Human Behavior, Global Warming, and the Ubiquitous Plastic Bag

Human Behavior, Global Warming, and the Ubiquitous Plastic Bag


By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: September 30, 2007
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y.

When she moved to the United States from Germany seven years ago, Angela Neigl brought with her the energy-conscious sensibilities of life in Europe. You drove small cars. You recycled every can, lid and stray bit of household waste. You brought your own reusable bags or crate to the market rather than adding to the billions of plastic bags clogging landfills, killing aquatic creatures on the bottoms of oceans and lakes, and blowing in the wind.

But, alas, there she was Friday morning, lugging her white plastic bags from the Turco’s supermarket, like everyone else, figuring there was no fighting the American way of waste.

“When I was first here, I brought my own bags to the market, but they would stuff the groceries in the plastic bags anyway. Finally, I gave up,” she said. “People are very nice here. It’s more relaxed. But the environmental thing is a little scary.”

You could have learned a lot, I guess, about the politics of global warming from the lukewarm response President Bush received last week from skeptical delegates at his conference on climate change and energy security. But in the most micro of ways, you can learn plenty any day of the week at the Turco’s or the Food Emporium in Yorktown Heights, the Super Stop & Shop in North White Plains, the A.&P. or Mrs. Green’s Natural Market in Mount Kisco or just about anywhere Americans shop in Westchester County and beyond.

snip...
Plastic bags are not the biggest single issue out there, and no expert on global warming would suggest solutions rest wholly with decisions made by individual consumers. On the other hand, it is estimated that the United States goes through 100 billion plastic bags a year, which take an estimated 12 million barrels of oil to produce and last almost forever. And if individual decisions can’t solve the problem, the wrong ones can certainly compound it.

snip...
Plastic bags are a small part of the picture. (sport utility vehicles, McMansions, long commutes, anyone?) But you think, if we can’t change our behavior to deal with this one, we can’t change our behavior to deal with anything.

more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/nyregion/30towns.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Plastic bottles, a few bags, a couple broken cassette tapes, and even an emerald green 2.0MB, Mac formatted floppy disk (but probably thrown out by a Windows user because we all know that nobody involved with Apple could ever do anything wrong, yes? :eyes: )

I would much rather use my mesh and cotton bags......and paper bags for fruit and veggies.

in flyover country would do this, but the woman ahead of me in line had canvas bags, I brought my canvas bag, and I heard the man in back of me refuse a bag for his two items.

If they're learning around here, I feel a lot better about my fellow humans.

Or maybe they're just sick of seeing the damned things flapping away in the tops of all their trees.

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/master.html?http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/1103/1103_feature.html

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In 2001, in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, we published the results of our survey and the analysis we had made of the debris, reporting, among other things, that there are six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton. Our readers were as shocked as we were when we saw the yield of our first trawl. Since then we have returned to the area twice to continue documenting the phenomenon. During the latest trip, in the summer of 2002, our photographers captured underwater images of jellyfish hopelessly entangled in frayed lines, and transparent filter feeding organisms with colored plastic fragments in their bellies.

Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his colleagues have discovered that floating plastic fragments accumulate hydrophobic—that is, non- water-soluble—toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.

The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5x1015) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. 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.

Many people have seen photographs of seals trapped in nets or choked by plastic six-pack rings, or sea turtles feeding on plastic shopping bags, but the poster child for the consumption of pelagic plastic debris has to be the Laysan albatross. The plastic gadgets one typically finds in the stomach of the bird—whose range encompasses the remote, virtually uninhabited region around the northwest Hawaiian Islands—could stock the checkout counter at a convenience store. My analysis of the stomach contents of birds from two colonies of Laysan albatrosses that nest and feed in divergent areas of the North Pacific show differences in the types of plastic they eat. I believe those differences reveal something about the way plastic is transported and breaks down in the ocean.

also the plastic bag is not only a culprit of global warming, some wild life die from ingesting these.

Thanks for the thread Kadie.

20% of the plastic bottles are being recycled, which is becoming a major problem.

and frankly, the bottles aren't all that healthy for those drinking the water either.

All of this crap in the streets and trash dumps is what "the free market" produces when left to it's own devices.