Progress is Slow but Steady

Gleaned from the watchdogs at Reusablebags.com, some hopeful progress on plastic bag litter, and some posturing to watch out for….

October 2, 2009, USA Today reported an announcement by Target that it would start offering a 5-cent discount for every reusable bag customers use to pack their purchases. An earlier pilot test with 100 Target stores showed a 58% reduction in the number of plastic bags used.

Also in October, CVS Pharmacies started offering customers incentives for bringing reusable bags, their green bag card system. For every four shopping trips with a cloth reusable bag, customers get a coupon for $1.

Because the plastic bag industry is big business, in Canada, the Environment and Plastics Industry Council published an alarming report that your eco-friendly shopping bag could be making you sick. Consider the source.

The report concluded that reusable grocery bags are "a breeding ground for bacteria and pose a public health risk" because of high counts of yeast, molds and bacteria. Duh! Our clothes have high levels of bacteria if we don’t wash them. Common sense practices like washing your reusable bag and using plastic with leaky meats can reduce contaminants. When you're choosing a reusable shopping bag, avoid the cheap ones and select-or make-durable bags that withstand washing.

The Worldwide Threat from Plastic Bags Marches On

According to an article posted in 2004, even at that time, there was growing international recognition of the threat of plastic bag use on the environment.

The handy plastic shopping bag, so handy for everything from toting groceries to disposing of doggie doo, came into widespread use in the early 1980s. By 2004, environmental groups estimated that 500 billion to 1 trillion of the bags were being used worldwide every year.

Said one critic: "Every time we use a new plastic bag they go and get more petroleum from the Middle East and bring it over in tankers. We are extracting and destroying the Earth to use a plastic bag for 10 minutes…”

To read more from this article, check out the link below:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0721-04.htm

Imagine how that would feel as you walk through an urban area and see plastic bags wafting from a nearby bush, or drive through a pristine countryside to have your vision drawn jarringly to a plastic bag snapped on a western fence. Then think about those eyesores killing wildlife. According to Planet Ark, about 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine animals are killed by plastic bags each year worldwide.

If each of us makes sure we have a supply of washable, reusable bags in our cars, and we don’t enter a single store without them, or don’t fail to stuff one in a pocket when we walk to a store, we will gradually win over converts. The ripple effect will cause businesses to stop offering them. If eliminating plastic bags from our lives is the only environmental change we make, it’s a good one.

Responsible Recycling Eases Strain on Landfills

Besides not using plastic throw-aways, we can reduce waste everywhere by responsible recycling. Surprisingly, landfill capacity has increased at the same time the number of landfills has drastically decreased. The EPA reports that the number of landfills in the United States has fallen 77 percent since 1988. In its 2006 MSW study, the EPA reports that while the number of U.S. landfills has steadily declined over the years, the average landfill size has increased. It goes on to report that in 2006, compared to 1990, the total volume of waste going to landfills dropped by 4 million tons, at the same time that the U.S. population increased by more than 50 million people.

During the past five decades American attitudes toward recycling and ecology radically changed. Environmental concerns also influenced landfill policies and materials recovery. The newer landfills are better controlled and protected, and considerably larger with more efficient compacting. We not only have much larger landfills and are putting less in them, we also use them more efficiently. A given amount of landfill space will hold about 30 percent more content today than in the past. The three main waste hauling companies in the U.S. say they have a long-term capacity of 26-38 years.

Bottom Line: Despite a vast population increase, nationwide landfill use is down and materials recovery is up. Our larger population is sending less to landfills. Efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle are paying off.

Some examples of the trends between 1960 and 2006 include:
• Recovery and reuse of trash has gone from 5.6 to 81.1 million tons.
• Discards going to landfills as a percentage, has gone from 93.6% to 54.9%.
• Population in the millions has gone from 179,979 to 299,398.
Source: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in
the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 9

How do we contribute to making this trend even better?
• Reduce the type and numbers of disposables we use: plastic bags, bottled water, paper plates, food baggies
• Download the recycling guidelines for your community and make sure you are recycling everything they take.
• If your community doesn’t recycle something you use a lot of, like glass, then find another source for those.
• Take the time when cooking dinner or doing dishes to wash out those disposable containers and put them in the recycling bin

Tis the Season-To Think About the Environment

Well, here we are approaching the holidays again—and shopping. What’s it going to be? More plastic bags for your purchases, or have you really reformed and carry your reusable bags everywhere?

In earlier blogs, I’ve given good reasons for eschewing plastic bags. At this time of year, when we are searching our databanks for cool, yet inexpensive gift ideas, think about giving the gift that keeps on giving—to our environment: give all your friends and relatives good quality reusable, washable bags. I have a pile of bags in every car that I’ve accumulated over the years at conferences, trade shows, and ecology events. My favorite ones came as gifts:
• My friend Kathy made me two large cloth bags with sturdy handles. She stenciled flowers on them and they are darling; plus, they hold a lot! I just throw them in the washing machine.
• My sister Beth bought each of us a sturdy canvas tote on which she had stenciled a big peace symbol (yep, we’re Baby Boomers, all right).
• I bought string bags for my nieces and nephews to get them on the road to reusables.
Cloth bags are a palette to unleash your artistic talents. You can put anything memorable on them, even family pictures. How’s this: give your younger brother a big tote bag with his naked baby picture on it. His kids will think it’s hilarious.
If you’d rather branch out, you can go to www.Reusablebags.com and pick out any number of environmentally friendly products for kids, adults, athletes, seniors. Some of their really neat things include:
• Fun-print nylon-lined Velcro lunch baggies (Do you know how many of those throw-away lunch baggies a family goes through in a year? Trailer-loads)
• Nalgene water bottles
• Big totes and string bags
• Thermal coffee mugs that go in the dishwasher and microwave (I love mine)
• Sippy cups for the tots
• Camping cookware
• Silverware
• Christmas drawstring wrapping bags.
If you are going to make tote bags, get some Christmas fabric, some bias tape or ribbon, and make your own drawstring package wrapping. Your gift recipients will love them and are guaranteed to regift at least the wrapping. They are so simple to make.
There are so many ways we can reduce waste and increase personal connections with a little thought. Let me know if you use any of these ideas.

Around the World in Discarded Plastic Bags

Africa has some wonderfully strange smells, sights, cultures, and customs. It also has some very familiar sights such as plastic bag litter. We visited a bustling market in Mindelo, Cape Verde Islands. Here, people shop for food daily and plan meals around what is fresh and readily available. We didn’t see one person there with reusable bags. They all got the cheap plastic bags from the vendors, and they are doing this daily. Where do you think all these bags end up? There and everywhere else we visited in West Africa, they ended up on the ground, in pits, and in waterways, wending their way out to sea. There they end up in the craws of sea turtles, birds, and fish, eventually strangling them.

Other plastic debris is just as ubiquitous. Bottle caps, rings off bottles, even disposable lighters have ended up in the stomachs of birds that died. Our love affair with plastics and disposables in general is killing wildlife and trashing our world. Plastics have become the babies of the third world where money is scarce and the per capita annual income is around $200. Plastic is cheap to produce and so more readily available for the indigent.

This is an issue that deserves some attention. Plastic bags can be easily replaced by cloth bags for shopping in these cultures where they make their own cloth, if they had a reason to do so. But plastic bags are handy and free. We’re making great headway with plastic bag litter, and some with other disposables in the United States, but hardly any in these forgotten parts of the world we come so far to visit. How do we choose between malaria eradication and plastic bag litter? It’s not even a contest.

Plastics Decompose Faster in the Sea, But Not in a Good Way

Something else to think about when you think of throwing your Styrofoam coffee cup or other plastic debris out the car window. It may well find its way into storm drains, down waterways, and out to the sea.

While common lore tells us that plastic is fairly indestructible in nature, a new study shows that bodies of salt water are an exception. In oceans, plastics seem to decompose fairly rapidly and release toxic by-products into the water, or the sea creatures that ingest them. This is the first study to look at what happens over the years to billions of pounds of plastic waste floating in our oceans, like the two-Texas-sized “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” floating between California and Hawaii.

Study lead researcher Katsuhiko Saido, Ph.D., reported at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) this month, and was met with surprise from scientists who always believed that plastics in the oceans were mostly a hazard to marine animals that eat or become ensnared in them. Saido reported that in Japan alone, as much as 150,000 tons of plastic debris, mostly Styrofoam, wash up on their shores each year.

Saido, a chemist with the College of Pharmacy, Nihon University, Chiba, Japan, and his team found that when plastic decomposes, it releases bisphenol A (BPA) and PS oligomer into the water. BPA and PS oligomer are of concern because they can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and can seriously affect reproductive systems.

Saido described a new method to simulate the breakdown of plastic products at low temperatures, such as those found in the oceans. The process involves modeling plastic decomposition at room temperature, removing heat from the plastic and then using a liquid to extract the BPA and PS oligomer. The study team was able to degrade the Styrofoam in the lab, mimicking conditions in the sea, and discovered that three new compounds not found in nature formed: styrene monomer (SM), styrene dimer (SD) and styrene trimer (ST). SM is a known carcinogen and SD and ST are suspected in causing cancer.

SOURCE: American Chemical Society (ACS)

Plastic Bags Around the World

Nothing much has happened lately in the struggle to reduce plastic bag litter. When I walk into the grocery store and pass someone coming out with a shopping basket piled high with plastic bag-wrapped groceries, I groan inwardly. What I want to do is to stop them, slap them around a little, and tell them to wake up and look at the pictures of what they are creating! But because I was not brought up like that, I don't. It helps just to think about it.

Soon, I will be leaving on a trip to 16 countries, 12 of them in Africa. I will be keeping track of all the plastic bag litter we encounter and bringing back pictures illustrating this problem. Sometimes, a picture is worth 1000 words. What I would ask is for everyone who reads this to really look at what litter is doing to this country, but even worse underdeveloped countries of the world. Perhaps it will sour our taste for convenience and disposables. I truly hope so.