Tag Archives: Plastic

ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS PICKS

Posted on by
Reply

AIR POLLUTION: Beijing Olympics: China to celebrate week of ‘fresh air’: China’s Olympic organisers are hoping to celebrate a week of “clean” skies tomorrow after recording another day when Beijing’s notoriously poor air quality was officially judged good enough for the Games

APICULTURE: Commercially raised bees spreading disease

AQUACULTURE: The salmon business: Can marine farming ever be eco friendly?: Every day, a million Britons tuck into salmon, and demand is rising fast. Marine farming is the supermarkets’ answer – but can it ever be eco-friendly? Martin Hickman reports

ARCTIC MELTING: Stuck polar bears eating birds, Canadian ice shelf loses 7-square-mile section

BIOFUELS: McDonalds to power Manila’s police cars

BIG OIL: BP 2Q profits soar

CONSERVATION: Ancient tree needs help: environmentalists: The founder of National Tree Day wants the Federal Government to help save a rare Tasmanian tree

CRONYISM, LIES, COVER-UPS AND INDICTMENTS: Senate Democrats call on EPA administrator Stephen Johnson to resign, want DOJ investigation

ECO-DRIVING: You can tell Google Maps that you want walking directions to supplement your driving directions, which can save you gas in high density areas, and google will find known routes that are direct, flat, and that use pedestrian pathways

ENERGY: U.S. Motorists May Drive Less for 1st Time Since 1980, Energy conservation: Starting at home

ENVIRONMENTAL LAW: A look at the ‘tough’ Montana judge in the gray wolves case

EXPOSURE TO CHEMICALS AND TOXINS: Political appointees at the Department of Labor are moving with unusual speed to push through in the final months of the Bush administration a rule making it tougher to regulate workers’ on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins

FOOD: L.A. blocks new fast-food outlets from poor areas, In New Orleans, a fried chicken institution revived, Every bite you take: How Sysco came to monopolize most of what you eat

FUEL EFFICIENCY STANDARDS: 180mpg hatch by 2050

GREEN GRAFFITI: Anti-Bush graffiti: 25 countries, six continents

GROSS IN APPROPRIATE USE OF RESOURCES: Airbus superjumbo lands at New York’s JFK

HIV/AIDS: U.S. blacks, if a nation, would rank high on AIDS, Number of new HIV infections in US much higher than government reported, study finds

HUMANITY: US House of Representatives set to apologise to black Americans for ‘enslavement and racial segregation’

INVASIVE SPECIES: Underwater, a disturbing new world: A Tribune team follows researchers to the bottom of Lake Michigan as they try to explain the rapidly shifting ecosystem

OFFSHORE DRILLING: Obama shifts, says he may back offshore drilling, GOP continues full-court press on oil drilling

OIL: Bush wants lower royalties levied on oil shale: Department of Interior says move would be an incentive

PLASTIC: Congress weighs ban Of chemical used in plastics

RECYCLING: Houston resists recycling, and independent streak is cited

REDUCE, REUSE, AND RECYCLE: How to carry groceries with a square of cloth

SCIENCE: Personalized stem cells one step closer to reality: Researchers create disease-specific, individualized human stem cells, Exercise pill: Drug burns fat, boosts endurance without moving a muscle, Ice on Mars confirmed by Phoenix Lander

SHARK: Rare shark stolen from tank, Great white shark filmed breaching at night: A first

TIDAL POWER: France plans groundbreaking tidal power experiment

TRAFFIC: Solo drivers would be able to a pay a toll for the privilege of using carpool lanes to speed their commutes on a dozen highways from the South Bay to Sonoma and east under a plan approved Wednesday by Bay Area transportation officials

WASTE: Within the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona, is one of the largest stockpiles of discarded vehicle tyres1 in the US – perhaps as many as 10 million individual tyres

WIND POWER: Japan owes its energy efficiency in part to wind farms, Wind-powered tall ships are once again important as oil prices hurt trade, World’s largest wind farm planned in Oregon

PLASTIC: Bisphenol A and phthalates in plastics may be as harmful as they are useful and plentiful

Posted on by
Reply

Plastics simplify our lives. As a result, plastic is everywhere and used in just about everything and serves as a great utility to society. However, this utility comes at a price. It is common knowledge that discarded trash adversely impacts the environment but science is discovering how plastics are poisoning our bodies with stealth in ways not before imagined and on a level unseen by the eye. The link between plastics and negative impacts to our health has gone relatively unnoticed until now. From DISCOVER Magazine:

How could that loveliness be linked to what seems its ugly opposite: the contortions and distortions that chemicals in plastic may have bequeathed us? The stunted testicles in fish and alligators; girls blooming breasts and pubic hair at an eerily young age; the steadily rising numbers of human males born with abnormal urethras; climbing rates of testicular and breast cancer; declining sperm counts. Not to mention the death of wildlife, particularly seabirds that mistakenly feast on discarded plastic. Those garbage-bag ball gowns are now married in my mind with a photo of a Laysan albatross whose belly, slashed open by biologists, was jammed with 306 pieces of plastic flotsam—a surreal bird version of a junkyard.

Image Found Here

Hat tip to Kevin.

SYNTHETIC SEA: Litter is impacting ocean ecosystems and killing wildlife

Posted on by
5


The Great Pacific Garbage Patch or Synthetic Sea are areas of the Pacific Ocean where trash is carried and concentrated by ocean currents into a soup. Since this human waste is having adverse impacts on marine ecosystems and on marine life, the area has become a concern for conservationists and environmentalists.

To keep oceans clean and to keep wildlife from ingesting our trash, it is important that we either recycle unwanted materials or place them into a trash receptacle. Albatrosses will feed plastic — mistaken for marine food— to their chicks, and the chicks die slowly from a diet of indigestible trash.

Other marine life suffers from anthropogenic waste too. Sea turtles can die from ingesting plastic, because the plastic impacts within their gut. Marine debris also impacts other marine life such as fish.

Do you need proof that trash such as plastic adversely impacts marine wildlife? The images below show decomposed albatross chicks that have died from consuming marine debris. Obviously, the indigestible trash must result in a painful and slow death. More information can be found here and here.





On the Net:

  1. Marine Debris: Cigarette Lighters and the Plastic Problem on Midway Atoll
  2. Remote Waters Offer No Refuge from Plastic Trash
  3. Oprah Shines Light On Great Pacific Garbage Patch (VIDEO)

UPDATE 1 (24 April 09):

Video: Small fish living within the synthetic sea are consuming plastic:

Synthetic sea images were found here. Albatross images were found here, here, here, and here.