News

11/29/10

It might be easier to clean up if the lawn chairs, water bottles and fishing nets all clumped together like a giant island of trash.

But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more scattered, which makes things challenging for the crew of a Richmond-based ship trying to find ways to clean up the mess.

"When you are out there you expect to see a sign: 'Welcome to the Gyre,'" said Nicholas Mallos, a marine debris scientist who sought to dispel popular notions of what the garbage patch is.

"It's not a floating island of trash. It's not the size of Texas," said Mallos, who works for the environmental group Ocean Conservancy. Though not always as obvious as a 3-ton "ghost net" or a floating mass of garbage -- which are out there, here and there -- the garbage collecting in the oceans is a serious global problem.

The trash, mostly plastics, collects in a vast region in the middle of the Pacific where four currents create a gyre, or vast vortex. Containers, nets and tiny bits of plastic are all swirling about, hundreds of miles offshore.

The crew of the Kaisei, a 151-foot brigantine tall ship that spends about half its time docked in Richmond, sailed for a few weeks in August in the garbage patch, also known as the North Pacific Gyre. It was the second voyage for Project Kaisei, which has a goal of eventually cleaning up the trash.

Speaking to reporters and others after their latest voyage this month, Mallos and Project Kaisei co-founder Mary Crowley described what they saw and their plans to try to clean up the garbage.

The trip confirmed that computer models are accurately predicting where the garbage is so that cleanup barges and ships can more effectively conduct large-scale trash removal.

In the few weeks the Kaisei was in the gyre, the crew collected thousands of pieces of plastic garbage and saw tiny bits of plastic entering the food web through small marine animals.

They picked up lids, containers, toothbrushes and car fenders.

Mallos said the problem is not readily apparent until one gets 500 miles off the coast of California, where tiny bits of plastic shimmer near the water's surface. The concentrations are heavier about 1,200 to 1,500 miles offshore, halfway to Hawaii, with discarded, rolled up fishing nets, sometimes adorned with other trash and trapped wildlife.

Crowley said the garbage extends to about 500 miles off the coast of Asia.

But the garbage still is not a massive island. It is more like an archipelago, Mallos said.

The plastics have been accumulating for decades and are extremely slow to degrade, though they do break into smaller bits that can be mistaken for food by small animals.

The trash mostly comes from shores both east and west but is also discarded by ships. In the gyre are lawn chairs that may have been left on a beach somewhere, containers washed from a road or tossed into a creek. And it has come from California, Asia and other regions along the Pacific's coasts.

Next year, Crowley and her partners plan to test ways to safely remove plastic trash off the coasts of San Diego and Seattle.

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11/26/10

Arcata and a handful of local businesses are ready to say goodbye to the single-use plastic bag, and they are hoping to spread the enthusiasm to help others do the same.

The Arcata City Council voted last week to move forward with creating a ban on single-use plastic bags to reduce impacts on the ocean and marine life as well as reduce litter and greenhouse gas emissions. The effort will likely require an Environmental Impact Report, but such a report would be useful in identifying what kind of ban would be most effective, said Karen Diemer, deputy director of Arcata Environmental Services.

The council directed staff to look into a plastic bag ban and any alternatives, which could include requiring businesses to charge for paper bags, banning produce and bulk bin bags as well as carry-out bags, or other options, Diemer said.

”Any single-use bag is going to have a higher environmental impact than a reusable bag,” she said.

A Master Environmental Assessment was put together in March for Green Cities California, a coalition of 12 governments working to implement groundbreaking environmental policies, as a way to provide other municipalities with information on plastic and other single-use bags. It does not address region-specific impacts but can provide a baseline for municipalities, according to the assessment.

The master assessment estimates that nearly 20 billion single-use plastic bags are used annually in California, and most end up in the landfill or as litter. Single-use paper bags are recycled at a much higher rate, but over its lifetime a paper bag has a larger greenhouse gas emission.

Although on a 1-1 ratio paper bags result in higher emissions, more plastic bags are often used to do the same job as one paper bag, so comparing them as such is a bit of a misnomer, Diemer said.

Single-use biodegradable bags appear more eco-friendly, but they cause more emissions during manufacturing and may only degrade under composting conditions, according to the assessment.

Reusable bags were determined by the assessment to have the least amount of impact, even if only reused a few times. Such bags are available in many stores in Arcata, and if a plastic bag ban was implemented, the availability might increase, Diemer said.

”It seems to me a majority of stores in Arcata have a low-cost option for reusable bags,” Diemer said.

At least one local business is moving on its own to reduce the use of single-use bags. Both locations of the North Coast Co-op will begin charging 10 cents per paper bag starting Jan. 1. Member Linkages Director Melanie Bettenhausen said the Co-op's goal is to reduce the amount of paper bags used by 80 percent in time for Earth Day on April 22. The charge for the bags is at cost, meaning the store won't make a profit.

”This is really an incentive to reduce our impact on the planet,” she said.

The Co-op has never offered single-use plastic bags.

Having a small charge for the bags will hopefully be the extra encouragement people need to remember their reusable bags, which shoppers often forget to bring inside. Bettenhausen said that's why the Co-op put up the banner outside the store that asks, “Did you remember your bags?”

Customers bring in a variety of reusable bags: homemade, store-bought or even Co-op canvas bags from a decade ago, she said.

The Co-op also plans to have reusable bag giveaways when it implements the new policy, and sell the thin reusable bags at cost to encourage customers to buy them. Bettenhausen said they also hope that when the store begins charging for paper bags, it will open the door for other grocery stores to do so as well.

Diemer was also hopeful others would follow the Co-op's example.

”I would love to see the Co-op take a leadership role to show how it can be done,” Diemer said.

The city council has also discussed potentially banning single-use plastic bags for bulk or produce items. Arcata Vice Mayor Susan Ornelas said her preference would be to include in an ordinance a two-step process that first bans outgoing single-use plastic bags, and then later bans the produce and bulk item plastic bags.

She said the city and the council should embark on an educational campaign if such a ban is passed to inform people of how plastic bags create litter problems and harm marine life, and how reusable bags are more sustainable.

”I think it's a doable thing,” Ornelas said.

Bettenhausen said the Co-op board had considered also eliminating the plastic bulk and produce bags, but they haven't identified a cost-effective way to do that yet. The Co-op used to provide recyclable plastic bags, but since the recycling center no longer takes them, the store stopped providing those kinds of bags.

If the paper bag policy is a success, there may be enough energy from members to move forward with eliminating those plastic bags as well, Bettenhausen said.

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11/17/10