Plastic bags: reuse or refuse!
Plastic never goes away.
It fragments into millions of tiny toxic pieces that are ingested by wildlife.
A few facts & figures about plastic bags
- Each year, approximately 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That's over one million bags per minute. Billions of them end up as litter each year.
- According to MSN, the production of plastic bags creates enough solid waste per year to fill the Empire State Building two and a half times.
- The Worldwatch Institute estimates that in the U.S. alone, an estimated 12,000,000 barrels of non-renewable petroleum oil are required to produce the 100 billion bags consumed annually. That's over $500,000,000 the country could be saving to put towards clean, green energy.
- 60,000: The number of plastic bags used in the U.S. every five seconds.
- The petroleum used to make only 14 plastic bags could drive a car 1 mile.
- Over 100,000 marine animals, including highly intelligent, adorable sea turtles, whales and dolphins, die every year because of plastic bags.
- In some parts of the ocean there are six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton.
- They can take from 400 to 1,000 years to decompose but their chemicals residues remain for years after that.
Source: TLC
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Plastic bags threaten animals
The news comes with depressing regularity. A whale dies in an urban harbor and, on being autopsied, reveals a stomach full of plastic, the most abundant detritus of civilization. Remarks a British marine biologist, “We have recorded plastic bags in the Bay of Biscay [in western Europe] over 120 miles from shore in waters over 4,000 meters in depth. Beaked whale species in particular are highly susceptible to swallowing plastic bags as they are believed to strongly resemble their target prey, squid. Other species of large whales, which take large mouthfuls of water during feeding, also take in plastic bags by accident and hence are also at risk.”
Elsewhere, a flamingo strangles itself on a bag, unable to twist its way out of the entangling plastic. A platypus suffers deep cuts from a plastic bag entwined around its body, while a pelican dies after consuming plastic bags while diving for fish. Calves, turtles, dolphins, seals—the list of victims goes on. Another scientist has recorded 170 kinds of land animals and birds injured by plastics washed up on British beaches, joining myriad aquatic species who suffer the effects of discarded bags in the environment.
The bad news continues. In November 2008 in Australia, a 10-foot-long crocodile tagged as part of a government wildlife-tracking program turned up dead, having consumed 25 plastic shopping and garbage bags. Whitey, as the crocodile was dubbed, had been relocated to a popular tourist destination called Magnetic Island, and authorities at first feared that he had died as a result of eating garbage left behind by visitors. Said Keith Williams of the group Australian Seabird Rescue, however, “Whitey probably was picking up plastic long before [being moved].”
Plastics take hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years to break down in most environments, such that it is not a stretch to imagine a single bag killing more than one animal over a very long lifetime on land and sea. And while the statistics are incomplete, some conservationists estimate that at least 100,000 mammals and birds die from them each year, felled by the estimated 500 billion and more plastic bags that are produced and consumed around the world; the numbers of fish killed by them are unknown, but they are sure to number in the millions.
Word of that devastation is spreading, and countries around the world have taken measures to limit or ban the use of throwaway plastic bags. The first to do so was Bangladesh, which banned plastic bags in 2002; following a particularly damaging typhoon, authorities discovered that millions of bags were clogging the country’s system of flood drains, contributing to the destruction.
In the same year, Ireland took another approach and instituted a steep tax on plastics. According to the country’s Ministry of Environment, use fell by 90 percent as a result, and the tax money that was generated funded a greatly expanded recycling program throughout the country. In 2003 the government of Taiwan put in place a system by which bags were no longer made available in markets without charge, and carryout restaurants were even required to charge for plastic utensils.
Larger economies have joined the cause. Australia has called for a voluntary ban, and thus far consumption of the bags has fallen markedly as 90 percent of the country’s retailers have signed on to the program. In 2005, French legislators imposed a ban on all nonbiodegradable plastic bags, to go into effect in 2010. Italy will also ban them that year, and China has already prohibited bags less than 0.025 millimeters thick. “Our country consumes a huge amount of plastic shopping bags each year,” a spokesperson for China’s State Council said on announcing the ban last May. “While plastic shopping bags provide convenience to consumers, this has caused a serious waste of energy and resources and environmental pollution because of excessive usage, inadequate recycling and other reasons.”
The previous text is an excerpt from an article published at Encyclopedia Britannica - to read the entire article, please click here!
Elsewhere, a flamingo strangles itself on a bag, unable to twist its way out of the entangling plastic. A platypus suffers deep cuts from a plastic bag entwined around its body, while a pelican dies after consuming plastic bags while diving for fish. Calves, turtles, dolphins, seals—the list of victims goes on. Another scientist has recorded 170 kinds of land animals and birds injured by plastics washed up on British beaches, joining myriad aquatic species who suffer the effects of discarded bags in the environment.
The bad news continues. In November 2008 in Australia, a 10-foot-long crocodile tagged as part of a government wildlife-tracking program turned up dead, having consumed 25 plastic shopping and garbage bags. Whitey, as the crocodile was dubbed, had been relocated to a popular tourist destination called Magnetic Island, and authorities at first feared that he had died as a result of eating garbage left behind by visitors. Said Keith Williams of the group Australian Seabird Rescue, however, “Whitey probably was picking up plastic long before [being moved].”
Plastics take hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years to break down in most environments, such that it is not a stretch to imagine a single bag killing more than one animal over a very long lifetime on land and sea. And while the statistics are incomplete, some conservationists estimate that at least 100,000 mammals and birds die from them each year, felled by the estimated 500 billion and more plastic bags that are produced and consumed around the world; the numbers of fish killed by them are unknown, but they are sure to number in the millions.
Word of that devastation is spreading, and countries around the world have taken measures to limit or ban the use of throwaway plastic bags. The first to do so was Bangladesh, which banned plastic bags in 2002; following a particularly damaging typhoon, authorities discovered that millions of bags were clogging the country’s system of flood drains, contributing to the destruction.
In the same year, Ireland took another approach and instituted a steep tax on plastics. According to the country’s Ministry of Environment, use fell by 90 percent as a result, and the tax money that was generated funded a greatly expanded recycling program throughout the country. In 2003 the government of Taiwan put in place a system by which bags were no longer made available in markets without charge, and carryout restaurants were even required to charge for plastic utensils.
Larger economies have joined the cause. Australia has called for a voluntary ban, and thus far consumption of the bags has fallen markedly as 90 percent of the country’s retailers have signed on to the program. In 2005, French legislators imposed a ban on all nonbiodegradable plastic bags, to go into effect in 2010. Italy will also ban them that year, and China has already prohibited bags less than 0.025 millimeters thick. “Our country consumes a huge amount of plastic shopping bags each year,” a spokesperson for China’s State Council said on announcing the ban last May. “While plastic shopping bags provide convenience to consumers, this has caused a serious waste of energy and resources and environmental pollution because of excessive usage, inadequate recycling and other reasons.”
The previous text is an excerpt from an article published at Encyclopedia Britannica - to read the entire article, please click here!
Sperm whale: death by 100 plastic bags
by CAROLYN KRAFT on 06/07/2012 - originally posted at Ocean Wild Things
Since my celebratory post last week on the City of Los Angeles plastic bag ban, this gruesome photo came to my attention. For those of you out there who still aren’t convinced that banning plastic bags is a good idea, then you must take a really good look at this photo of 100 plastic bags found in a dead sperm whale’s stomach.
Since my celebratory post last week on the City of Los Angeles plastic bag ban, this gruesome photo came to my attention. For those of you out there who still aren’t convinced that banning plastic bags is a good idea, then you must take a really good look at this photo of 100 plastic bags found in a dead sperm whale’s stomach.
The photo was taken by Dr. Alexandros Frantzis, Scientific Director at the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute in Greece. It was also published in the most recent issue of Whalewatcher, the journal published by the American Cetacean Society (ACS), which you should definitely check out because it’s all about sperm whales, the good, the bad and in this case, the ugly. (Everything about sperm whales is good, they are amazing animals in every way; the bad and the ugly centers around negative human impacts and how we are managing to harm and kill sperm whales even without whaling.)
The story of this whale is told in the ACS Whalewatcher. Scientists with the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute (PCRI) discovered a dead sperm whale floating near Mykonos Island in the Aegean Sea. It turns out the sperm whale was a male calf and close to 17 feet long, indicating he was an older calf, but still very young. He was bone thin; something had clearly gone wrong.
During the necropsy (an autopsy on animals), scientists were surprised to discover that the stomach was very easy to find. Normally, it’s buried deep within the anatomy of a sperm whale and hard to reach. It came popping out and was “disproportionately big and full for such a young whale.” At first the necropsy team wondered if the sperm whale had managed to eat a giant squid, the first record of a giant squid in the Mediterranean Sea?! But no, instead they found a miniature plastic landfill.
Here’s the direct quote describing the scene from the ACS Whalewatcher article on “Sperm Whales in the Mediterranean” by Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, Alexandros Frantzis and Luke Rendell: “All our ‘civilization’ was in the stomach of this whale. Tens of big compacted plastic bags used for garbage or construction materials, all kinds of plastic cover for anything we can buy in a supermarket, plastic ropes, pieces of nets, even a plastic bag with full address and telephone number of a souvlaki restaurant in the town of Thessaloniki. Unfortunately, the whale could not call to complain about the damage caused by their product.”
The finally tally: 100 plastic bags in the sperm whale’s stomach, plus other debris!
In the article, the researchers explain that young sperm whale’s are at greatest risk for eating plastic bags because they are still learning how to identify prey and plastic bags underwater probably look a lot like the large squid they like to eat. Although, they have also found dead adult sperm whales with plastic debris in their stomachs.
During an email exchange, I asked Dr. Alexandros Frantzis: “Have you seen this in sperm whales before? Or was this a first? Just curious because I didn’t know this was a problem in sperm whales.”
Dr. Frantzis responded: “Unfortunately yes. Several times and in various cetacean species: sperm whales, Cuvier’s beaked whales and Rissos’ dolphins. All these species have something in common: they are mainly or exclusively squid eaters and deep divers. Except one beaked whale and one Risso’s dolphin that were found with their stomach completely or almost full of plastic bags (like that sperm whale), all other cases concerned a smaller quantity of plastic debris. However, we find plastic bags or other plastic products of human ‘civilization’ in an important percentage, more than 50%, of the stomach contents examined from the above mentioned cetacean species.”
My reaction summed up: Gasp, gulp, guilt, groan.
What are we doing to our oceans? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but we can still make a difference by reducing our use of plastic bags. Help sperm whales and all ocean animals by supporting plastic bag bans and using reusable canvas bags instead. It’s at least a start and the least we can do considering we created this mess.
(Note: A huge thanks to Dr. Alexandros Frantzis and the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute for sharing this photo and for all they do to help whales, dolphins and porpoises living in the Mediterranean Sea. To purchase a copy of the most recent Whalewatcher, contact the American Cetacean Society, or better yet, become a member and support conservation of whales, dolphins and porpoises.)
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