I've been thinking about bags—and, more generally, plastic—a lot lately, and not just because of BPA.
For one thing, the final phase of San Francisco's plastic-bag ban just went into effect: as of yesterday, pharmacies can no longer hand out their heretofore fave kind of sack. For another, I just read this post from Sightline Daily (via Terrapass's blog), which contends that the importance of the paper vs. plastic choice is dwarfed by the choice of what you put in the bag.
That may be true in the embodied-energy sense—embodied energy being what's required to manufacture, supply to the point of use, and disassemble or dispose of something. But the unfortunate fact is that lots of bags and other plastic items never get properly disposed of (whatever that means) and instead end up polluting our oceans. A great number of them congregate in what's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Two web videos explore that floating dump in compelling ways. The first episode of "Gorilla in the Greenhouse," SustainLane's web-video series for kids, raises awareness about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the evils of plastic pollution at the same time as it promotes eco-consciousness and action on the part of the next generation.
For the grown-up set, there's "Garbage Island," a 12-part VBS.TV series in which a group of "non-hippie environmentalists" takes a three-week boat trip to the North Pacific Gyre to find the garbage patch and analyze its waters. What surprised them (and me as well) was that the patch is not actually a visible clump the size of Texas; rather, it's a dense accumulation of debris (the size of Texas). "I came out here expecting to see a trash dump, with pieces you could pull out of the water," the narrator says. "But what I got was an even ruder awakening. Looking out, you don't see the garbage; most of the time you just see the water. But what's in the water is 1,000 times worse than a Coke bottle. It's every part of a Coke bottle busted down into a little digestible morsel."
The plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch disintegrates into its component polymers, and those broken-down bits act as a sponge for persistent organic pollutants. The
horrifying realization is that the garbage patch represents much more than pollution; our castoffs
have actually changed the composition of the ocean, in not-so-nice ways. As the narrator puts it, "It's not a matter of pulling shit out [of the water]; it's preparing our systems for the change that's on its way. It's part of the ocean now. We've consigned ourselves to eating our own shit."
Pretty sobering stuff. In fact, you might want to watch the more-upbeat "Gorilla" afterward. That way you can imagine all the kiddies of today getting inspired, and then becoming savvy, and growing up to find ways to deal effectively with the change that's on its way.
