Plastics pollution is severe and getting worse

From an Article by Michael Tanenbaum, Philly Voice, December 12, 2019

Philadelphia City Council passed a bill Thursday that will ban retailers from providing customers with single-use plastic bags, ending a 12-year effort to enact the environmentally minded legislation.

The ban spearheaded by Councilman Mark Squilla, who pushed for it previously on four separate occasions, would take effect July 2, 2020, pending the final signature from Mayor Jim Kenney.

Businesses affected include supermarkets, convenience stores, service stations, department stores, dollar stores, clothing stores, restaurants, food trucks, farmers’ markets, dry cleaners, and delivery services

Despite an attempt to also impose a 15-cent fee for all other single-use bags – such as paper and heavier plastic bags – provided by businesses to customers, that provision was ditched when other council members argued it would disproportionately impact the city’s poorer residents.

The law is intended to both reduce waste and save the city money. Philadelphia spends between $9 million and $12 million a year cleaning plastic bag waste from the streets, sewers, and bodies of water.

“Philadelphia uses approximately 1 billion single-use bags every year, and most of those are plastic,” said Joseph Otis Minott, executive director of Clean Air Council. “These bags litter our communities and cost taxpayers millions of dollars every year to clean up. Although this bill is long overdue and misses a very important fee component, we are very pleased that City Council has finally started to address the chronic, and devastating litter problems the city faces.”

Environmental groups withdrew support for the bill when the 15-cent fee was dropped, claiming the ban would be far less effective if customers faced no penalty for not bringing a reusable bag.

The bill does include a study on the outcome of the program to determine whether it needs to be adjusted, potentially by adding a fee at a future date.

“By banning single-use plastic retail bags, Philadelphia has joined hundreds of other communities across the country in sending a message that we realize there is a plastic problem,” Minott added. “We hope that this law will be amended in the next session to include a fee on all other bags.”

The Three (3) R’s for Our Green World

Pacific Ocean Garbage Accumulating

Solar Impulse Pilot: ‘I Flew Over Plastic Waste as Big as a Continent’

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com , April 25, 2016

As the Solar Impulse 2 made its historic 62-hour flight from Hawaii to California without fuel, pilot Bertrand Piccard personally saw the horrific amount of plastic in our oceans.

While flying above the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Piccard sent out a tweet to Boyan Slat, the 21-year-old founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup.

“I flew over plastic waste as big as a continent,” Piccard wrote. “We must continue to support projects like @BoyanSlat Ocean Cleanup,” referring to Slat’s ambitious project of ridding the world’s oceans of plastic trash.

The Ocean Cleanup describes itself as the “world’s first feasible concept to clean the oceans of plastic” and has garnered widespread public admiration and support especially for Slat, a former aerospace engineering student who proposed the concept when he was only 17.

Piccard and Slat also spoke on Friday as the solar-powered plane made its risky journey. It’s no surprise that the pilot and the young inventor linked up—both are using innovative technology to promote the greater good of the planet. Piccard and the Solar Impulse team plan to fly around the world using only the power of the sun to promote clean transportation and other environmental causes.

“We have demonstrated it is feasible to fly many days, many nights, that the technology works,” fellow pilot Andre Borschberg told the Associated Press. “I think innovation and pioneering must continue,” Piccard added. “It must continue for better quality of life, for clean technologies, for renewable energy. This is where the pioneers can really express themselves and be successful.”

Slat has spoken before about the necessity to protect our oceans. “The oceans are the most important life—support systems of our planet,” he said in 2014. “It regulates the climate, it produces oxygen. The vast majority of biodiversity can be found in the ocean.”

The Ocean Cleanup involves a massive static platform and V-shapped booms that passively corrals plastics with wind and ocean currents. If all goes to plan, the project will officially launch in 2020 and be the longest floating structure ever deployed in the ocean.

Similarly, both parties have experienced hiccups along the way. Before arriving in California, the plane, the Solar Impulse 2, had been grounded in Hawaii for nine months as it underwent repairs after its record-breaking five-day trip from Japan to Hawaii in July.

As for the Ocean Cleanup project, despite a 530-page feasibility study, some critics and scientists have written off Slat’s idea on mechanical design and ecological impacts. Dr. Marcus Eriksen, the co-founder of 5 Gyres, offered a number of constructive suggestions for the project.

Still, it’s very clear that the environment needs whatever help it can get, from curbing our reliance on dirty energy to putting a stop to plastic waste. The world’s oceans and marine life are suffering from a devastating plastic crisis, with 8 million metric tons of plastic waste dumped into our oceans every year. Plastic pollution is only getting worse as consumer use of plastic and plastic-intensive goods intensifies in emerging countries.

Not only that, an alarming new study by the University of Delaware physical oceanographer Tobias Kukulka reported that there might be much more plastic than what’s estimated.

“My research has shown that ocean turbulence actually mixes plastics and other pollutants down into the water column despite their buoyancy,” Kukulka said, according to UD Daily. “This means that surface measurements could be wildly off and the concentration of plastic in the marine environment may be significantly higher than we thought.”