Plastic Bags Are Killing Us

Plastic BagsOnce upon a time, the “Paper or plastic?” question seemed like it could go either way. Choose plastic and you’re choosing something that may be stuck in landfills for hundreds of years. Choose paper and you’re sacrificing trees (“it takes 14 million trees to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used every year by Americans”). But it’s way more complicated than that. From an excellent article at Salon:

Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil. … Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide.

The bags look like jellyfish to a lot of marine life. The bags that don’t get “eaten” become part of the flotsam that now clogs every square inch of the world’s now fully plastinated oceans (some sections of ocean now carry 6x more plastic than biomass).

more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Despite the hopeful-looking recycling symbol on the side of most plastic bags, recycling centers can’t handle them – they bring most recycling equipment to a screeching halt. You’re better off bringing them back to the store where you got them.

“The only salient answer to paper or plastic is neither. Bring a reusable canvas bag, says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

Sadly, environmental incentives to get people to bring their own canvas bags shopping have never worked. But economic incentives might. IKEA now charges customers five cents per plastic bag, and donates the proceeds to an environmental working group. Fashion might work too:

Bringing your own bag — or BYOB as Whole Foods dubs it — is the latest eco-chic statement. When designer Anya Hindmarch’s “I am not a plastic bag” bag hit stores in Taiwan, there was so much demand for the limited-edition bag that the riot police had to be called in to control a stampede, which sent 30 people to the hospital.

Earthresource.org is running the Campaign Against The Plastic Plague.

Lake of Paint

China Digital Times (a J-School-hosted site) links to a stunning pair of images showing an algae bloom in China’s Lake Dianchi so intense the water seems to have turned to paint (here’s how the lake used to look).

Algaebloom

Salon.com picked up and expanded on the post: Invasion of the great green algae monster, quoting Ming Dynasty poet Yang Shen:

A windy lake is Dian yet never any dust is seen,
The newly green isle Ding in the far horizon lies.
Beauty one enjoys here as in land south of the Yangtse River,
A vast rippling lake in spring with distant foam lily white.

The bloom is stunning – and tragic – evidence of the consequences of China’s economic boom and rapid industrialization. While it’s common (and largely true) to point out that China’s boom has been marching on heedless of environmental considerations, that’s not quite the case here.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect to the current algae explosion is that Lake Dianchi has been a target for environmental cleanup for more than a decade. The days when the city of Kunming simply dumped nearly all of its raw sewage and garbage directly into the lake are more or less over. Landfills have been created, sewage plants erected, waste water treatment facilities put into place.

But efforts to clean up the lake have come too little too late, insufficient to offset years of abuse. “The struggle is vast: Cleaning up Lake Dianchi means nothing less than bringing to heel the entire economic revolution that has swept China over the past three decades.”

What kind of poem would Yang Shen write, if he were alive today? … Would he observe, in tones of the darkest gloom, that a jewel of China’s environment that has been treasured for centuries upon centuries has been made unfit for human beings or fish in the space of one lifetime?

To quote BTO, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Music: Jefferson Starship :: Dance With the Dragon

What the World Eats

Time is running an excellent photo essay depicting the amount of food consumed by various families in the course of a week, from 15 countries around the world.

In Chad, this family living in a refugee camp spends around $1.23 per week, mostly to make soup with fresh sheep meat.

Chad

In North Carolina, this family spends $341.98 per week on spaghetti, potatoes, sesame chicken (piles of pizza and soda also involved).

Us

The photos are stunning, as is the variance in weekly expenditure, from the $1.23 in Chad to the $500 spent by the Bargteheide family on fried potatoes with onions, bacon and herring, fried noodles with eggs and cheese, pizza, vanilla pudding. Of course, every family is different, and there is no attempt to portray anything like a “typical” family.

Turbine Turbulence: How to Fix U.S. Wind Power

Why is U.S. wind power output two million times below its potential, accounting for just one half of one percent of our annual consumption? (For point of comparison, Denmark currently gets 20% of its electricity from wind). Popular Mechanics sums up some of the challenges and potential solutions.

– Inconsistency. If the wind is blowing at night, and the grid is too full to soak up the excess energy while the town sleeps, a lot of energy goes to waste. And there’s no quick fix for a windless day. Batteries are the answer of course, but batteries make more sense for individual homes than they do for entire cities.

– The biggest wind farms are deep in rural areas such as North Dakota and Kansas, but it takes big pipes to bring the electricity they generate back to city grids. At a cost of $1 million/mile, no one wants to foot the bill. But all power sources need feeds to home-base, so wind energy should be taken into account along with other power sources when planning grids.

– Though an estimated terrawatt exists up to 50 miles off-shore, deep-sea turbines present their own set of problems – oil rig style platforms have to be enhanced to withstand the horizontal shear of blades as big as football fields, and floating them around is more complex than it sounds.

More info.

Music: Mercury Rev :: Hudson Lines

Un-Charge Your Charger

Reach under your desk and touch your cell phone charger’s wall wart. Is it warm? That warmth correlates to wasted electricity. Treehugger: 95% of all energy consumed by cell phones is used by the charger when the phone is not plugged in. Some interesting follow-ups in the discussions there — two readers extrapolate the rather small amount of waste to the entire population of Canada (32 million) and come up with 32.3 million kilowatt hours, or 196,977.08 barrels of oil per year. And that’s just cell phone chargers. In Canada. Extrapolate to the whole world, and to all devices with wall chargers, and the numbers get scary.

Other articles I’ve seen on this say the figure is closer to 2/3 of cell phone electricity, rather than 95%. But:

If 10 percent of the world’s cell phone owners did this … it would reduce energy consumption by an amount equivalent to that used by 60,000 European homes per year.

Nokia’s new phones will be visually suggesting that users unplug their chargers when not in use. Nice move on Nokia’s part, but makes you wonder why chargers aren’t made with sensors and switches, capable of turning themselves off when not in use. Apparently there is no technical barrier to building chargers this way – the absence of such switches now is purely economic.

I’m thinking of creating a home charging station, so all of our gizmos’ chargers can be plugged in to a single power strip with an on/off switch.

Music: Mission of Burma :: The Mute Speaks Out

Turtle Egg Defender

Santo Que es mas macho? Sea turtle egg, or Mexican wrestler? Millions of Mexican men believe eating sea turtle eggs will enhance their sexual potency – an unfortunate reality for endangered turtles like the Leatherbacks.

Wrestler supreme El Hijo del Santo (“Son of the Saint”) has been appearing in ads assuring his fans that he acquired his super wrestling powers with no help from turtle eggs. Now that’s a role model. Also in on the campaign is Mexican supermodel Dorismar.

The model appeared in print ads wearing a slinky black bikini alongside baby turtles scurrying across a beach. “My man doesn’t need sea turtle eggs, because he knows they don’t make him more potent,” reads the ad’s caption.

Brilliant tactic. I’m trying to imagine how similar campaigns might appear in other countries where species are threatened in part due to demand for animal parts with alleged aphrodisiac powers. Which super-hunks or glamour-pusses are going to stick up for the rightful owners of Chinese tiger penises, or African rhino horns?

Music: Califone :: Pink & Sour

If The Earth Were a Sandwich

Last year’s meme, but I missed it — Ze Frank’s If the Earth Were a Sandwich:

Never before have two pieces of bread been placed on the ground directly opposite each other on the globe, thus making an earth sandwich. The fact that the earth has never been a sandwich is probably why things are so f***’d up.

Use the find opposite tool so you can discover what point on earth is diametrically opposite your own back yard. Like Ze Frank, diametrically opposite my house is the middle of the Indian Ocean. In fact, it looks like the entire U.S. is SOL on this one, exceptin’ Hawaii and a tiny sliver of northern Alaska. But I strongly encourage all of you reading from Mongolia to hook up with your antimatter cousins in Argentina.

Music: Tom Waits :: Grapefruit moon

The Great Turtle Race

For the past 100 million years, 6-foot long leatherback turtles have been crawling onto a beach in Costa Rica to lay their eggs, then sprinting back to their feeding grounds in The Galapagos to re-fill their bellies. But 90 percent of the leatherbacks have disappeared in recent decades, victims of human pressures. The turtles’ epic history may only have 10 years left – they’re on their way out.

This year, researchers attached satellite transponders to the turtles’ shells as they laid their eggs, and were able to track routes back to The Galapagos. The resulting wealth of GPS data means their race home can be plotted, full of educational opportunities. The trip will be re-played as a 14-day journey starting tomorrow. Amy, Miles, and I have all picked a turtle to cheer on, and will be watching the trip for the next two weeks.

At first I bristled to see the names of corporate sponsors attached to the animals, but that was a knee-jerk reaction. Corporations are exactly the entities that should be chipping in to raise awareness and change the world. Away we go.

The site is being produced by J-School multimedia journalism instructor Jane Stevens.

Music: Tom Waits :: Earth Died Screaming

Spin Time

Catching up on some of the SXSW talks I missed via podcast, and happened on Alex Steffen’s Worldchanging conversation. Lots of good stuff, but was struck by one tidbit in particular. But before I reveal that, pop quiz:

If you own a power drill, how many total minutes would you estimate it’s been spinning since you bought it? Think hard. Be honest.

How much spin time is on your drill?

View Results

According to Worldchanging (who admittedly provide no backup for their data), the average power drill “is used for somewhere between six and twenty minutes in its entire lifetime.”

And yet supposedly almost half of all American households own one. If you think of all the energy and materials it takes to make, store and then dispose of those drills — all the plastic and metal parts; all the trucks used to ship them and stores built to sell them; all the landfills they wind up in — the ecological cost of each minute of drilling can be seen to be absurdly large, and thus each hole we put in the wall comes with a chunk of planetary destruction already attached.

But what we want is the hole, not the drill. That is, most of us, most of the time, would be perfectly happy not owning the drill itself if we had the ability to make that hole in the wall in a reasonably convenient manner when the need arose. What if we could substitute, in other words, a hole-drilling service for owning a drill?

We can. Already there are tool libraries, tool-sharing services, and companies that will rent you a drill when you want one. Other models are possible as well, and such product-service systems are not limited to hand tools.

It’s a significant point. Which unfortunately ignores the fact that there’s an ecological footprint involved in driving to the tool-lending library when that rare picture-hanging time arrives. But still – if you step back and look at how much you own that you seldom use, multiplied by n zillion people, the impact is staggering. How do we change our own minds, our own ways of living? How much convenience are you willing to sacrifice for ecological gains?

Music: Akron/Family :: The Lightning Bolt of Compassion

Good News

What’s going on? Two chunks of good news for humans in one day?

– The Supremes ruled 5/4 that, gee, the EPA does have a legal right to regulate C02 emissions after all. This all dates back to 1970, when the EPA got away with murder — on the technicality that carbon dioxide was not technically a pollutant. It may help melt glaciers and snuff out polar bears, but hey, it’s just a common gas, none of the EPA’s bidnis. No longer.

– Non-DRM music from the EMI catalog will soon become available through iTunes. Not only will it be unprotected and playable on non-Apple hardware, it’ll be available as 256kbps AAC – far higher fidelity digital music than is currently commercially available. Apple wouldn’t be upping the bitrate if consumers weren’t demanding it; it’s heartening to know that users can tell the difference.

And there was much rejoicing, less gnashing of teeth.

Music: Pere Ubu :: Navvy