Plasticific

This is disturbing. Last week I found this picture of a turtle on The Ecologist and it wrenched my heart. Poor little baby hatchling must have got caught in a plastic ring commonly used for six-packs of beer cans. And grew into it.

They also mentioned the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the article, which was news to me. According to the Independent it is twice the size of the continental US and it’s a soup of plastic in the Pacific Ocean.

Plastic takes FOREVER to break down. And there is currently no good recycling systems for many of the plastics. And typically toxic additives are used and toxins are released during production and when it's breaking down or being burned. In fact, plastics don't break down by exposure to the sun only. They slowly photo-degrades to a molecular level, at which point further degradation can only be achieved by burning. That means it will be sitting in the ocean for a long time. The pieces might be so small that we don’t see them, but they will still be there. These plastics are eventually getting into our food stream. What effect this has on us and the environment is little known. I have heard that some might be hormone disruptors, but either way: my intuition tells me it’s probably not good.

The garbage patch was discovered by rich sailor Mr. Moore, when he was looking for a short cut on his yacht back to LA. When he ended up being in the plastic soup for a week, he realized that this is crazy and turned into an environmental activist. I guess, even the nicest yacht is not so great anymore, if the places to discover are trashed. Mr Moore warns that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

...for every 6 pounds of plastic that we got, there was only one pound of zooplankton.
Captain Charles Moore

What's next? Should we lie back and watch the clouds go by and keep on trashing our environment?

I think, we urgently need a more environmentally-benign replacement for plastic.

Maybe biopolymers are a solution, like these biodegradable plastic baskets, which are claimed to degrade after 18 weeks in the ground?

In the meantime, now more than ever, whenever I can choose between plastic fork or a metal fork, I will most definitely choose the metal one.