just in case . . . so far they have just been practicing - but after this story...no ...of course that is just silly old hippie (SOH vs.DFH) paranoia -
Out here we are just useless old couch-trippers! But we did do our own little Occupy Darwin March recently -15 out of 37 - of us Darwinian's - showed up to protest - I checked - we had the largest per-capita turnout on the planet! I guess I've been a little jumpy since finding that out!
Hawaii Officially Becomes the First U.S. State to Ban Plastic Bags!
Lori Zimmer
31st May 2012
inhabitat.com
Los Angeles may have recently become the largest city to ban plastic bags, but Hawaii just knocked it out of the park by banning plastic bags statewide! Honolulu County just joined the ranks of the ban, making every city in the state part of the plastic bag ban. Hopefully Hawaii’s rejection of plastic bags will inspire other states to follow their lead.
Hawaii’s statewide plastic bag ban was not actually a decision made by state legislature – the banning of plastic bags is a decision left to each city. Yet each city in the state banned together to enact the ban, with the help and advocation of local activists and grassroots leaders. Maui and Kauai were the first to prohibit plastic bags at retailers, and the city and county of Honolulu finally joined their ranks with last week’s decision. Honolulu will begin enforcing the ban next year.
Hawaii’s gorgeous natural landscape has been greatly affected by plastic bag pollution – the bags don’t biodegrade, and they interfere with the state’s richly populated ecosystem. Seeking to preserve its native environment as much as possible, the state banded together to raise awareness about plastic bag pollution, and to promote reusable bags across their counties and cities.
Congratulations to Hawaii! Now, who wants to accept the challenge to be the second state in the union to ban plastic bags?
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
