http://www.plasticoceans.org/film/
Last night I took my wife to see the documentary "A Plastic Ocean",
followed by a panel discussion of local experts on plastics in local waters.
I have been following this subject area for several years now, and I
learned a couple of new things from the movie. My wife, who feels that
I do more than enough on environmental issues for several households was
affected by the movie. As we left, despite being thirsty after 3 hours
at the event, she refused to buy a bottle of water from the vending
machine in the building, as the single-use plastic bottle is an
appreciable part of the problem highlighted in the movie.
From the panel discussion, it was made clear that even in our
'pristine' local rivers, plastic pollution is present. In one sampling
run last summer, it was made clear that the microplastics count (per 100
litre sample) was demonstrably higher just downstream from the local
waste-water management facility than upstream from it. As I have been
saying for years now, conventional municipal water treatment is not
designed to capture microplastics.
In short, waste plastics are killing our food chain via multiple
pathways. We need to address this on multiple fronts. There are some
success stories, but not nearly enough. Stopping plastic pollution in
one jurisdiction does not protect against migrating plastic pollution
from other locations. It's one planet, and plastic pollution is found
at both poles; on mountains; on, in and under the ocean and other water
bodies; and in our bodies.
There are many ways to reduce the amount of plastic waste ending up in
our environment (reduce, reuse, recycle) and community activities to
clean up some of the waste on shorelines and on land. Legislation is
slowly coming into effect in some places (municipal, state/province,
federal) to encourage more recycling.
Some individuals and groups are actively developing and promoting
alternatives to pervasive plastics (e.g.,
https://www.lifewithoutplastic.com/store/ca/)
Personally, I'm still working on 3 areas:
1) floating plastic pollution (nano, micro, meso and macro) already in
our wild waters
2) micro and nano plastics escaping from municipal waste-water treatment
3) micro and nano plastic clean-up on shorelines
If you are interested in any of the 3 areas above, I have written a
couple of short documents I can share (summary of solutions for the 3
areas above, backgrounder on organizations and technologies being
applied to clean-up water-borne plastic pollution).
--
It's your planet. If you won't look after it, who will?
Darryl McMahon
