I just read a great article in Sierra Club magazine www.sierraclub.com . It’s titled Message in a Bottle with a picture of a plastic water bottle floating in the ocean. A man named Charles Moore discovered a patch of garbage the size of texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. The effulent of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers were studied and it was estimated that 60 tons of trash poured into the ocean in three days. It was equivalent to 2.3 billion individual pieces of trash. Slack currents in the ocean caused garbage from several continents to pile up and grow to a massive size.
Our beaches around the world are littered with plastic refuse and our environment degrades every day as a result of plastics ending up in our waterways. That’s motivation to help change the way we manufacture and use plastics.
Developing new innovative and cost effective materials, designs and end of life solutions for products is necessary to reverse the dangerous degradation of our environment with plastics. This year we will compost over 30 tons of compostable trash, saving it from the landfill and waterways. That’s our contribution to improving our community and our planet.
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What a great service in bringing this to our community! There is another concern that is becoming a hypothesis related to the volumes of plastics entering into riparian zones and our oceans. In the case of shore birds it is believed that this concentration of plastics generate chemicals that act as estrogen mimickers. Significant decreases in shore bird populations have coincided with the volumes of plastics waste entering their ecospheres.
Comment by Dennis — May 24, 2009 @ 10:47 pm
Dennis brings up a great point. On our links page are two great websites that discuss and explore the impact of oil based plastics in our waterways.
Green Step Solutions and Pebble in the pond
Comment by chris - EcNow Tech — May 25, 2009 @ 3:40 am