plastic: a global environmental calamity

No, I said county attempt.

Conservatives and Republicans in my area fought tooth and nail against attempts to ban plastic bags and to limit plastic straws.

If you support Republicans, you are actually part of the problem when it comes to plastic pollution of the oceans.

What plastic pollution in the oceans? There really isn't much plastic in the oceans at all.
 
I was listening to a radio call-in discussing a plastic bag ban in the area. Caller after caller whined about how inconvenient it was, and how it was "big government" interfering in our lives. One caller said that they were infringing on "our rights as Americans" by taking away plastic bags.

We kind of deserve everything that's about to happen.

What's about to happen?

Did you know that plastic breaks down in ocean water?
 
it's local then.But this is far from just a partisan issue.

it's generational ( older people have less interests)
it's corporative ( fighting sensible regs)
it's political too
and according to the article it's Big Oil as well

read it if you haven't- it's a very good expose

Big oil saved the whales, dumbass.
 
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??

I guess you miss the days you had to carry a bag of gold around too. :laugh:
 
What plastic pollution in the oceans? There really isn't much plastic in the oceans at all.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
https://theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/
is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world and is located between Hawaii and California. At the time of sampling, there were more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch that weigh an estimated 80,000 tonnes. These figures are much higher than previous calculations.
 
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
https://theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/
is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world and is located between Hawaii and California. At the time of sampling, there were more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch that weigh an estimated 80,000 tonnes. These figures are much higher than previous calculations.

So they counted and weighed it? :rolleyes:
 
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
https://theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/
is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world and is located between Hawaii and California. At the time of sampling, there were more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch that weigh an estimated 80,000 tonnes. These figures are much higher than previous calculations.

I have sailed through it. Multiple times. It is real.
 
planet-plastic-feature-2.jpg


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


ABSOLUTELY RIGHT= why we need to stop blowing $trillions on the CO2 "BOOGEYMAN".


WE USED TO HAVE BIODEGRADEABLE PLASTICS....MADE OUT OF CELLULOSE...
 
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