Matt,
I won't be insulted by your misreadings of my posts and your rather, I agree, 'snippy' posts if you won't be insulted by my suggesting that you post something to back up your claims.
Thanks for the post. It informs everyone who reads the thread. I'm not at all convinced that plastic is better than paper. Paper bags should be recycled and reused. They should not go into landfills. Perhaps there needs to be money given for paper bags that are returned, too.
I don't think any remedy should be 'simple,' but carefully thought out. That means that commensurate with getting rid of plastic bags, there is a thoughtful alternative. Humans are going to dispose of everything they use, eventually. Hemp, anyone?
I think that the trade-off for paper vs. plastic vis-a-vis killing off ocean life (eventually all of it) still tells me that I would pick paper.
To simply say that turtles and other sea life eat the bags and die is to not understand fully what is happening in the ocean: the tiny bits which the plastic breaks into becomes part of the oceanic 'soup.' This soup is usually composed of plankton and other easily decomposed material, but now is impossibly mixed with tiny, tiny bits of plastic. This imperils the smallest life, phytoplankton, which is the basis for all life on the planet.
This is the guy I have been most influenced by, Charles Moore:
"We cannot wait for more studies. If there is any time left to turn this around, there isn’t much. My own opinion is that there is no good plastic and that we must immediately end or at least put severe limitations on its use."
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/S...5oct05.htm
"I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic."
"Trash has always been tossed into the seas, but it has been broken down in a fairly short time into carbon dioxide and water by marine microorganisms."
"What we saw amazed us. We were looking at a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments-a plastic-plankton soup."
"In 2001, in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, we published the results of our survey and the analysis we had made of the debris, reporting, among other things, that
there are six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre
for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton."
"Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his colleagues have discovered that floating plastic fragments accumulate hydrophobic-that is, non-water-soluble-toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances."
"The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5 x 1015) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish..."
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/M...cNov03.htm
NOW READ CAREFULLY: There is a solution and that would be to, over time, require everyone to bring their own bags. If one forgets, then, for a small fee (I paid $1 for a huge Home Depot re-usable bag) a reusable bag can be bought. I think money to buy back plastic for recycling is also important.
I came to some of my conclusions by reading others' posts which informed me, not only of the facts, but also of others' ideas and preferences. This was elucidating.
Since I believe that, when the oceans and everything in them die, then humans are next, I think that keeping plastic out of the ocean is THE most important thing. There is already so much CO2 created by the U.S., China, corporations, coal burning, the military, cutting down the rain forest; methane from raising meat, etc. that I don't know if transporting paper bags is the biggest or worst culprit. But, bottom line, it seems that we must quit doing all these things that are destroying the earth's environment.
Biggest problem, bottom line? Too many people.
p.s. I was beginning to think Matt was a troll, but preferred to give him the benefit of the doubt. That's one of the reasons I asked you to post some research, Matt. I thought that, if you didn't, it would mean that you were just here to see what sort of trouble you could stir up.
april
]
]