Running The Numbers: Oceanographic Visualization

published May 6, 2009 by Maria Popova on brainpickings.org

What 20,500 tuna have to do with your old toothbrush, or how a plastic comb ended up on top of Japan’s most iconic volcano.

We love TED. We love data visualization. We hate environmental demise.

Naturally, we love artist Chris Jordan‘s (remember him?) response to the overlooked but tremendously concerning issue exposed by legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle in her TED Prize wish — overfishing and the rapid decline of oceans’ natural vitality.



In Running The Numbers II, the second installment of his Portraits of Global Mass Culture series, Jordan looks at mass phenomena on a global scale. Again, each image portrays concrete data about a specific issue.

Depicts 270,000 fossilized shark teeth, equal to the estimated number of sharks of all species killed around the world every day for their fins.

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Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world's oceans every hour.

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Detail of the top of Mt. Fuji

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Jordan’s work is both a reminder of and an antidote to our individual sense of insignificance as we face these disturbing global issues with an increasing sense of urgency — we love the idea of juxtaposing the effect of our collective actions with the tiny individual contributions that make them up. It’s a new kind of call for personal responsibility — could that be your old toothbrush at the foot of Mt. Fuji?

We are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Depicts 20,500 tuna, the average number of tuna fished from the world

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For a deeper look at our collective individualism in its cultural context, be sure to check out Jordan’s absolutely brilliant book, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait — it comes with our highest stamp of recommendation.

via @TEDchris

Manufacturers face cost dilemma in going green

posted July 27th in GMA News

Manufacturers wanting to make their products more environment-friendly are slowly coming to terms with the high cost of recycled materials and its patent inflexibility, leaving them no choice but to pass on the burden to consumers.

Such is the case for appliance manufacturer Electrolux, which launched late Tuesday a campaign that aims to raise awareness about plastic debris ending up in the world's oceans.

Terry Sales, Electrolux Philippines Inc. marketing manager, told GMA News Online that one challenge that besets the company in its green efforts is the difficulty of sourcing recycled plastic.

"As a manufacturer [of appliances], we use a lot of plastics," Sales said. "But right now, there are not enough supply of recycled plastic available to manufacturers like us."

Sales explained that despite the huge volume of plastic being produced, used and disposed around the world — 300 million metric tons in 2010, according to a report by the Royal Society in UK — plastic that can be used for manufactured products are still a scarce resource.

"Plastic still needs to be reprocessed. You can't just pick up plastic garbage and turn it into another plastic product. Unfortunately, there are not enough suppliers in the world who would like to invest in reprocessing plastics," Sales emphasized.

Virgin vs recycled plastic

This is the reason why the company's recently launched product in its green range, the UltraOne vacuum cleaner, is a little bit more expensive than its other products, Sales said.

UltraOne is made from 70 percent recycled plastic and uses up to 50 percent less energy than the regular vacuum cleaner.

"Recycled plastic is more expensive than virgin plastic, which is why it is more convenient for manufacturers to use [the latter]," he added.

Product design is also compromised when firms use recycled plastic. "You can only make products in black, since that's the only color available for recycled plastics," Sales said.

But Sales pointed out that cost of raw materials is not the only factor that leads to more expensive green products.

"There aren't a lot of green products available in the market today. As such, there is not much demand for it yet," he stressed.

Still, Sales said it is the goal of Electrolux to have 15 percent of all its product ranges as green products, and to have products made from 100 percent recycled plastic.

Debris from oceans

To address the dilemma, the company said it has started research into how they can use plastic debris recovered from the ocean as potential source of raw material.

"Right now, only post-consumer plastic on land meets our commercial safety and quality standards," the company said. "However, [we are exploring] how the ocean plastic may be used in the future, and one such step is to make a single concept vacuum that we can auction out."

Electrolux's "Vac from the Sea" campaign collated plastic garbage that drifted to several of the world's oceans, and processed them to create three different concept vacuum cleaners.

The green process

For greater impact toward saving the environment, activist group Greenpeace said manufacturers should look more into how their production processes are affecting nature.

While not discounting the efforts of companies to make their products more energy-efficient, for example, Greenpeace said the initiatives shouldn't end there.

"Hindi naman namin dinidiscount 'yung (efforts nila), but it shouldn't end there. We're telling companies to minimize their carbon footprint, and it helps, but they should also go for clean production cycles and zero toxic waste discharge," JP Agcaoili, the group's media officer, told GMA News Online in a phone interview.

Agcaoili cited the example of manufacturing firms who make efforts to establish wastewater treatment facilities when the more acceptable approach is to eliminate wastewater production entirely.

The Greenpeace official also cautioned against what pundits call "greenwashing," or the use of public relations and marketing practices that mislead the public into thinking the company's products are environmentally friendly.

"Companies have to make sure that when they do their green initiatives, they do not divert the attention from the real issues at hand," Agcaoili stressed.

"For example, some companies with high carbon footprint simply cannot eliminate or reduce it by just planting trees," he added.

Instead of doing these corporate social responsibility efforts, Agcaoili said firms should invest and focus on doing things properly with their processes.

"Being what it is, it's really an investment. But their investments will come back to them. If, for example, the world's waterways are clean, companies will benefit from that also," he said. — VS, GMA News

Plastic {Infographic}

posted July 27, 2011 by Zachary Shahan on Planet Save.com

Plastic — it is everywhere. While it has helped humanity in some important ways, it is also wreaking havoc on ecosystems and organisms around the world (including humans). Here’s an interesting infographic with some stunning and disturbing information on: how much plastic we use, what problems it’s linked to, plastic in the ocean, BPA, plastic’s ridiculously long lifespan, and how we can cut plastic out of our lives (OK, maybe not how we can do so completely, but how we can do so to a large degree).

The most interesting line of the infographic, in my opinion, is this one: “every piece of plastic made still exists today.” But, really, there’s a ton of interesting info here.

The infographic also does a good job of pointing out the key steps we can take to body-slam our plastic problem:

Use reusable bags
Cut the bottled water out of your life
Say no to single-serve plastic packaging
Use sandwich boxes instead of sandwich bags (cooler anyway!)
Use silverware (.. which actually results in a little more pleasant of an eating experience)
Go digital (forget the old-school plastic CDs & cases)
Use a refillable dispenser
Bring your “to-go” mug with you
Avoid plastic you can’t easily (and probably won’t) recycle
Try to find products not made of plastic (when you have to buy something, that is)

Anyway, here’s the infographic:  (CLICK GRAPHIC TO ENLARGE)

Plastic Bags - Oceans Report

posted on www.EnvironmentCalifornia.org on July 19, 2011

Leading the Way Toward A Clean Ocean: Communities Around the World Take Action Against Plastic Bags 2011-07-19 Leading_the_Way_Toward_a_Clean_Ocean_final.July.2011.pdf

Executive Summary

On July 14th 2011, The California Supreme Court ruled that the city of Manhattan Beach can enforce a local ordinance banning plastic bags. The policy had been held up by a lawsuit brought by the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition. Manhattan Beach can now move forward on their bag ban, bringing the total number of California cities and counties that have successfully taken action against plastic bag pollution to 12.
[1] http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/S180720.PDF

Our oceans are polluted with millions of tons of plastic trash. In the Pacific Ocean, plastic debris churns in a soup called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area twice the size of Texas where plastic bits outweigh plankton. Plastic pollution persists for hundreds of years, and can kill turtles, seabirds and other marine animals.

Throw-away plastic bags are a significant part of the problem. To reduce ocean pollution and protect the environment, more than 80 national and local governments across the planet have taken official action to ban throw-away plastic bags or to establish fees or taxes on such bags.

State, county, and city governments in California should follow their lead and ban the use of plastic grocery bags.

Plastic bags contribute to the pollution of California’s ocean and beaches.

• Californians use approximately 16 billion plastic bags per year—more than 400 annually per person.
• Less than 5 percent of plastic bags are recycled. Instead, they end up sitting in landfills, littering streets, clogging streams, fouling beaches, or floating out to sea.
• Plastic trash threatens ocean ecosystems. Sea turtles and other marine animals often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them, causing injury or death. In parts of the Pacific Ocean, including the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic outweighs plankton by up to six times.
• The city of San Francisco estimated that the taxpayer cost to subsidize the recycling, collection, and disposal of plastic and paper bags amounts to as much as 17 cents per bag. Applied to California as a whole, that adds up to more than $1 billion per year.

More than 80 national and local governments around the world have taken action to protect the ocean by reducing the use of plastic bags.

• At least 20 nations and 47 local governments have passed bans on distributing specific kinds of throw-away plastic bags, including the nations of Italy, Kenya, Mongolia, Macedonia, and Bangladesh; the states of Maharashtra, India and Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the cities of Karachi, Pakistan and Telluride, Colorado.
• Approximately 26 nations and local communities have established fee programs to reduce plastic bag use and/or increase the use of reusable alternatives, including Botswana, China, Hong Kong, Wales, Ireland, Israel, Canada’s Northwest Territories, Toronto, Mexico City, and Washington, D.C.

Bans and meaningful fee programs effectively reduce plastic bag pollution.

• Bans and fee programs quickly reduce plastic bag distribution. Ireland, which in 2002 established a fee roughly equivalent to 28 U.S. cents per bag, saw plastic bag use drop by 90 percent within the first year. After Washington, D.C., implemented a much smaller 5 cent tax on plastic bags, the number of bags distributed by food retailers fell from 22.5 million per month to 3.3 million per month. And the year after banning plastic bags at pharmacies and supermarkets in 2007, San Francisco businesses distributed 127 million fewer plastic bags, and cut overall bag waste reaching the city landfill by up to 10 percent.

Eleven city and county governments in California have taken successful action to reduce plastic bag pollution.

• Eleven California cities and counties have bans on plastic bags in effect, including Long Beach, Santa Monica, San Jose, San Francisco, and unincorporated Marin and unincorporated Los Angeles counties. Five of these communities, including Marin County and San Jose, have also authorized mandatory charges on paper bags to encourage citizens to use reusable bags.
• Two additional communities, Oakland and Manhattan Beach, passed bans that were later struck down after legal challenges by plastic bag manufacturers.

Much more progress can be made to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean and transform our throw-away culture.

• Education and recycling cannot keep pace with the generation of plastic bag pollution. Despite a 2006 law requiring retailers to place bag recycling bins in front of their stores, less than 5 percent of bags are recycled.
• To make a real impact, all California cities and counties should restrict the use of plastic bags, and advocate for similar action at the state level.

Bags ban: good idea — on paper

posted July 17th in the Signal.com

Los Angeles County’s ordinance on the ban of plastic shopping bags in unincorporated county stores went into effect July 1. Despite the huffing and puffing of many who claim it’s an infringement on consumers’ right to choose, it’s ultimately a good move, but not without some glaring flaws.

Yes, it’s odd that we’re on the side of an ordinance that also passed in San Francisco, but it’s for our own good.

How many times have you seen plastic shopping bags wafting down the streets when the Santa Ana winds come blowing through? How many thousands of discarded bags line the wash and the Santa Clara River? How many thousands, if not millions of dollars are spent clearing them from all over the county?

An L.A. County study estimates the average household in the county uses roughly 1,600 plastic bags each year. That’s a lot — especially when you consider that there are about 3.2 million households in the county. That comes out to about 5.1 billion plastic bags used each year.

And far too many of those end up on the streets, sidewalks, landfills and the ocean. The last part is evidenced by what’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of trash floating north of Hawaii that’s roughly twice the size of Texas.

But paper bags are biodegradable, stores are required to use fully recyclable bags and 40 percent of each bag has to be made from recycled material.

Because plastic bags have been cheap to produce, free for consumers and available essentially everywhere for decades, we’ve all taken them for granted when we go shopping. So, for those who shop in unincorporated county areas — where the ban has taken place — it’s a bit jarring and frustrating. But it’s supposed to be.

There is some logic behind this, however ham-handed the execution may be.

Beyond the frustration of no longer being able to get plastic bags, shoppers are fuming at the fact that the once-free paper bags are now 10 cents apiece — as is mandated by the county ordinance.

The idea is to dissuade consumers from exclusively using paper bags so we aren’t instead using billions of those each year.

The 10-cent collection goes to the stores, not the county, as some believe. And its purpose is to cover the cost of the paper bags and to fund campaigns that encourage shoppers to bring their own reusable bags to the stores.

This is where we stop liking the ordinance.

Instead of using a proverbial carrot like Target’s model, in which customers who bring in their own bags get a five-cent discount per shopper bag used, those who are affected by the ban are given a heavy dose of stick — 10 cents at a time.

Ten cents per bag isn’t likely to break the bank for anyone, but it’s just pricey enough to be really annoying, especially after bags have been free for so many years. But that’s the point; the county wants shoppers to get frustrated and motivated enough to bring their own bags.

Reusable bags are a good thing; they save money and reduce pollution and litter. But it’s much more shopper-friendly to not penalize shoppers by charging them for the paper bags, and instead incentivize the use of reusable bags by offering discounts.

L.A. County is hoping its progressive and proactive stance on litter will serve as a template for the rest of the state and the country, but it’s already causing confusion and frustration in its limited execution.

Local shoppers who live just outside the city borders aren’t embracing the new change, and it has led many of them to drive down the road a bit and go to stores in the city of Santa Clarita — thus costing county merchants business.

It would be better if the ordinance were everywhere  or nowhere in the county, instead of targeting select areas and largely nullifying the environmental impacts of the change. This should be a state resolution to ensure sweeping change, and not just target a select few parts of California.

Calif Supreme Court upholds plastic bag bans

Posted in The Mercury News July 15th, 2011   SAN FRANCISCO—The California Supreme Court has upheld plastic bag bans in a unanimous decision applauded by environmentalists.    The court ruled Thursday that Manhattan Beach can ban grocery stores and other retailers from using plastic bags without doing a full environmental study on the subsequent increased use of paper bags. Dan Jacobson of the group Environment California says it's a victory for safeguarding the health of the ocean. Plastic bag bans have already been approved by San Francisco, Long Beach, Malibu, Santa Monica, Marin County, San Jose, Calabasas and Los Angeles County. The San Jose Mercury News says the city of San Carlos may now prohibit the use of plastic bags. San Carlos leaders were waiting for the high court ruling because an environmental study could cost the city $150,000.

Trawls and Trash Represent One-Two Punch for Threatened Turtles [Slide Show]

Studies have identified plastic pollution and fishing practices as major threats to sea turtles for several years. This knowledge is, at last, beginning to translate into action.

Posted in the Scientific American By Melissa Gaskill  | July 15, 2011

 

Image: Courtesy of NOAA

Nearly 200 Kemp's ridley (Lepidochelys kempii), green (Chelonia mydas) and loggerhead (Caretta caretta) sea turtles washed up along the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coasts in April, the most deaths in one month since record keeping began in 1986. And 100 green sea turtles were found dead on the coast of Uruguay in the first three months of this year. The latter group died from ingestion of trash, primarily plastic. Most of the former showed signs of drowning in trawl nets.

Both events are the latest pointing to a larger trend in which pollution and fisheries practices pose significant obstacles worldwide to these endangered animals' recovery. Scientists who have been sounding the alarm for decades see these latest tragedies as the tipping point that may finally translate science into action.

Kemp's ridleys, which live primarily in the Gulf of Mexico, are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. In the recently ended 2011 season, U.S. National Park Service scientist Donna Shaver recorded 192 ridley nests on the Texas coast (95 percent of ridley nests occur in northern Mexico, where a record high of 12,143 nests were recorded in 2006). 

Green turtles, also endangered in the U.S., range widely in tropical and subtropical waters, generally between 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south latitude, with an estimated 200 to 1,100 nesting annually in Florida. Loggerheads, currently listed as threatened, are found throughout temperate and tropical regions of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, with an estimated 60,000 to 90,000 nests per year and declining. 

The four other species of sea turtles worldwide—leatherback, hawksbill, olive ridley and flatback—all are listed as either endangered or threatened, and the first three are also found in U.S. waters.

Deadly Seas
Sea turtles die of drowning or injury when caught on hooks, entangled in fishing line or trapped in fixed nets or trawls. For instance, the National Marine Fisheries Service estimates commercial shrimping in the Gulf of Mexico killed 5,365 turtles in 2009. And mid-Atlantic trawl fisheries capture an average of 770 sea turtles each year, says Elizabeth Wilson, a marine wildlife scientist at the nonprofit Oceana.

Sea turtles and commercially targeted fishes frequently gather in the same places, which results in turtles being caught as bycatch, says biologist Larry Crowder of Duke University. In fact, a 2004 paper Crowder and his colleagues published in Ecology Letters suggests that loggerhead and leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) sea turtles face between a one half and two thirds chance of encountering longline gear every year. 

Sea turtle species also spend time near shore, where they can become bycatch of subsistence or artisanal fishers. A 2007 case study led by biologist Hoyt Peckham at University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that these small-scale fisheries also represent a significant threat.

Turtles that elude hooks, nets and lines still face the risk of ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic debris floating at the sea surface or lower in the water column. Plastic washed up on beaches can interfere with nesting and hatching.

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation has documented plastic in all five of the Earth's large ocean gyres, says Marcus Eriksen, director of project development. In the North Pacific, foundation scientists have measured plastic particles at up to six times the volume by weight of zooplankton. Ingested plastic is also now found in the bodies of most marine organisms, where it can cause injury, nutritional deficiency and death, primarily by blocking their intestinal tracts—the fate of many of those Uruguay turtles.

Plastics can become a problem even before they are ingested. They start off containing potentially toxic chemicals such as nonylphenol and bisphenol A (BPA) and pick up more in seawater. A study in 2010 by Marc Ward of Sea Turtles Forever  and researchers from Algalita, Hokkaido University in Japan and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution identified regional patterns in the concentrations of some chemicals taken up by marine plastic. For example, PCB concentrations were greatest in Japanese and U.S. urban coastal areas, reflecting the chemicals' higher past usage in those areas. Plastic particles act as pseudo-plankton, introducing these chemicals into the food chain, where they work their way right up to humans.

Calls to Action
These threats to turtles have been known for decades. Research published in Nature more than 10 years ago warned that current fisheries activities would doom Pacific sea turtles, and a paper in Science in 1972 identified the threat of microplastics in the ocean. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Both problems have relatively clear-cut solutions, including reducing single-use plastics, cleaning up debris and developing and requiring turtle-safe fishing gear.

Yet translation of this knowledge into policy and concrete action remains limited and often controversial. Whereas a few U.S. fisheries require the use of devices to allow turtles to escape trawl nets, the majority of trawl fisheries worldwide do not, and even in the U.S. their use is not always enforced. U.S. longliners must use circle hooks, which cause less injury to turtles, and fish as bait, rather than more turtle-attracting squid. Enforcement remains spotty here, too, though, and the U.S. fleet, Crowder points out, represents, at most, about 10 percent of total longlining efforts worldwide.

Other possible protections have yet to get even that far. In March the federal government issued a six-month extension to its deadline for a final ruling on whether to change the status of loggerhead sea turtles from "threatened" to "endangered"—an effort first spurred by legal petitions back in 2007. The listing has proved controversial, in part because of its potential effects on fisheries, particularly those in the North Atlantic. "There has not been widespread acceptance of gear fixes by the fishing community, which generally resists any type of regulation," says Catherine Kilduff, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).

Court Cases
Organizations are also seeking to catalyze action through the courts. In April the CBD, Oceana and Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN) sued the U.S. government for missing another deadline, this one to designate more than 70,000 square miles of waters off the West Coast as critical habitat for leatherbacks. As of June the parties were negotiating a settlement that would set another deadline for designation of the protected area, Kilduff says--this one technically enforceable by the court. Even if the designation is made, restrictions on fishing practices there will not necessarily follow.

On May 31 the CBD, TIRN, Sea Turtle Conservancy and Defenders of Wildlife filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the National Marine Fisheries Service and the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama for violations of the Endangered Species Act. Acting in direct response to those sea turtles deaths along the Gulf Coast—which as of June 1 totaled 320 for these three states—the groups also asked for emergency closure of the Gulf shrimp trawl fishery. Kilduff says it is unlikely that anything will happen before the end of the 60 days.

Nor is the scientific community twiddling its thumbs. Ward pays locals in Costa Rica $2 an hour to remove plastic from the reef and plans to seek more funding to pay fishers to net plastic. Eriksen, in addition to publicizing research on plastic pollution, also plugs existing technology that uses plastic waste to make literal building blocks and technology used by PyroGenesis Canada, which uses waste (including plastic) to generate power. In 2009 the United Nations Environment Program called for a worldwide ban on plastic bags, and more than nine countries, including the Congo, had banned or taxed plastic bags as of June 2011.

Meanwhile, some scientists point out that individuals can make a difference by changing the way they use and dispose of plastics and demanding sustainably caught seafood. Individuals can also call on industry and policy makers to respond, helping to turn these most recent tragedies deaths into action. Then they may yet prove to be that tipping point.

View a slide show of the threatened turtles.