Plastic Oceans (Plastic in our playground!) Part 1 - Plastic bags

posted in www.sail-world.com by Ian Thomson on May 20, 2012

'Plastic in the sea'

The ocean is our playground. We sail on it, we swim in it, we fish from it and without it we don't have 60-80% of the world's oxygen........So why do we abuse it?

The reason we abuse it is because most of us don't even realise we are. Covering 70% of the planet, our oceans seem to cope with everything we throw at it, right? Well think again.

So let's go back to the beginning. When we were kids at school we were all taught to clean up all the trash in our playground. So why did we change as we grew older. For many of us sailors, the ocean is our new playground, yet we throw our trash in it all the time, not directly, but we certainly contribute.

Let's pick two items that are incredibly numerous in our oceans and cause great issues for creatures living in the ocean and the ocean itself, let alone creating health risks to us.

Plastic bags and plastic water bottles What do these items have in common? They have both been created for 'Convenience'.

IMG 2244 - Ocean Crusaders -  Ian Thomson

This is where it all began for Ocean Crusaders. As a professional skipper in the Whitsundays I began pulling Dead Sea turtles out of the water so they could be inspected by marine parks. The key moment came when one of the turtles I pulled out was found to have a plastic bag formed perfectly in its stomach. It had died of starvation but not before trying to eat 12 cigarette butts, a plastic water bottle cap and 1/2 a coke can. I set out to educate people of the issue and this is my crusade.

Our world uses somewhere between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags every single year. They are big numbers but let's put those numbers into perspective. We see these numbers and we go, O.K that's big but have you ever tried to count to one million, let alone one billion or one trillion. To count straight through from one to 1,000,000 will take you 11 days. Yep, that's right 11 days. Try 32 years to count to one billion. You cannot count to one trillion in your lifetime.

Or let's put it another way, grains of rice. To get one million grains of rice you need 25 litres (6.5 gallons) of rice. So multiply that by 1,000 to get one billion. So you need 25,000 litres of rice (6,500 gallons).

So let's look at those numbers again. We use somewhere between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags every year. Based on 500 billion, if we joined them end on end they would circumnavigate the world a whopping 3.1 million times. Imagine laying them out flat, we could wrap our world hundreds of thousands of times.

So now you understand the scale of the issue, let's go a step further. This is just plastic shopping bags. Add to this figure the plastic used to wrap bread, toilet paper and what about the plastic that pretty much every item in the world is packaged in. It is a massive number that the plastic manufacturers love but our environment hates.

Plastics are like diamonds.........they last forever!!!!!

plastic water bottles - Ocean Crusaders -  Ian Thomson

This is my favorite saying as it is so true. Plastic will never go away. It does not break down, it breaks up.....into millions of smaller pieces that break up further through a process called photo degradation. In samples taken from the North Pacific Garbage Patch 10 years ago it was shown that pieces of plastic the size of plankton were floating around imitating this micro-organism.

In fact there was a ratio of six pieces of plastic to every plankton. Studies last year showed an increase to 45:1 and this is before the garbage from the Japanese Tsunami in March 2011 makes it to this region, believed to be another 1.5 million tonnes of trash floating around the north pacific.

The standard single use plastic bag will be around for over 1,000 years before it begins to photo-degrade. So with 500 billion of them added to our world every year, we are creating a problem we cannot clean up. That's probably why there is enough rubbish in the North Pacific to cover the entire country of Australia 3m (10ft) deep. 50% of plastic bags that make it to the ocean come from landfill so putting them in the bin is not a solution.

When you add to these statistics the fact that 100,000+ marine creatures and one million sea birds die because of plastic suffocation or entanglement every year, it is time for all of us to change our habits and as ocean users, we should be leading the way.

6010 108830235765 102067230765 2636790 268210 n - Ocean Crusaders -  Ian Thomson

You all know the alternatives for shopping bags. It's only because we are lazy that we don't use them as often as we should. Just remember to put them back in your car when you've unpacked the shopping so they are there when you want them next. If you do need to use plastic bags for rubbish bins etc. use compostable bags that by law have to decompose within a short period of time, usually six months maximum pending your country.

If we don't make changes now, we'll be sailing on oceans of plastic before we know it, clogging our engine intakes and contaminating the fish we all love to eat, or worse, slowing us down when we race.

Say no to plastic bags.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Ocean Crusaders was founded by Ian Thomson in June 2010 after setting the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of Australia. He is on a crusade to educate the world of the issues our oceans are facing. An online education program is available for primary school teachers to present to their students or for parents to present to their children. Visit www.OceanCrusaders.org for more details.

Sailors should sign their yacht up to the 'Ocean Safe Certification' program to show their support for the campaign here and don't forget to like us on our Facebook page.

Part 2 in the series focuses on Plastic Water Bottles.
by Ian Thomson

Plastic Oceans (Plastic in our playground!) Part 2 - Plastic bottles

posted on www.sail-world.com by Ian Thomson on May 20, 2012

'Plastics in our oceans'    . ©    Click Here to view large photo

In part one, we looked at plastic bags. We went through the numbers and quantified how much one million and one billion is in reality. Let's revisit that before we move onto Plastic water bottles.

To count straight through from one to 1,000,000 will take you 11 days and it will take 32 years to count to one billion. You cannot count to one trillion in your lifetime. In grains of rice, to get one million grains you need 25 litres (6.5 gallons). For one billion you need 25,000 litres of rice (6,500 gallons).

The world now consumes 200 billion litres of bottled water every year. The majority of this is in plastic bottles. You can pretty much equate each litre into one bottle. So that makes 200 billion water bottles that we need to dispose of or recycle every year.

How did we get to drinking this much water out of bottles when we have perfectly good water out of the taps? Well you can blame the big soda drink manufacturers. Back in the 80's they realised that we can only drink so much soda.

In order to keep growing they needed to create a new market. They decided to bottle water. They then went on a campaign to sell us, saying that bottled water is way better for us than water out of the tap. We fell for it and today it is a multi-billion dollar market. We now ship water from Fiji to Italy, Italy to USA and Paris to Australia!

So is it better for us or not? Well 40% of bottled water is actually filtered tap water. Some are known to be better, some worse. No matter what water brand you buy though, there is one key that should give us the answer.

Plastic breaking up through photo-degradation - Ocean Crusaders -  Ian Thomson

It is called a 'Used by date'. Water does not go off in rivers and lakes or in our taps so why does it have a used by date? It is because plastic water bottles contain toxins that leach into the water, contaminating it and also affecting the taste. It's that plastic taste you get occasionally. It's actually killing you slowly. What are these toxins? The big one is Bisphenol A (BPA).

There are more and more studies these days on this toxin and it has been proven to cause breast cancer, ADHD, autism and the list continues to grow. To put it bluntly, toxins in plastic consumed during pregnancy is a major issue. Heating kids drinks and food in plastic just adds to the issue.

So it's not healthy for us so how do they get away with it. It is all in the name of convenience. We are too lazy to take our own bottle and refill it. Tonight I saw the most crazy advert on TV. Coca Cola's brand of water here in Australia 'Mount Franklin' is promoting that their water is in bottles that are made of just 30% of the plastic of other brands and that they crush down really easily.

Initially I thought that at least it is less plastic but then I thought about it. They use less plastic which costs them less. Win to Coca Cola. Oh and you can't reuse it as it crushes too easy so you have to buy another bottle. Win to Coca Cola.

World Cartoon - Ocean Crusaders -  Ian Thomson

Around the world only 30% of plastic is recycled so that means 66.6 billion of these bottles will go into landfill or worse still, into the oceans. The caps on water bottles are still not recyclable so that means 200 billion bottle caps in our world that won't break down, they'll last forever.

So as a boater, what can you do? Simple, buy S/S water bottles and refill them. If you want to buy water, buy it in large containers or filter it from the tap at home. S/S bottles may cost a bit but the savings you will make in not buying water will pay for this bottle countless times. It means you create less waste, you save money and the environment will love you for it. Everybody wins.

If you're in a yacht club or corner store, purchase or lease a water vending machine. You can even get flavoured water dispensed. If every shop replaced the fridge they store bottled water in with a water vending machine, they still make money but don't kill the environment. Oh and it would be cheaper for you too.

Bottled Water - Ocean Crusaders -  Ian Thomson   Click Here to view large photo

I don't want to sail on an ocean of plastic and I'm sure you don't want to either. We need to change our habits today. It is the little things that count towards making our oceans safe for the future.

Say no to plastic water bottles.

Reduce, Resuse, Recycle.

Ocean Crusaders was founded by Ian Thomson in June 2010 after setting the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of Australia. He is on a crusade to educate the world of the issues our oceans are facing. An online education program is available for primary school teachers to present to their students or for parents to present to their children. Visit the Ocean Crusaders website for more details.

Click here to view part one of Plastic Oceans.
by Ian Thomson