The “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” lies about 1,000 miles from the coast of California. It is in the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, which is one of the oldest and most diverse ecosystems in the world. The garbage patch has gotten a lot of media attention in the last year. However, due to the fact that one must get on a boat and go all the way out to the patch to study it, there hadn’t been any in-depth scientific analysis of the patch,… until now.
The Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) went on an in-depth search of the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” this month. Their findings were varied.
The stresses in our early twenty-first century civilization take many forms—social, economic, environmental, and political. One distinctly unhealthy and visible illustration of all four is the swelling flow of garbage associated with a throwaway economy. As noted in my book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, throwaway products were first conceived following World War II as a convenience and as a way of creating jobs and sustaining economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the more jobs there would be.
What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.
We’ve all done the elementary school math story problem: Would you rather have $10,000 right now, or a penny doubled every day for a month? Well, in the end, those of us who were greedy enough to take the $10,000 right up front ended up poorer than those who took the penny.
This problem seems silly to us though. Now what about this one. Would you rather take $1,000 right now or $4,000 three years from now? Chances are, you chose the immediate cash. Psychologists use the term ”delay discounting” to describe our inability to resist the temptation of a smaller immediate reward in lieu of receiving a larger reward later. Most people choose the smaller, more immediate reward over the larger “patience is a virtue” reward.
And no matter what the context, discounting stems from three factors: a bias for the present; uncertainty; and projected resources. We are a people who thrive on instant gratification; that’s one reason we love TV so much. It is also a contributing factor to the current economic crisis (and debt in general).
Would you be so cavalier in throwing out a disposable razor if you knew how much it actually impacted your local environments? Would you think twice about purchasing a bottle of water if you knew how much it cost you to dispose of? That’s the question asked by the MIT SENSEable City lab these days. And they plan to see what effects one man’s trash actually has on the environment.
Inspired by the Green NYC Initiative which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in New York to almost 100 percent by 2030 (currently, only about 30 percent of the city’s waste is diverted from landfills for recycling!), a group of MIT researchers have developed a program that uses special electronic tags in order to track different types of waste on their journey through the disposal systems of New York and Seattle. Its name? Trash Track. Trash Track will monitor the patterns and costs of urban disposal while raising public awareness about the impacts the garbage can under the sink has on the environment.
“The Experiment- How do environmental conditions affect the amount of biogas produced?” If you are homeschooling like I am, entering a science fair or simply looking for a fun way to teach your children about our impact on this planet then Save the Earth Science Experiments, Science Fair Projects for Eco-Kids by Elizabeth Snoke Harris is the book for you.
This fun book (which I purchased through a Scholastic flier) is filled with experiments to get you thinking (and by YOU I do mean parents as well as the kids). The book begins with an introduction on problems occurring in the world which impact our global well being. It is then followed by a section on how to put together an effective Science Fair Project and more than 20 experiments that are related to our current environmental concerns. Throughout the book, you will find short stories and facts which detail a concern or in “The High Price of Ethanol” points out that a solution (biofuels) we think is better, is actually just as damaging.
Apa Sherpa, 49, has climbed Mount Everest a record 18 times but now he’s preparing for a 19th, this time to clean up the mess left by the thousands of climbers who have scaled the mountain since 1953.
Apa, a high-altitude guide, plans to take the Eco Everest Expedition up the mountain to clean up garbage left by previous expeditions. Climbers have noted the build-up of waste on the mountain for several years.
New York’s Ontario County is exploring the possibility of turning garbage into gas at the county’s landfill.
The county is debating whether to let Casella Waste Systems, which runs the landfill in the town of Seneca, build a $5 million pilot plant there. If the pilot proves successful, a $100 million plant could eventually be built on the site, reports the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The idea will be debated at a public hearing tonight.
Currently the landfill takes in about 2,200 tons of trash a day from 33 counties, other states and Canada.
However this is not the first journey to be made across the Pacific using plastic waste. Last year a raft made of 15,000 bottles called the Junk successfully made a similar journey from California to Hawaii in 87 days in order to promote awareness of the global plastic waste problem.
In less than one day, nearly 400,000 volunteers in 104 countries found and collected 11,439,086 items of litter from beaches and waterways.
The garbage cleanup was part of the Ocean Conservancy’s annual Coastal Cleanup. Information about the types of garbage found during the cleanup was compiled into a report that will help planners to understand and address the problem of litter.
I may be biased by my happy life in South Korea, but still I think there are two things that Japan does better. Firstly, Japan excels at making foreign tourists feel like rock stars. Several years back on a school exchange trip to Hokkaido, my group and I received enough popular adoration to make us feel like the Beatles in their heyday. Secondly, Japan is immaculate. For instance, Sapporo may be the fifth biggest city in Japan with a population just larger than Manhattan’s, but when I visited there I saw neither a single plastic bag nor newspaper littering the streets.
Now, it must be said by way of comparison that Korean cities are by and large much cleaner than American ones. Or at least it’s fair to say that the dodgiest parts of Korea’s large cities are still much nicer than their American counterparts. Almost unimaginable in Korea are the dingy, urine stained shop fronts of San Francisco’s Market Street or the sprawling cardboard-house ghettos of LA’s Skid Row. However, almost everywhere you go in Korea you’re unfortunately bound to run into litter.
