ExclusiveAn interview with Bill McKibben on the eve of an environmental protest.

Led by venerated climate change activist, author and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, citizens from all over the country will converge on the White House on Saturday, August 20th, 2011 at 11 o’clock Eastern Standard Time to protest a proposed tar sand oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to refineries in Texas. Their goal? Pressure President Barack Obama to stop a project called Keystone XL, a pipeline running through America’s heartland. Indications are that Obama is likely to sign off on the project (the chief lobbyist for the project is Hillary Clinton’s deputy campaign manager). As McKibben tells EcoSalon, “This is the singular test of Obama’s environmental administration. It’s clean cut; congress isn’t in the middle, it’s Obama’s call.” McKibben plans to be arrested in the first wave of protesters Saturday morning and plans to be wearing his Obama ’08 t-shirt and button in the support of the “Obama we worked to get elected.”

(Image above: An aerial view of toxic sludge left in the wake of Tar Sand mining in Alberta, Canada. Photograph: Jiri Rezac/Greenpeace.)

Tar Sands: A Modern Eco-Disaster

Regardless if it’s crude or tar as sand sludge being transported, the fact is, pipelines rupture. Last year, 819,000 gallons spewed into the Kalamazoo River and 21,000 gallons leaked in Romeville, Illinois. In July of this year, between 23,000 and 31,000 gallons of crude spilled into the Yellowstone River. As sweet crude sources become scarcer and scarcer, the process of extracting oil stratified in sand, water and clay is becoming more cost-effective. The problem is that the process is incredibly destructive environmentally and extremely energy-intensive. Tar sand refinement takes 40% more greenhouse gas emissions to develop into usable crude, and the “mining” of it leaves unprecedented environmental destruction in its wake.

As NASA climate scientist, Jim Hansen, says about Keystone XL pipeline if approved: “It’s essentially a game-over for the climate.” The United States is the largest importer of tar sand oil in the world, sourcing it from Canada. The massive pipeline would most likely double the extraction from Alberta’s boreal forest, an area already decimated by extraction activities.

McKibben tells us, “You have three scenarios here. One: the toxic sauce spills into some of America’s most important farmlands and wilderness areas. Two: it spills into the Ogallala aquafier (the world’s largest, located in the midwestern United States), and three, if it makes it all the way to Texas, it’s guaranteed to spill into the atmosphere during refinement.”

Tar sands projects are the fastest-growing cause of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, and it’s estimated that by 2015, tar sands will account for more emissions than the entire country of Denmark. Extraction requires a tremendous amount of water (2-4.5 barrels per barrel of oil produced), which winds up in toxic tailing lagoons that have never been successfully reclaimed. An analysis using industry data shows that the lagoons leak over a billion gallons of polluted water into the environment each year. And because refining what’s called bitumen (a mixture of sand, water, oil and clay) into usable crude takes at least 40% more energy than regular crude refinement, the amount refined will skyrocket and so will the emissions.

Anatomy of a Protest

Protest organizers confirm that 2,100 people from all over the country are coming to Washington D.C. to be arrested over the next two weeks.  The protestors will receive a training before converging on the White House, where morning and afternoon, for the next two weeks, waves of mass arrests will take place. Reports from protest headquarters state that citizens are busing in, and as many as 1,000 so far have stated exactly when they’ll be arriving for their arrest. According to McKibben, “This will be the single largest act of civil disobedience in American history.”

Sources and further reading:

Tar Sands Action

The Guardian

Oil Sands Fact Sheet

On Earth: NRDC Says Wild Lands Under Attack

Kalamazoo Oil Spill Highlights Pipeline Risks

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Bamboo and you: is this supposedly sustainable material all it’s claimed to be?

You care. You really care. That doesn’t mean you have the time to be an investigative carer. Green this, green that, and pretty soon, caring becomes a full time profession. Because green is also the color of money, and plenty of people are trying to cash in on your consciousness.

Take bamboo. Bamboo pajamas, bamboo underwear, bamboo towels, bamboo sheets, bamboo floors – we’re bamboozled. But ask any carer why it’s truly sustainable, and suddenly it’s hem and haw city. It’s, like, renewable or something? Right?

Right – sort of. We’re here to help you sort the grass from the greenwash.

Bamboozled on the Floor

Bamboo is amazing. First, it’s a fast-growing, carbon dioxide-eating grass that doesn’t need extra water, nor does it need fertilizer or pesticides to be commercially grown. Some species grow up to three feet in a day and can be harvested in just four years. Bamboo even self regenerates. As a feedstock for “wood” flooring, it’s hard to argue against this wonder grass; oak for comparison, can take a century or more to mature. The downsides of the product aren’t many; it’s mainly the source by which bamboo flooring is procured that can be murky. The domestic market for sourcing raw bamboo is fledgling at best. Most bamboo comes from China and it’s often difficult to determine where it’s coming from, really. With global demand for bamboo increasing, there are plenty of examples of important habitat being bulldozed for agriculture. That’s bad, obviously. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) does certify some bamboo flooring products which means it meets a strict criteria for sustainable harvesting and worker’s rights.

Bottom line: For wood substitute materials such as bamboo flooring, FSC is the way to go.

Bamboozled on Your Body

Now it gets tricky. Once we start talking textiles, bamboo’s green quotient starts to feel like third grade long division. Bamboo as a plant, even if sustainably harvested, might not be sustainably manufactured. There are two kinds of processes for making bamboo into fabric: mechanical and chemical. The mechanical option involves smashing the woody parts of the plant which secretes natural enzymes that break the plant down into mush. The mush can then be combed out and spun into yarn.  This is essentially the same process by which hemp is made into linen. Bamboo linen is rare, because the mechanical process is cost prohibitive and labor intensive.

Chemically-processed bamboo fiber is similar to rayon or modal, which makes it soft as a baby’s butt – it’s the new silk. This is the stuff you want on your skin. But here’s the problem: To achieve aforementioned baby-butt softness, bamboo leaves and shoots are ‘cooked’ in chemical solvents such as sodium hydroxide (lye) and carbon disulfide. The process is known as hydrolysis alkalization and multi-phase bleaching. Fact: Sodium hydroxide in its crystalline form is the active ingredient in Liquid Plumr. Acute exposure can case eye and skin irritation and breathing fumes can cause vomiting. That carbon disulfide in the bamboo bath is known to cause neural disorders. Where this becomes a big issue is if bamboo is being processed for fabric in places where worker safety conditions aren’t scrutinized (a particular issue right now in China).

Now, there are some good ways to process bamboo that are far more eco-friendly and involve less environmentally detrimental chemicals to break down the plant into stock for yarn. A company in Seattle, Washington called 5 Bamboo makes a proprietary product called Nomo, all produced in a closed loop system. Lyocell is the result, which is leaps and bounds better than hydrolysis alkalization and multi-phase bleaching.

Bottom line: look for bamboo products that are Lyocell or indicate mechanical, not chemical, processing.

Do We Want to Be Bamboozled, Do We Not Want to Be Bamboozled?

The skinny is this: If a bamboo product is produced in the USA, it’s probably being made from the more environmentally friendly process. If the bamboo is made abroad, it’s possibly bad news. There are some certifications that exist to help consumers make conscious choices but these too have issues. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a global NGO that defines industrial and commercial standards, which works as a tool for companies to implement environmentally friendly practices. The ISO, however,  does not certify the manufacturing processes. In so many cases, the producer isn’t the manufacturer of the textile and though the product make be safe for the environment, the process by which it was made is not. Chain of custody gets weird in developing world supply chains.

Bottom line: You don’t need to make a career of it (I promise), but it’s up to you, the consumer, to do your homework. Bamboo may be the new silk, Pergo, cutting board and kitchen utensil, but you have to talk to the company that makes the product first. As always, it’s Caveat Emptor out there. Or maybe better: Viridus Caveat Emptor: green buyer beware.

Image: The Busy Brain, Lav & Kush, Joi

The post Bamboozled: Are You Having the Grass Pulled Over Your Eyes? appeared first on EcoSalon.

SeriesEnvironmental cleanup in the wake of Japan’s twin disasters. Part 4 in a special series.

A surreal and compelling mix of headlines (read: Royal weddings, Osama bin Laden) may be dominating this week’s news, but the unfolding events in Japan after the March earthquake and tsunami – compounded further by nuclear plant instability – continue. Among the many significant issues: all that garbage.

Nothing illustrates the growing glut of plastic in the ocean from land-based sources like a natural disaster. All of those bleach bottles, all of those candy wrappers, all ending up somewhere. Whether littered or properly disposed of, it doesn’t actually matter when natural forces manifesting in the ocean overcome the borders of sea and land. And rather than death by a thousands cuts (plastic litter and watershed trash from land), Japan’s tsunami unleashed a vast amount of debris virtually overnight into the Pacific. (To see how the theoretical path of the debris works over time, click on this link to view an animation.)

This figure exhibits the projected pathway of flotsam that entered the ocean after waves hit Japan on March 11, 2011.  The model is based on historical data from drift buoys pinging GPS locations in The North Pacific over several years. Image Credit: Nikolai Maximenko, International Pacific Research Center.

The garbage is coming.

Within about a year, garbage will start hitting Hawaii’s shores and the coast of California within three, before circulating back out again to Hawaii and adding to The North Pacific Garbage Patch where it will circulate in the gyre.

Initially, it is difficult to determine how much we’re talking about, but think of it this way: Imagine taking all the plastic for a couple of miles or more from several cities situated on a coastline, and sucking it into the ocean. Think about taking thousands of grocery stores full of plastic products, all those single-use yogurt cups and half and half containers, lifting them all at once, and throwing them into the ocean. Think about all the dumpsters. The reycling bins. The storage facilities. The freight containers. Interesting, if disheartening, California beach-combing is on the way.

University of Hawaii at Manoa‘s Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner created the model. (Full disclosure: Maximenko advises the non-profit I work for on our gyre expeditions to search for plastic pollution.) Modeling, as a science, is still a very difficult enterprise as so many vectors affect how flotsam will actually travel when at sea. But judging by the vast amounts of debris pulled out to sea by Japan’s tsunami, the ultimate impact will be significant.

Finding remnants of the waste three to five years from now, after it has traveled thousands and thousands of miles at sea, will remind us as a society that although the 24/7 news cycle might forget past tragedies, plastic is forever. And it will remind us of the legacy of our culture. 24/7.

Editor’s note: This is part 4 in a special series on plastic. Read part 3, part 2 and part 1.

Images: Official U.S. Navy photographs

The post Plastic Surgery: Where Will Japan’s Tsunami Garbage Go? appeared first on EcoSalon.

seriesPart 3 in a special series on the presence of plastic in our lives.

We all try to do our part. We try to make conscious, low environmental impact choices when we can, but technology has outpaced awareness. Plastic hides everywhere: under our noses, in place sight, in the places we’d least expect. Case in point: a committed java junkie, I try to carry a reusable cup at all times. When I don’t, I order a medium in a large cup, so I can avoid the plastic lid. And then I learned even the paper cups have a thin layer of polyethylene lining.

Most of the scientific literature to date suggests that polyethylene doesn’t leach chemicals, but it doesn’t biodegrade, either, creating a lasting problem. So often, we don’t even know we’re consuming plastic. Even chewing gum contains plastic (poly-vinyl acetate). Check the ingredients; it’s difficult to find a single chewing gum that doesn’t contain a synthetic. Ditto beer. Fans of the hearty, local microbrew will notice the plastic gasket lining the bottle caps of glass bottles. In short: it’s everywhere.

Many face cleansers, for example, utilize plastic in their formulas to work as an abrasive. Everyone wants healthy skin, and we dutifully scrape away those older, dead skin cells to reveal the younger, fresher cells beneath. The plastic particles in the exfoliants wash down the drain, into the rivers and the ocean, where they work as a vector to absorb persistent organic pollutants at highly toxic levels – and can be ingested by fish and bio-magnify up the food chain, right back into tonight’s dinner.

Treatment plants haven’t been able to demonstrate effective capture of these plastic additives, which on personal care labels will go by names like “polyethylene micro-spheres” or “micro-beads.” Brands like Clearasil, Ponds, and Neutrogena all use synthetic exfoliants. (Luckily, there are healthy, green alternatives for younger, fresher skin, from brands like Farm Aesthetics, Burt’s Bees, and Yes to Carrots to homegrown remedies like lemon peel and coffee grounds.)

Coffee, beer, gum, cleansers – does it ever stop? Plastic is even in some brands of whitening toothpaste.

The stuff just doesn’t go away. We’ve been using plastics widely for about 40 years, with consumption spiking about 20 years ago. Within this short span of time, plastic can already be found in every part of the ocean and on every single beach in the world.  It’s made of toxic chemicals. It doesn’t biodegrade. It’s accumulating in every light and dark recess of our reality. And we don’t know what it’s going to do to us yet.

Recycling, far from being an answer, is a myth, one that makes us feel good but doesn’t solve the problem. When we throw “it” away, we have to remember one thing: there is no away. There is only out of sight. As we wash our faces, brighten our smiles, and pound our morning lattes, we’re creating an ever-, over-plasticized environment.

Editor’s note: This is part 3 in a special series on plastic. Read part 2 and part 1.

Image: Nick Harris

The post Plastic: The Forever Wonder Substance appeared first on EcoSalon.

ExclusiveThe clash over plastic, and a surprising industry admission.

The Fifth International Marine held a week ago on Oahu was like the prom for plastic garbage nerds. All sides of the issue converged on Oahu. There were the cool kids (Jack Johnson strumming some tunes), the industry guys sporting pleated pants held up by braided belts (evaporating bad cologne), science dorks walking quickly from point A to point B without so much as noticing the sun, and vociferous activists pumped up on coffee. It was many fish in a small pond, a full net of stakeholders concerned with how the chemical bottom line translates to plastic pollution in our shared ocean. The general tenor of the NGOs was simple: call a spade a spade. Calling plastic pollution ‘marine debris’ is ducking the problem. Calling it what it is, makes people act. And after this conference, I’d expect we’re going to see this issue amplified.

Starting with the Science

What we know, is that we don’t know a lot. Expeditions to sample the ocean surface for plastic are expensive, and precious few have ever made it out of port. I spoke with Kara Lavendar Law, from SEA Education, who has the most data on plastic distribution in the ocean. SEA has been monitoring plankton for over twenty years in the North Atlantic and Caribbean, and as a result, has pulled up a lot of plastic in their samples. While we’ve only really heard about the North Pacific Garbage Patch in the media, there exists much more data on the North Atlantic, thanks to Law and her team. The situation is startling: 6.5 pounds to 184 pounds per square kilometer of water. (There are 315 million square kilometers of ocean on planet earth – and we’ve only been packaging everything we consume in plastic for 40 years.) It’s important to note, however, that outside of the gyres, plastic is still present, but ostensibly in smaller quantities – though this isn’t for certain. From personal experience, having sailed three times across both the North and South Atlantic conducting sampling, I’ve never seen a plastic-free sample.

What’s most surprising about SEA’s data is that it suggests plastic density has flatlined over 20 years. A scientist isn’t going to to go on the record making claims without proof, but she will pose the questions: Where is it going? Is it sinking? Consumption and population are both going up, which means more plastic is going into the ocean, so why is the data flatlining? The plastic has to be going somewhere. Various theories float around at the conference. Nearly every scientist believes that input is getting greater but to date, there has been no comprehensive study of the ocean floor for plastic pollution.

Industry

I spoke with the American Chemistry Council representatives at the conference. Their massive public relations problem is oceanic plastic pollution. These are the guys who have to deal with fourth graders asking them why they kill turtles. The American Chemistry council represents all the companies that produce the resins that the manufacturers make everything plastic out of. They like the “Marine Debris” label because it encompasses all the jetsam in the ocean. But what’s out there is plastic. As if sea turtles weren’t bad enough, there’s the even bigger publicity nightmare: dangerous chemicals in mothers’ breast milk. That’s the kind of issue that drives public outcry and policy that limits their activities on the books.

Mostly, they’ve tried to promote recycling as the solution, even though the capture rates post consumer are so low they almost cease to matter (3-12%) worldwide. The real problem, though, is that recycling doesn’t work. You can’t make a bag out of a bag, and this is hardly an extreme claim from an environmentalist contingent. The industry is well aware of this, which I confirmed when I spoke with Mark Daniels of Hilex Poly, the largest recycler of polyethylene in the country.

Here’s why recycling doesn’t work: to make another bag, 70% virgin content is introduced in the new bag, along with 30% post consumer. The result of recycling one bag roughly introduces 3.3 new bags into the waste stream. Daniels didn’t like that I was using math, but finally, after asking him this question: “So, is this a fair statement: no matter how much you recycle, no matter how much recycling infrastructure you build, the net result of recycling is more plastic in the world, bags or otherwise?” His answer, simply enough, was “Yes.” (I almost fell out of my chair.) By his own admission, the net result of recycling compounds the plastic problem rather than ameliorating it. Daniels used the phrase “Cradle to Cradle” several times and I kept asking him to define what that means. He couldn’t. He’s making three cradles out of one cradle and they’re made of plastic. The interest in recycling is economic, not stewardship. What they fear is that people will quit consuming their products. Recycling is a system neatly built to ensure perpetual consumption by duping people into believing they’re doing something good for the environment.

Now, you can make a PETE bottle out of a PETE bottle, but the regulations to make it food safe again makes it cost prohibitive. For the most part, the only thing that can be made from recycling plastic is another plastic product. Whether they’re durable goods or single-use isn’t really the point. Plastic is plastic.

The NGOs and Activists

These are the people flaming pissed about belly-up sea turtles, bird carcasses with lighters in them, seals strangled by plastic box ties, fish caught in six pack rings. They’re also mad about everyone – you, me, your children – being full of chemicals from plastic. The American Chemistry Council sponsored this conference (as did Coca-Cola), so it appears at least that they’re trying to engage the activist and science community more transparently. As an activist, getting an ACC official on the phone has been an incredibly difficult task and here, at the conference, they were subject to all the major activists working on this issue. They don’t like that we’re going after bans of their products, again, feebly arguing that all we need to do is recycle. Activists in the rabble groaned when an industry representative championed a new plastic bottle made out of plant-based material as progress. Leave it up to the plastic industry to turn organic material into something that doesn’t biodegrade.

Activism starts at home. Refusing single-use plastics, opting instead for the coffee cup or stainless steel bottle, is a big step. Then it’s time to start engaging the businesses you frequent and ask them a simple question, “What are you doing to reduce your plastic footprint?”

Next up in the series, we’ll talk about how much plastic we all use, where it hides, and how to avoid it.

Image: Micro-fragments of plastic the beach of St. Helena, a very remote island in The South Atlantic. Credit: Stiv Wilson

The post Plastic Surgery: Hawaii, Science, NGOs and The American Chemistry Council appeared first on EcoSalon.

seriesThe first in a special series on plastic.

It’s a plastic world and it’s here to stay – the plastic, that is. It clogs our sewers, it litters our beaches, it kills our turtles, it leaches chemicals into our baby bottles (and we’ve recently learned that it’s not just BPA that causes estrogenic activity). But the people who produce and sell this non-biodegradable omnisubstance of our lives sure don’t want you to stop buying, buying, buying. And they’re spending a lot of money to protect their market interest.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be investigating where plastic hides, the powers that protect it, the environmental consequences of widespread adoption, as well as taking a look at alternatives and ways to reduce the plastic footprint. Click through to the slideshow to start the series.

This fall I had the chance to sail across The South Atlantic ocean with pro surfer Mary Osborne, studying plastic pollution in the South Atlantic. I enlisted Mary to the cause and she’s picked up the ball and is running with it, serving now as an ambassador for 5 Gyres. I caught up with Mary recently to chat about what she’s up to in her outreach efforts. To raise plastic use awareness, she has worked with Ventura, California photographer, Angela Izzo to produce this series of portraits with Mary clad in waste packaging.

Says Angela of her inspiration for the series: “By using pop culture imagery and media as an inspiration to create ‘Fantasy’ like scenes and sets, the images entice the viewer to look deeper into the photograph. At once, the viewer is confronted with the actual material being made of plastic trash, and Mary’s iconic image works to target a wider audience who may not be aware of this issue. My goal for this project is to raise awareness of the current plastic devastation confronting our oceans and to encourage change through individual action like bringing your own bag to the store, growing your own food and being mindful of our everyday habits. Together we can make this world a better place.”

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Stay tuned for more synthetic sojourning in the days to come.

The post Plastic Surgery: A Series On Waste, Fashion, Policy And Consumer Culture appeared first on EcoSalon.

Why recycling plastic bags only worsens our plastic plight.

All around the country, states and municipalities are considering legislation to either impose a fee on or outright ban single use plastic shopping bags. The arguments for eliminating plastic bags are sundry – the effects on the environment, the cost to taxpayers for clogged sewer systems and landfilling, and the havoc plastic wreaks on the animal kingdom from ingestion and entanglement.

We just need more recycling! So goes the cry of industry attempting a bait and switch.

According to the EPA, 100 billion plastic bags are consumed each year in the United States. That’s the supply side; the demand by recyclers is less than 5% of that number in the United States. Recently, The Salem Statesman Journal published a piece about the need for curbside recycling to address the trauma that plastic pollution creates in watersheds and oceans. At first blush, it seems to make sense. The article states that right now, citizens of Marion county (where the paper serves) must bring their bags to The Marion County Transfer Station for recycling. The piece argues that this inconvenience is what is causing the low recycling rate. But what’s important to note is that “able to be recycled” and “is recycled” are two very different things.

I contacted the Marion County transfer station and was told that all the plastic bags they collect go to another company, Agri-Plas, Inc. So I called Agri-Plas to ask what they do with them. The answer was startling: nothing. Nothing? As Agri Plas rep. Jennifer Sanders says, “There is absolutely no market for HDPE (film, plastic wrap, bags) in the United States. Everything we’ve collected in the past two years, at least, is still sitting here. Sometimes China will take them, maybe.”

Recyclers are in the business of making money. They can’t make money on HDPE, so why is the industry arguing on their behalf for something they don’t even want?

The largest plastic bag recycling center in the world is in Indiana, called Hilex Poly. Here’s what I want to know: At $.10 per pound, bound and delivered for HDPE, are they turning a profit? That doesn’t even cover delivery costs. Unfortunately, we can’t look at the company’s finances. Hilex Poly is a private LLC held by another company, HPC, which manufactures virgin plastic products. Hilex appears to be a public relations front. On their website, they give no recycling rates of bags for the United States; they employ about one thousand people nationally. By comparison, California’s taxpayers spend $25 million a year to collect and bury 19 billion plastic bags.

Recycling is the worst kind of supply side economics. Supply will always exceed demand because consumption always outpaces recycling. Even if recycling rates go up, consumption rates go up faster. The problem is getting worse, not better, even with improved recycling. Every year, more bags are consumed and more virgin plastic is produced. If recycling were truly a solution, the market for virgin plastics would be in decline.  It’s not.

Here’s the problem: You can’t make a bag out of a bag. Virgin content is needed because the polymer chains that hold a bag together are weakened by the recycling process. Recycling is actually down-cycling in practice. Only products of less structural integrity can be made from the original material. No matter how much we recycle, there will still be a net higher amount of plastic bags on the planet. In the ocean. In the river. In the landfill. In the sewer.

What’s doubly insidious is that the industry is very well aware of this, as well as the economics regarding their products in the waste stream. The industry props up recycling as convenient strategy for passing the responsibility to the taxpayer and government. This is calculated. This is on purpose. And yes, it’s cynical. Millions of dollars are spent lobbying, creating misleading ads full of rainbows and flowers and happy talk, and in generous campaign contributions to policy-makers.  Wouldn’t this money be better spent actually trying to fix the problem? Yes, but with the fossil fuel system already in place and humming cheaply, the industry doesn’t want to fix what’s broken because it isn’t broken for the industry. Creating a new, sustainable infrastructure means vast amounts of capital. Sunk costs and time. Trial and error. Research and development. Tight margins. New competition. Imperfect data. And very few dollars.

Image: Oregon Ban the Bag

The post The Myth Of Recycling: Markets, Pollution and Industry Spin appeared first on EcoSalon.

Take five. Here’s an at-a-glance chance to reconnect with or catch top stories you might have missed this week at EcoSalon:

1. Mixed and very strong reactions to new writer Libby Lowe’s article, Jesus, Enough With The Chicken, highlighting the new Chick-fil-A location in Chicago. Should there be a separation of chicken and state? Are human rights involved when it comes to a simple chicken patty? Read and weigh in on this “heavy sandwich.”

2. Abigail Doan on trashion: Condoms and Candy Wrappers: And We Wonder Why Anna Wintour Won’t Green Vogue has us all asking whether creative reuse is fraying the lines of sustainable design and glorifying “less than marketable fashion.”

3. Fears over child bullying, kidnapping and standard-issue psychopaths preying on our children are challenged with senior editor Luanne Bradley’s piece, Are The Kids Alright In 2011? Not If You Buy Into The Hype. Bradley writes: “Was it really safer back then? If you buy into recent statistics, kids are actually as safe or safer now.”

4. Can you green me now? Have you ever thought about how sustainable your phone network is? Stephanie Rogers investigates in her Digg-topping article, Verizon Vs. AT&T: Who’s Greener (We Know Who Works Better). Want to know who wins? Click and see.

5. Sea sluts and plastic patches. Foreign correspondent Stiv Wilson is a self-proclaimed two-timer, but not for what you’re thinking. Reflections from a Two-Timer, a thoughtful conclusion to the exclusive 14-week series chronicling his sailing journey in the South Atlantic Gyre may be over, but you can catch the entire series here.

Above image helloturkeytoe

The post The Friday Five, Vol. 1 appeared first on EcoSalon.

ExclusiveThe final chapter in a voyage through the Atlantic gyre.

It’s not what you think, but it is true that I go both ways.

I’ve just finished an epic three-point, five-month voyage that had me sailing from Brazil to South Africa to Namibia to Uruguay. We crossed the Atlantic twice, traveling some 9,000 nautical miles by sea in a rugged sailboat. Along the way, I’ve recorded the adventure – and trials – here at EcoSalon, sending my dispatches to our editor at all hours via satellite. For those of you who are just joining the saga, in addition to journalism, I work with an NGO called The 5 Gyres Institute that hunts the world’s oceans for plastic pollution in areas that no one else studies. We maintain a constant presence at sea, and this expedition completed the first two research transects of The South Atlantic Gyre sampling the ocean surface for plastic every 60 nautical miles.

Here’s what I can tell you right now: There’s a lot of plastic between South America and Africa that no one has ever talked about, and I’ve just spent 63 days at sea staring at it firsthand.

At home in the States, I listen to politicians debate the importance of bag bans in my hometown of Portland. I watch science organizations and universities that study marine plastic pollution fight for supremacy on the issue, along with various NGOs vying to be the dominant voice of the movement. It makes me ill. Out there, in the wide blue frontier, ego is irrelevant. The west coast of the United States, where the vast majority of people who work on this issue reside (and where their research vessels are moored), is roughly 1,400 miles long. But there are millions of miles of beaches in this world with plastic on them and 315 million square kilometers of ocean surface with particles of plastic stratified to the depths. Despite what we hear, it has nothing to do with islands of plastic the size of Texas. It’s a soup, not a tarte.

And it’s crazy, isn’t it? That’s what this job impresses upon me everyday – that we are crazy to be so careless and inconsiderate with a material so resilient and toxic. Yet reflection inspires me, because I’ve also witnessed NGOs, scientists and politicians championing the cause in an ethical, selfless, passionate manner. These people matter, and we owe them our gratitude. They have mine.

All of us, humbly or arrogantly, started using plastic in earnest about 40 years ago. As a global society, we are head-over-heels in love with the stuff. Widespread utilization of plastic started, among several reasons, as a way to help women get out of the kitchen – believe it or not, single-use plastic adoption has roots in feminism – but the result has become a pernicious addiction to a wonder material that no one can figure out how to handle once it’s used. And so, in 40 years, we broke the ocean.

That’s a lot of space to break. In terms of pollution vectors, plastic is just another threat, but it’s a big one and as far as the amount of people working on the issue, it’s the underdog in terms of ocean advocacy.

What is big?

It is difficult to really convey how much space we’re talking about. Until you two-time (yes, I’m a sea slut; I’ve done the North Atlantic, too), crossing an ocean by ship, it’s almost impossible to grasp. Flying over the sea doesn’t exactly do it. You need the unique vantage of being that person on the bow of a ship chasing the horizon endlessly for months on end. You need to leave Africa and notice she’s out of view within six hours – and you won’t see anything but light blue on blue or dark grey on grey for a month. You might spot a couple of albatrosses or storm petrels, perhaps the occasional whale or dolphin. But for the most part, you don’t see anything other than a color pallet study for 30 days. Thirty days is a long time.

With the exception of windless days when we can dive and make repairs or conduct additional research, we’re constantly moving forward doing at least 155 nautical miles a day. 30 days, 24/7 moving, 8-9 miles an hour.  There is nothing to hit, nothing to see, no one to meet, with one exception: every hour, we saw plastic. You can get remote as you want to get, and you’re still going to find plastic.

It is no exaggeration to say that we know more as a species about outer space than we do about our own shared oceans. We know it’s really big, so consider the size in the context of an additional ocean reality we now know: on average, there is a pint glass-full of plastic particles scattered over something the size of a football field with the occasional bucket, toothbrush, water bottle or bleach bottle on the 50 yard line tossed in. Over 315 million square kilometers on this planet, this is an almost incomprehensible amount of pollution.

While the media love to run Texas Sized headlines about the North Pacific Garbage Patch, which confuses the public about the true nature of this problem (and some NGOs too), our team and others working with us everywhere in the world are finding the same plastic everywhere – without exception. Density varies, but frequency does not.

It doesn’t matter who owns the issue. A global problem needs a global solution, and this is absolutely a global problem. We need to go beyond the North Pacific, beyond the USA-centricity, beyond the ego and the get. We must start engaging each other as a species, worldwide, and stop this madness made real by something as absurd to our true needs as mere convenience.

Editor’s Note: This is part 14 in an exclusive series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the latest each week here at EcoSalon during his months-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre and beyond.

The post Reflections from a Two-Timer appeared first on EcoSalon.

ExclusiveThe voyage into the heart of the Atlantic gyre continues.

To make landfall in Uruguay, we’re dependent on our engine to propel our vessel through the windless areas of the open sea. But today, as we followed a line of garbage where we pulled out milk crates, buckets, and nondescript plastic garbage, we heard something terrible. The engine seized. Assessing, we determined that the gearbox had broken, rendering the engine useless. To fix this problem we’d need a machine shop, something one doesn’t have 1200 miles from land. The gearbox shaft extends to the propeller. When the propeller doesn’t spin, the boat doesn’t move forward. End of story.

So here I am, spinning slowly between swells on a becalmed sea with sails hanging, adrift in the South Atlantic with new thoughts on the definition of “the middle of nowhere.” Until wind, we wait, we sweat and we swim. The sea is so placid right now, we can watch small fragments of plastic on the surface floating by.

As Skip Dale donned Scuba gear to sort out the propeller shaft below Sea Dragon, I filmed from the water – the interaction between sea life and a fairly substantial ghost net (net bolus, net ball) we had happened upon just before the gearbox broke. Still under power when we discovered it, we had nearly missed it, and would have if it not for Simon’s spear. Yes, our South African artist crewmate, Simon, had brought a handcrafted, hand-fabricated spear on the expedition, the purpose of which had eluded me until now. Seeing it on the dock in Cape Town, I simply thought: hey, he’s an artist; this object is useless at sea, but it’s cool for photos. I could not have been more wrong. As I watched the bolus drift pass, Simon reared up, and like a Zulu warrior took a short running start and launched the spear from the stern. As if he’d done this a million times before, he hooked the net straight away (the design featured a barb so that it sticks whatever it speared), and he pulled it to the boat with a retrieval line, tied a line to it and then let it drift behind us.

A ghost net is a tangled mess of ropes and fishing nets that floats on the surface, kind of like an iceberg. From surface observations it appears small, but underwater it’s a massive ball that extends downward. Rope and fishing tackle are no longer made of natural fibers, having been replaced within the past 30 years by the non-biodegradable counterpart, polypropylene.

As I swam with the bolus, about 50-100 small fish took shelter under it. Three large Dorado orbited the smaller fish under the bolus and at one point I was able to get within a couple feet of them. Beautiful.

What’s bizarre about ghost nets is how many different kinds of ropes and netting materials comprise them. The ropes don’t necessarily come from the same source vessel, harbor, or watershed, but still somehow, in a great cosmic-drift-grind, they find each other out here, in the open ocean. Drifting through time and space, they conspire only to tangle together, tangle marine life, and slowly disintegrate in the sun, sending pollutant infused plastic fragments adrift in the ocean.

Simply touching this net-ball made a cloud of polypropylene dust explode into the water. I watched as the tiny fish just breathed right through it, unaware. As I hovered there, with Sea Dragon’s belly in the azure distance, I began to shudder to think about where I was, what I was doing and what I was seeing.

With a chill, I realized I was the first person on earth to shoot underwater video footage of a naturally occurring net bolus in the middle of the South Atlantic Gyre. It’s not a realization that fuels the ego, but one that stirs the senses as they rub up against the definitions of words like massive, horrific, unseen, random and sublime.

With modern technology, it’s often easy to forget you’re in the middle of the ocean – indeed a blue desert that encompasses 70 percent of the earth’s surface (only five percent of which has been explored). Yet here I was, having no idea that when I woke up this morning what awaited me in 15,000 feet of water.

Here I swam, untethered to anything, alone, observing bits of manufactured goods that once started out as oil in the ground. That oil was extruded from different sources, then refined at different refineries and shipped to different rope factories all over the world, sold, bought, lost only to one day collect here and be happened upon, quite by accident by our crew. And at this strange moment, in this nondescript patch of pure blue, I observe this entanglement as a sinister, toxic shelter for sea life drifting in a cerulean nether land. It’s like, as one crewmate said of our samples, finding a Twinkie in outer space.

Unfortunately, what we’ve confirmed now, in two separate expeditions, is that the Twinkies are everywhere.

Editor’s Note: This is part 13 in a special series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the exclusive each week here at EcoSalon during his months-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre and beyond.

Images: Stiv Wilson

The post Twinkies In Outer Space appeared first on EcoSalon.