“The unprecedented plastic waste tide plaguing our oceans and shores, can become as limited as our chosen relationship with plastics, which involves a dramatic behavioral change on our part…”Captions and Photograph: © SAF — Coastal Care
Excerpts;
Often described as the world’s number one consumer product, as well as the most ubiquitous, shopping bags are now among the world’s most-banned. As of last July, the United Nations counted 127 nations that have banned or taxed bags‒and bag regulations have proliferated so quickly, especially at the local level, that even an Al Qaeda-backed terrorist group joined in‒banning plastic shopping bags last summer as “a serious threat to the well-being of humans and animals alike.”
Read Full Article, National Geographic (04-17-2019)
New York plastic bag ban comes into force but opponents tote exceptions; Guardian UK (02-29-2020)
7 Facts about plastic bags that will change how you use them; Padi2 (03-27-2017) Kenya brings in world’s toughest plastic bag ban: Using plastic bags is illegal — and punishable by jail time; NPR (08-28-2017)
No matter where you go in Kenya — from the vast expanses of the Great Rift Valley to the white-sand beaches off the Indian Ocean — one thing is a constant: plastic bags. But beginning today, almost all plastic bags are illegal in Kenya…
Think You Can’t Live Without Plastic Bags? Consider This: Rwanda Did It; Guardian UK (02-15-2015)
In 2008, while the rest of the world was barely starting to consider a tax on single-use plastic bags, the small East African nation decided to ban them completely…
Plastic Waste Causes $13 Billion In Annual Damage To Marine Ecosystems, UN
Concern is growing over widespread plastic waste that is threatening marine life – with conservative yearly estimates of $13 billion in financial damage to marine ecosystems, according to two reports issued at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly.
Dead whale found with 40 kilograms of plastic bags in its stomach; CNN (03-18-2019)
Video captures moment plastic enters food chain, BBC News (03-11-2017)
A scientist has filmed the moment plastic microfibre is ingested by plankton, illustrating how the material is affecting life beneath the waves. The footage shows one way that plastic waste could be entering the marine and global food chain…
Plastic pollution: When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide, Coastal Care – ©2009
” Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. However, durable and very slow to degrade, plastic materials that are used in the production of so many products all, ultimately, become waste with staying power. Our tremendous attraction to plastic, coupled with an undeniable behavioral propensity of increasingly over-consuming, discarding, littering and thus polluting, has become a combination of lethal nature…”
