Solutions to Plastic Pollution

green | May 28th, 2010 - 12:32 AM

It’s hard to imagine what life was like without plastic.  It’s everywhere: covering our food, holding our purchases, protecting our sports stars, rolling along the highway, saving patients in hospitals and floating along our waterways and oceans.

The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

During a recent team meeting at BrownFlynn, we started brainstorming potential (generally ridiculous) solutions to cleaning up The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  This Garbage Patch the size of Texas has accumulated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where ocean currents push the pieces of (mostly) plastic into a particularly inhospitable whirlpool.  It’s growing in size and every year people find other similar garbage patches around the world’s oceans.

The main problem with this is that the plastic deeply affects ocean habitats and ends up in our own bodies.  The pieces of plastic break down into smaller particles, making them extraordinarily difficult to clean up, and the plastic particles bothabsorb and release toxic chemicals in the water, making them small pieces of contamination.  Fish eat these plastic particles, mistaking them for plankton, and end up saturated with the toxins that were absorbed in the plastic.  Guess who eats the fish.

Some scientists have decided that it would be impossible to clean up all the plastic in our oceans, so they have gone the route of advocacy, education and prevention.  Here are a few places that have banned the use of plastic bags and single-use water bottles (Australia, San Francisco, Seattle).  Other cities tax the single-use plastic items.

Another group of scientists, on the other hand, has decided to tackle the plastic pollution in our oceans by testing different cleanup methods through Project Kaiseiand creating a documentary about it to raise public awareness with the hopes of affecting change in consumer behavior.

“Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.” Salon.com

Plastic is made from petroleum.  Are plastic bags—that are made to be thrown “away”—the highest and best use of our precious non-renewable resource?  Although plastic is ubiquitous these days, it has only been in mass production since the 1940s.

So what did we use before plastic?  Food came naked or maybe wrapped in cloth or paper, people brought reusable cloth bags with them to shop, athletes wore leather protection, hospitals used glass and metal and cloth, and our oceans and environments were much cleaner.  Could we go back to that?

A more likely solution, perhaps, is good old-fashioned innovation.  Entrepreneurs and businesses around the world are thinking holistically about environmental impacts like these and are taking systems approaches to help our communities become more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable.

For change to take place at scale, however, each one of us needs to think about our personal consumption and waste habits.  All of us can help to reduce the supply of plastic pollution to our aquatic habitats.

SustainGenuity:  Solutions to Plastic Pollution

Photo from students.umf.maine.edu/learykp/public.www/

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
Tags: , , , , ,
«
»
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

GTC – Twitter

GTC – Hot Topics

GTC – Recent Stories

GTC – Cloud

ban biodegradable BP chemicals children cleanup climate consumer declare eco-friendly ecosystems environment footprint global warming Green Green Conservation Green Trash Green Trash Can greentrashcan health Healthy kids marine ocean oil oilspill Overfishing paper parks plastic recyclable recycle Recycling reduce reusable reuse rubbish save school sustainable tips waste water wildlife world

GTC – Archives