plastic: a global environmental calamity
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Althea
Althea told me...
I would say it's as much about everything being a political issue. The arguments against working toward cleaning up the environment are idiotic. It always comes down to infringement...real or imagined.
If people want to use plastic bags, that is their right. They should pay $5 each. See how they like those 'rights'.
In Florida, thousands of these sea turtles come ashore and lay their eggs. They hatch their eggs. I have had the joy of assisting some to make it to the surf when confused, and not once, did I find a turtle anywhere in Florida that had died from eating a plastic bag!!
.
I think they should be banned, and I am a conservative independent. They are a pain in the ass to recycle too. You can't put them in with normal recycling, and have to be brought back to the store; that is IF your store participates.
Also, 2 of my very liberal friends don't recycle at all, and throw everything in the trash. I recycle everything, so you can go on blaming cons, but we are hardly the problem.
Turtles are not endangered. There are thousands of them currently returning to the shores of Florida and Cuba. They hatch, successfully, hundreds of thousands of hatclings. The biggest threat to turtles is from their natural predators. Not from garbage.
From your article which supports my statement about third world shit holes:
Researchers at the University of Exeter and the Society for the Protection of Turtles studied 34 turtles who had washed up on the beaches of on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and found they were particularly attracted to pieces of plastic which looked like sheets or threads, and were black, clear or green.
I'm old enough to remember environmentalists saying plastic bags were a good thing, because we would no longer have to kill trees for paper bags...
Fascist leaning lefties can't remember what they said yesterday, let alone several years in time.
And don't forget about the plastics straw ban they had shit hemorrhages over. The orange moron went out of his way to push plastic straws and his cultists cheered him on. This is retarded behavior.
USFREEDOM911
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!
Over the past 70 years, we’ve gotten hooked on disposable goods and packaging — as plastics became the lifeblood of an American culture of speed, convenience, and disposability that’s conquered the globe. Plastic contains our hot coffee and frozen dinners. It is the material of childhood, from Pampers to Playmobil to PlayStation 4. It cloaks our e-commerce purchases and is woven into our sneakers, fast fashion, and business fleece. Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute, and 500 billion plastic bags a year — including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash.
But the world’s plastic waste is not so easily contained. Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into the oceans — the equivalent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. John Hocevar is a marine biologist who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace, and spearheaded the group’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Increasingly, his work has centered on plastics. “This is a much bigger problem than ‘just’ an ocean issue, or even a pollution issue,” he says.
More than half the plastic now on Earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030.
Since 1950, the world has created 6.3 trillion kilograms of plastic waste — and 91 percent has never been recycled even once, according to a landmark 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances. Unlike aluminum, which can be recycled again and again, plastic degrades in reprocessing, and is almost never recycled more than once. A plastic soda bottle, for example, might get downcycled into a carpet. Modern technology has hardly improved things: Of the 78 billion kilograms of plastic packaging materials produced in 2013, only 14 percent were even collected for recycling, and just two percent were effectively recycled to compete with virgin plastic. “Recycling delays, rather than avoids, final disposal,” the Science authors write. And most plastics persist for centuries.
As the globalized economy boomed, the toxic reality was hidden overseas. Plastics tossed out here were picked over at domestic recycling facilities, which targeted easier-to-sort-and-reprocess clear plastic bottles, milk jugs, and detergent containers. The leftovers were tied up in dirty bales and shipped to Asia. “China took them because there was some high value of material in there,” a former Waste Management executive tells Rolling Stone. Oftentimes, he says, Chinese recyclers “would dump those bales into the river to separate the materials and pick the better stuff out. And then they simply let the rest just go downstream.” The target plastics weren’t recycled in state-of-the-art facilities, rather shredded and melted down in rudimentary factories — often staffed by whole families, children included — eking out a toxic living amid mountains of imported trash.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/plastic-problem-recycling-myth-big-oil-950957/
much more @ link
I remember when plastic bags were supposed to be better then paper bags; because it saved trees.
USFREEDOM911
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
Oh, I remember the use a plastic bag "save a tree" motto that was drilled into the public consciousness for decades.
LOL, I just posted the same thing.
USFREEDOM911
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
I would love to see you walk out of a grocery store with nothing but metal and glass containers holding your food items.
People used to do it all the time.
Bigdog
Harris - make America a 3rd world shithole
Yes; they also didn't have massive refrigerators and freezers, two or three cars and typically went to the bathroom outside of the house.
Bigdog
Harris - make America a 3rd world shithole
The straws are all being thrown in the ocrean by Asians, moron.
And your "reusable" grocery bags spread disease like E. coli, salmonella, fecal coliform, and other harmful bacteria.
USFREEDOM911
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
Yes; they also didn't have massive refrigerators and freezers, two or three cars and typically went to the bathroom outside of the house.
Unless you're saying that when they go shopping, that they're completely restock their fridge; then this has nothing to do with it.
What do the number of cars have to do with groceries??
Bigdog
Harris - make America a 3rd world shithole
Yes; they also didn't have massive refrigerators and freezers, two or three cars and typically went to the bathroom outside of the house.
Grandmas used to use these :0)
Into the Night
Contributor
Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!
Over the past 70 years, we’ve gotten hooked on disposable goods and packaging — as plastics became the lifeblood of an American culture of speed, convenience, and disposability that’s conquered the globe. Plastic contains our hot coffee and frozen dinners. It is the material of childhood, from Pampers to Playmobil to PlayStation 4. It cloaks our e-commerce purchases and is woven into our sneakers, fast fashion, and business fleece. Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute, and 500 billion plastic bags a year — including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash.
But the world’s plastic waste is not so easily contained. Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into the oceans — the equivalent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. John Hocevar is a marine biologist who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace, and spearheaded the group’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Increasingly, his work has centered on plastics. “This is a much bigger problem than ‘just’ an ocean issue, or even a pollution issue,” he says.
More than half the plastic now on Earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030.
Since 1950, the world has created 6.3 trillion kilograms of plastic waste — and 91 percent has never been recycled even once, according to a landmark 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances. Unlike aluminum, which can be recycled again and again, plastic degrades in reprocessing, and is almost never recycled more than once. A plastic soda bottle, for example, might get downcycled into a carpet. Modern technology has hardly improved things: Of the 78 billion kilograms of plastic packaging materials produced in 2013, only 14 percent were even collected for recycling, and just two percent were effectively recycled to compete with virgin plastic. “Recycling delays, rather than avoids, final disposal,” the Science authors write. And most plastics persist for centuries.
As the globalized economy boomed, the toxic reality was hidden overseas. Plastics tossed out here were picked over at domestic recycling facilities, which targeted easier-to-sort-and-reprocess clear plastic bottles, milk jugs, and detergent containers. The leftovers were tied up in dirty bales and shipped to Asia. “China took them because there was some high value of material in there,” a former Waste Management executive tells Rolling Stone. Oftentimes, he says, Chinese recyclers “would dump those bales into the river to separate the materials and pick the better stuff out. And then they simply let the rest just go downstream.” The target plastics weren’t recycled in state-of-the-art facilities, rather shredded and melted down in rudimentary factories — often staffed by whole families, children included — eking out a toxic living amid mountains of imported trash.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/plastic-problem-recycling-myth-big-oil-950957/
much more @ link
Typical Greenpeace panic mongering, all made up of magick made up numbers and horrible events that never took place.
Into the Night
Contributor
Define 'ecosystem'.
He's too retarded to know what he spews.