13.7 Billion Years: Plastic Not So Fantastic

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Plastic Not So Fantastic

No more plastic bags, the UN environment chief says

"Single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in an official statement.

"There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."

Steiner's statement accompanied the release of "Marine Litter: A Global Challenge," a new and sobering UNEP report that has concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that plastic is the most pervasive form of trash in the world's oceans.

Indeed, the massive and growing "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" -- a floating island of mostly plastic human trash stuck in a swirling ocean gyre -- is almost twice the size of Texas.

Based on regional reports prepared by the secretariats of the "12 Regional Seas" (Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Caspian, East Asian Seas, Eastern Africa, Mediterranean, Northeast Atlantic, Northwest Pacific, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, South Asian Seas, Southeast Pacific and Wider Caribbean), the report asserts that "marine litter is a global concern affecting all the oceans of the world."

"It poses environmental, economic, health and aesthetic problems that are rooted in poor solid waste management practices, lack of infrastructure, indiscriminate human activities and behaviours and an inadequate understanding on the part of the public of the potential consequences of their actions."

Last week, the District of Columbia council unanimously approved a law banning disposal, non-recyclable plastic bags and charging consumers a five-cent-a-bag tax for bags they use to take their groceries home.

In 2007, San Francisco became the first American city to impose a plastic bag ban. According to a San Francisco Chronicle article about the historic legislation, San Francisco environment director Jared Blumenfeld said that it takes 430,000 gallons of oil to make 100 million plastic bags.

The production of five plastic bags adds 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide to an individual's carbon footprint.

"Environmental groups estimate that 500 billion to 1 trillion of the bags are now used worldwide every year," according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. That's a lot of global-warming CO2 released into the atmosphere.

A plastic bag ban in Los Angeles will begin in July 2010. There are similar plans being considered in Connecticut, Philadelphia, Seattle and New York.

A ban enacted in China in June 2008 has reduced consumption by 40 million bags.

Ireland has also done its part by exacting a levy on plastic bag use. "After the levy was introduced in the Republic of Ireland," said Councillor Anne Wilson of the North Down Alliance, "it cut plastic bag usage by 90 per cent and also helped provide over £93 million for environmental projects."

"There are two main ways which a plastic bag levy would have a positive effect," Wilson said. "Firstly, it would reduce unsightly plastic bag littering and secondly, fewer chemicals would be released into the environment if less plastic bags were being created."

Marine mammals and birds ingest all sorts of toxic plastic bits that are blown to the sea from land. Some birds have been known to feed small pieces of plastic to their young, mistaking it for jellyfish. Others get tangled in plastic, unable to get free.

But some scientists believe that the plastic bag ingestion problem has been overstated and that in regard to marine mortality, the real killers are old fishing nets and fishing equipment.

Either way, keeping mankind's trash -- fishing gear and plastic bags included -- down to the bare minimum is clearly a good idea.

The American writer William E. Vaughn, who penned a column for the Kansas City Star from 1946 until his death in 1977, once wrote, "In the next century it will be the early mechanical bird which gets the first plastic worm out of the artificial grass."

Unless we significantly curb our waste, plastic and otherwise, our planet will likely become more mechanical, plastic and artificial.

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