Here are some more facts about the North Pacific Gyre and plastics. Get your facts on and take action!

The Gyre is for Real!

There’s no plastic bag island where Hufflebot now lives, but there is a lot of trash floating out there.

Here are some facts to help you start learning:

The basics are just like Socket says. In the Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there’s now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that’s twice the size of Texas. This contains six times as much plastic as biomass such as plankton, jellyfish and other marine life. As the Gyre swirls around, plastic trash is broken into smaller pieces, just like a kitchen food processor.

Here’s a list with some more facts on plastics in the environment. Check out the fact sheet that the folks from Algalita Marine Research Labs came up with: http://www.algalita.org/pdf/plastic-in-the-environment.pdf

Plastic Bags are Bad News

It really is time to bag the bag. Here are some key things to think about:

Here on our little Planet Earth, over one million plastic bags are used each minute. Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags that they have mistaken for food.

Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade - breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food web when animals accidentally ingest.

According to a story on Salon.com last year, only 1% of plastic bags are recycled worldwide. That number is about 2% in the U.S, and the rest of the bags find their way to landfills where they can take when discarded can persist for centuries.

Solutions!

A group of school kids in Hanover, New Hampshire are taking things into their own hands! Just like the Greenhouse Gang, Kids For a Cooler Planet are making waves and changing the tide of plastic bags.

In 2001, Ireland consumed 1.2 billion plastic bags, or 316 per person. But an extremely successful plastic bag tax, introduced in 2002, reduced consumption by 90%. Approximately 18,000,000 liters of oil have been saved due to this reduced production. Governments around the world are considering implementing similar measures. Pretty cool, huh?

San Francisco Bans Plastic Bags! Maybe this was from Scoot, and maybe it wasn’t. Click here to learn more!

Check out more info relating to plastic bag waste at these websites:

• Reusable Bag Facts
• We’ve Still Got a Long Way to Go
• Marine Litter Facts