In Review: A Month Without Plastic

On December 4, we gave ourselves the change of going a month without buying any plastic (Soup On Wednesday - Food for Thought: Plastic Challenge). The plastic free challenge was issued by the crew of Mollymawk.

How did you do?

While we found this quite changing, it was impressively eye opening. There is plastic on or in everything. For instance, just this past Saturday we bought a cloth filter for our Melita coffee pot. We've had one in the past that worked much longer than the four months predicted. But it did finally give up the ghost. We feel this is better than constantly using the paper filters, but ... you guessed it ... the filter was plastic wrapped.

Much of Whatcom County is used to not using plastic bags, if you've brought your own, so we didn't have that issue. Yet milk (whether cow or rice) still comes in either plastic or waxed cardboard that the recyclers won't take. If we had a wood stove, maybe ...

But even our box of local food from a farm share often comes bagged in plastic bags. This isn't necessary!

The challenge encouraged us to be creative in the gift giving within our family. This became a unique and special time.

While we didn't keep detailed notes during our month, the process sure opened our eyes to all the ways plastic products surround us. And while we couldn't go the entire month plastic free, we still found it worth the challenge.

Here is how the Mollymawk crew did (with some tips) (Life Without Plastic ...).

Blessed be,
Joel

Soup on Wednesday - Food for Thought: Plastic Challenge

As is typical during Advent, I'm going to offer some "Food for Thought" on Wednesdays and some Friday Fun on Fridays. So, without further ado ...

Jill Dickin Schinas aboard Mollymawk offers a challenge this month: Can you live a month without purchasing any plastic? Yes, she knows that this is the Christmas Season when gifts are often bought and given, which makes it all the more a challenge. She offers in depth background information, too.  Here is a teaser from their website, with a link to the full article.

Enjoy, and Blessed Be,

Joel

The Plastic-Free Challenge – Can you do it?

by Jill Dickin Schinas in November 2013

Everybody’s heard about the Pacific garbage patch. It’s the size of Texas and it’s so dense that you could build a house atop the debris. Last week I read an account by someone who sailed past the floating island and who claims to have faced a constant battering from all the rubbish hitting the hull. “The debris isn’t just on the surface,” he says, “it’s all the way down. And it’s all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the…

Continue reading this article… →

Plastic or Plankton? Plastic in the Oceans

I have had a hard time believing that the Pacific Gyre, in particular, has tons of plastic floating around in it. But then, I was picturing plastic bags, bottles, jugs, etc. Big plastic, in other words. Why, then, aren't tankers and other transport ships reporting this? Wouldn't all this plastic garbage foul their props?

Turns out, I had my size wrong. Think small particles of plastic. Think animals confusing plastic for plankton. This video gives a good - if shocking to me - overview of what is going on out in the Pacific, not just in the gyre, but along the current lines, too.

Dennison Berwick notes:

The United Nations has estimated that there are 46,000 plastic objects in every square mile of ocean in the world. Research by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has shown that in the areas where (because of winds and currents) the plastics tend to gather, there may be six to ten times more plastic than plankton measured by weight.  And most of these items are really small – small enough to be mistaken as food by fish and birds.  What they “eat” may be carrying ONE MILLION times more pollution such as pcbs than the ambient sea water they are floating in.  Studies have already shown that birds do absorb these toxins into their tissue.  Evidently the fishing industry hasn’t yet studied fish tissue.

But the Atlantic Ocean also has a plastic garbage patch. I'll let the BBC report on this one (below), and merely ask the question: What does the Indian Ocean have? What is our response to this? In a throwout culture, where does our garbage go when we are done with it? How much packaging is necessary? If we treat the world as a piece of Paradise (Heaven or Heaven on Earth) how does this change our actions?

Gives a new meaning to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Blessed Be

Rev. Joel

Link: Algalita Marine Research Foundation

BBC News Report:  Gill, Victoria, "Rubbish Patch Blights Atlantic" 24 Feb 2010

'Rubbish patch' blights Atlantic

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News, Portland
Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.
The region is said to compare with the well-documented "great Pacific garbage patch".
Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been "largely ignored" in the Atlantic.
She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon, US.

The work is the conclusion of the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin.
Scientists and students from the SEA collected plastic and marine debris in fine mesh nets that were towed behind a research vessel.

“ We know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular ”
Dr Kara Lavender Law, Sea Education Association

The nets dragged along were half-in and half-out of the water, picking up debris and small marine organisms from the sea surface.
The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic - off the coast of the US. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface.
These were pieces of low-density plastic that are used to make many consumer products, including plastic bags.
Dr Lavender Law said that the pieces of plastic she and her team picked up in the nets were generally very small - up to 1cm across.
"We found a region fairly far north in the Atlantic Ocean where this debris appears to be concentrated and remains over long periods of time," she explained.
"More than 80% of the plastic pieces we collected in the tows were found between 22 and 38 degrees north. So we have a latitude for [where this] rubbish seems to accumulate," she said.

The maximum "plastic density" was 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre.
"That's a maximum that is comparable with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," said Dr Lavender Law.
But she pointed out that there was not yet a clear estimate of the size of the patches in either the Pacific or the Atlantic.
"You can think of it in a similar way [to the Pacific Garbage Patch], but I think the word 'patch' can be misleading. This is widely dispersed and it's small pieces of plastic," she said.
The impacts on the marine environment of the plastics were still unknown, added the researcher.
"But we know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular," she told BBC News.

Nikolai Maximenko from University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the study, said that it was very important to continue the research to find out the impacts of plastic on the marine ecosystem.
He told BBC News: "We don't know how much is consumed by living organisms; we don't have enough data.
"I think this is a big target for the next decade - a global network to observe plastics in the ocean."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8534052.stm
Published: 2010/02/24 11:50:30 GMT
© BBC 2011