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Seattle to Ban Plastic Straws, Utensils at Restaurants Next Year

Be sure to watch the video.

Study: Production of Enough Plastic to Cover Aregentina Causes Havoc

[If you can't see the video, 
please go to www.elpasonaturally.blogspot.com.]


Thank you Marshall Carter-Tripp for a Voice of America story, Study: Production of Enough Plastic to Cover Aregentina Causes Havoc. It says:

July 19, 2017

TORONTO — More than nine billion tons of plastic has been produced since 1950 with most of it discarded in landfills or the environment, hurting ecosystems and human health, according to the first major global analysis of mass-produced plastics.

Nearly 80 percent of this plastic ended up in landfills or the environment and production in increasing quickly, researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in the study published on Wednesday.

Less than 10 percent was recycled and about 12 percent was incinerated.

"If you spread all of this plastic equally, ankle-deep, it would cover an area the size of Argentina," Roland Geyer, a professor of industrial ecology and the study's lead author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "It is an enormous amount of material that does not biodegrade ... I am very worried."

Burning plastics contributes to climate change and adversely impacts human health, while build-ups of the material can hurt the broader environment, Geyer said.

Packaging is the largest market for plastic and the petroleum-based product accelerated a global shift from reusable to single-use containers, researchers said.

As a result, the share of plastics in city dumps in high and middle income countries rose to more than 10 percent by 2005 from less than 1 percent in 1960.

Unlike other materials, plastic can stay in the environment for thousands of years, Geyer said.

There are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the world's oceans, according to a 2014 study published in a Public Library of Science journal.

This build-up harms marine life and ecosystems on sea and land, Geyer said.

If current trends continue more than 13 billion tons of plastic waste will end up in the environment or landfills by 2050, researchers said.


Some resources:

10 Tips for Living with Less Plastic

100 Steps to a Plastic-Free Life

Two Years of Living Plastic Free: How I Did It and What I've Learned

The Friday Videos and Another Look at Recycling - Especially Plastics

This past Monday I posted about a John Tierney piece that made the front page of the New York Times Review section on Sunday. Tierney was arguing that some things just aren't worth recycling because, doing so, doesn't significantly reduce the carbon footprint of that item. Besides, he argues, we have plenty of open space. Can you imagine that, rather than preserving the land around our Franklins, we just bury more trash and garbage? Natural open space isn't there to become a garbage dump even if we fail to enforce anti-dumping laws in our desert.

I digress. Tierney's piece does indeed raise questions. It also has gotten some rebuttals. 

Grist responded today with a list of objections to Tierney's points. Do read Is recycling as awful as the New York Times claims? Not remotely. Grist's rebuttal is short, sweet and organized.

A longer and more informative response was published by the Natural Resources Defense Council: Too Good To Throw Away Recycling's Proven Record.

I seriously question Tierney's argument that "[r]ecycling one ton of plastic saves only slightly more than one ton of carbon dioxide." Plastic is derived from petroleum and gas. Now there is a carbon footprint. Recycle - sure. Reuse - you bet. Still that doesn't quite cut it. Reducing or eliminating the use of plastic is the best bet. There are a variety of products that are banned because they are deliterious to the health, welfare and safety of all of us. Without a doubt, plastic bags and plastic bottles, and bottled water damage our environment, kill wildlife and aren't good for us. 


The video above extols recycling plastic bottles which, of course, is far better than burying them in a landfill or simply disposing of them into the open environment. Certainly reusing/repurposing the plastic is the way to go. Realistically, the items created from used plastic will someday be part of that landfill and contribute to the leachate. Again, better not to have plastic sacks and bottles.

Plastics, as Ben Braddock is advised in the 1967 film, The Graduate, is the way of the future. One of my uncles was the Vice-President of Douglas Aircraft. I can remember his giving my parents a set of round, plastic coasters - a promotional product showing off the light weight material soon to be used on their airplanes.

Today we are swamped by plastics. Just about everything that we can buy is plastic or comes in plastic or in layers of plastic or even has micro-plastics in the ingredients. I don't know about you, but I have been deliberately buying less things in plastic which makes me search online for some good diy recipes for personal products. (There are many, many of them with all natural ingredients.)

Recycling and reusing plastics is a good thing. But greatly reducing the amount of plastics in our culture is ultimately the only way to go.

One last video:



What habits can you change to make your life less plastic?

Awash in Plastics

Click on image to enlarge.

Maybe I'll start a graphic of the week as I do with the video. Here's one from Upworthy posted originally HERE.

It was a Scientific American story about micro-plastic beads in our grooming products that sounded the RED ALERT for me. Read the story HERE. The SA story and the Upworthy graphic will make you wonder just how much awash we are in toxic plastics.

A good read on this whole subject is What's Gotten Into Us?:Staying Healthy in a Toxic World by Mckay Jenkins. Grist interviews the author HERE.

In the 1967 classic, The Graduate, Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) was much better off escaping in the end with Elaine Robinson (Katherine Ross) then taking this advice:


But that's hindsight and it may be too late.

The Friday Video: Man invents machine to convert plastic into oil

Here's an idea to convert the El Paso city flag into oil. The city flags, of course, are all of those plastic bags from the grocer or other retailers. You can see them flying on ocotillos, chollas, yucca, sotol. They flap from all of El Paso's beautiful chain link fences. This invention doesn't just do shopping bags but all plastics. Of course, a city that talks sustainability and tauts being a Tree City USA for window dressing and a city that scuttles bike share behind closed doors in order to get a temporary fix to move some traffic on the bridges, is probably not the city that will have the vision to utilize this technology. But one can hope. The big hope, the big positive . . . is that all those twenty and thirty somethings who see a sustainable future and know how to get there are our future.

Here's the video with a hat tip to Judy Ackerman: 


Visit http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/plastic-to%20-oil-fantastic/