A young business is being innovative in finding ways to turn our plastic trash into treasures
We've done the research to find an eco-friendly reusable bag to replace one-time plastic bags.
To help educate others, we’ve put together a "travelling show kit" that consists of a display board with photos of "trash", birds entangled and birds who’ve died by ingesting plastic. We augment that with our Problem with Plastics Brochure.
The kit is used at events, fairs, local club meetings, K-12 classrooms, church groups, marinas, and community beach organizations.
BUT we don't need to rely on it for every occasion. Our Beach Watcher events are almost entirely plastics free. We bring our own mugs, dishes and cutlery from home. It’s a whole new way of thinking, and you can get into the habit pretty easily.
We've extended that mind set to larger, more public gatherings. At our Sound Waters "one-day university for all" held annually the first Saturday in February:
This is quite an achievement as attendance is upward of 500 people! In addition, several of the 60+ Sound Waters classes cover plastics, toxins, and what they’re doing to the marine environment.
We've implemented a Monofilament Recovery and Recycle Program (MRRP) at fishing beaches and boat launches around Whidbey Island.
Discarded monofilament fishing line is responsible for entangling wildlife, often causing loss of limb, and death from starvation. Sea birds seem to be particularly susceptible. It’s also a danger to divers who can become caught up in the line under water, and is easily tripped over when walking along the beach.
We are participating in a plastics debris study with Port Townsend Marine Science Center, where beach substrate is sifted and small plastic particles collected and identified back in the laboratory.
We are assisting the Port Townsend Marine Science Center with presentations to local schools to increase awareness of the threat of marine plastic debris to wildlife.
By dissecting the boli from young albatross and combined with audio visuals, the children get a hands on expererience to understand why plastics are devastating to marine bird life
The "Plastics And Us" blog is maintained by volunteers from Island County Beach Watchers, a group supported by the county's WSU Extension.
We live on Whidbey and Camano Islands in Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
We are very concerned about the impact of over- and careless- use of plastics, and the subsequent impact on the quality of the marine environment all around us, and the fellow creatures who share it with us.
As we find helpful information across the Internet, we will post it here for you.
Source: WSU Beach Watchers - Island County.
Please see this excellent video report from PBS - the Online NewsHour - that discussesOther resources:
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Read more in this article by Jessica Marshall of Discovery News at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26994478/
As nearly everyone I spoke to about marine debris agrees,Hohn provides an excellent overview of the many people who are working this problem - from understanding its dimensions, to raising public awareness, to the complex issues of political reality.
the best way to get trash out of our waterways is,
of course, to keep it from entering them in the first place
It crops up in everything from clothes to coffee canisters, but how much do you really know about plain, old plastic?
This 219 page report, Tackling Marine Debris in the 21st Century, was written by the Committee on the Effectiveness of International and National Measures to Prevent and Reduce Marine Debris and Its Impacts, from the National Academy of Sciences.Recycline, a company founded ... in 1996, transforms recycled plastic into toothbrushes, razors, colanders, cutting boards and other personal-care and houseware items that can all be sent back to the company — in postpaid mailers — and recycled again.Source: New York Times
In the past few 20 years, many health and beauty companies have begun utilizing 'microbeads' as exfoliates in cleansing products. This is economical for the corporations but creates a large problem when these particles are rinsed off your body and into the wastewater stream. Many of these particles are too small to be filtered out in wastewater treatment screens. So, the final destination for these plastic microbeads is often our oceans.Read more at http://izzitgreen.com/blog/2010/04/buyer-beware-harmful-microplastics-in-facial-and-body-scrubs/.
It is our problem,This video includes
and it is our problem to solve
Imagine a water bottle
filled a quarter of the way up with oil.
That’s about how much oil
was needed to produce the bottle.
in the giant problem that we all face each of us in charge of one piece of the solution, and that is our own consumption
