Hat eating Turtle
Do Something Drastic – Cut the Plastic!
A good friend recently sent me an email about plastic. I received that email one day before she died, unexpectedly.
She began the email saying “I had no idea what happened to them when I recycled them…….”.
Sooooooooooo……..
Where do you think that plastic bag goes when you send it off to be recycled?
Would you be surprised to find that less than 1% of the plastic is actually recycled?
It costs more to recycle a bag than make a new one.
Ah ha!
According to Jared Bloomfield, San Francisco’s Director of Enviornment it costs $4000 to recycle 1 ton of the bags that then can be resold on the commodities market for only $32.
The Enviornmental Protection Agency reports between 500 billion and a trillion bags are consumed each year.
Where DO they go?
In 1975 oceangoing vessels were dumping 8 million pounds into “ocean fills”.
That number is 30 + years old.
Plastic does not photodegrade it just churnes back into itself.
It breaks and tears, polishing itself until it becomes a substance known as a nurdle.
A nurdle is a piece of plastic small enough to be eaten by the single celled animals at the bottom of the food chain.
The effect on wildlife is catastrophic. Larger animals like sea turtles, dolphins and whales can also midtake the larger pieces for food and die of starvation.
So….what do we do?
Using a cloth bag saves about bags a week – 24 bags a month – 288 a year and 22,176 in an average life time!
China has banned plastic bags and saves 37 million barrels of oil each year because plastic bags are a petroleum deritive. Bangledesh, Rwanda and San Fransisco have banned them. In Ireland the government began taxing them and reduced comsumption by 90%.
I propose a local tax on plastic bags. The tax money collected could then be channeled into local environmental concerns. Or, possibly making party hats out of something innoxious – like, say,sugar.
