Earth Friendly Shopping

Update – Hat tip to a Siegal at Daily Kos for turning me on to this video

I know that this isn’t a new subject, and I have written about it before, but I think it deserves repeating, and recent events brought it back to the top of my thoughts.Some background. I am the leader of my son’s Cub Scout den. Now, I don’t agree with everything the scouts do, but it is something that my son really loves, and, as a leader, I have the opportunity to shape which parts of scouting we engage in.So I have the boys in the meeting, and I start talking about our upcoming “Scouting For Food” drive. This single event gathers half the private donations for the Alameda County Food Bank. In years past, we tied plastic shopping bags on peoples doors one week, and then the following week we went back and collected the bags full of food. This year, the Scouts are not using the bags. We are putting up “door hangers” and asking people to use their own bags or boxes. I told the boys that this was a good thing, and started talking about the evils of plastic shopping bags. I told them, that if there was one simple thing that they could do to help the environment, it would be to convince their parents to use cloth shopping bags instead. The boys looked at me blankly, and said that they had never heard of such a thing (well, all except my son, who has seen us using cloth bags for his entire life)

So, this launched me into my tirade about plastic shopping bags, and while it is still fresh in my mind, and while I am still feeling somewhat emotional about it, here goes:

• The problem is huge 500 Billion bags are used around the world every year.
• The EPA has estimated at only 1% of plastic shopping bags are recycled.
• Plastic shopping bags can last up to 1,000 years in landfill

But worse, many plastic bags don’t even end up in landfill. they litter the streets, end up getting washed into our sewers, and ultimately find their way into the ocean. Currently, there is a “plastic patch” in the Pacific Ocean, TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS. The plastic patch contains 3.5 million tons of garbage, mostly plastic. It is in an area of ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii, where circular currents act like a trap. The patch has been growing. Increasing 10 fold in size each decade since the 1950s.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.

Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean’s surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.

“These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs,” Chabot said. “It doesn’t pass, and they literally starve to death.”

The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.

While we have always dumped trash into the sea, for most of our history, the trash has been able to biodegrade in a relatively short period of time. But plastic does not biodegrade. It photodegrades.

a process whereby sunlight breaks them into progressively smaller pieces, all of which are still plastic polymers. In fact, the degradation eventually yields individual molecules of plastic, but these are still too tough for most anything—even such indiscriminate consumers as bacteria—to digest. And for the past fifty years or so, plastics that have made their way into the Pacific Ocean have been fragmenting and accumulating as a kind of swirling sewer in the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

Possibly worse, the degrading can become concentrators for other toxic chemicals which then find their way into the foodstream

Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish? After what I have seen firsthand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.

And don’t think paper bags are any better. Using paper bags kill trees, and paper bags last a long time in landfill.

The answer is reusable cloth bags. It has been estimated that

In New York City alone, one less grocery bag per person per year would reduce waste by five million pounds and save $250,000 in disposal costs

Nobody is perfect. There are times I get and use plastic bags. Like when I need to pick up something to feed the kids that night, and I don’t have a cloth bag in the car. But every time you use a cloth bag instead you are saving energy, reducing landfill and protecting oceans. Even if you only use one cloth bag each shopping trip, you are helping.

Lots of people doing little things, can help.

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