The oceans are spilled in every day with plastic trash and it’s killing creatures all the time but nobody hears about it and hardly anybody cares. I’m trying to live with less plastic but it’s hard. Everything is made of or wrapped in plastic. This is a picture of a big baby bird that died because its mother thought plastic was food and fed it to the baby.
http://www.mindfully.org/Water/2006/Sea-Plague-Plastic2aug06.htm
It’s still oil.
I heard that the biggest culprit was tiny plastic pellets. You can find these mixed with sand on some beaches. Ditching stuff overboard is so easy when no-one’s looking. It’s like those dog owners who suddenly become “responsible” about picking up the poo only when someone’s seen them.
Oil is very nasty but experience shows that the damage it causes is usually reversible. One school of thought suggests that we shouldn’t try to clean it up at all.
Depends on the type and volume. There is no precedent for the size and chemical complexity of the current Gulf spill.
You know, there is more and more recycling of plastic, and more banning of the grocery bags and such. But we keep seeking, and using a lot of oil. I think there is more hope of controlling the former even though the damage is so demonstrably bad in the ocean gyres.
The trouble is, recycling is really just downcycling. They don’t make new bottles, they just make plastic boards and fibers that then can’t be recycled.
We need a global ban on all disposable plastic. It’s silly to make something to be used for 15 seconds out of a material that lasts so long without the ability to biodegrade.
too few even care enough to inconvience themselves in the slightest concerning oil-plastics. 
Also, that poor bird didn’t eat plastic bags. It ate bottle caps and cigarette lighters. All short-term use plastic needs to be banned.
We carry avian first aid kits in our vehicles and boat. Unfortunately many of the folks who use the water around here have little regard for disposing of litter properly and used fishing line including hooks with attached bait. It’s the same attitude that folks who let their cats roam free have about the environment. I couldn’t begin to count the number of waterbirds we have freed from fishing line with hooks and assorted plastics all up and down the Chesapeake Bay. The rural back roads and byways where I do most of my work is filled with roadside dumps, typically adjacent to waterways the feed either into the Chesapeake Bay or Pamlico Sound. Folks have been getting rid of their garbage this way for generations hence many of them feel entitled, it’s a “natural” thing for them to do.
Just had some young women tell me loudly to “F_ _K Off!” when I suggested, politely, that they pick up the trash they just dumped from their car in the parking lot of our pharmacy. The garbage was plastic blister packs for some cell phones and MP3 players along with their ash tray contents. I was a little surprised most people don’t have the nerve to say something like that to my face.
So let’s see…
We seem to be an oil-addicted and trashy species.
Honestly, we’re not quite as bright as we need to be. (Or not to be.)
I’ll go with “culture”.
I worked in an organic garden for a while and it was kind of hard to get over the natural instinct to find a trash can for my banana peels and orange peels as I ate my way around the garden! The boss wanted that stuff tossed around. It was good for the garden. We should make disposable plates out of banana leaves and stuff like that. Work with the natural trashy instinct and not against it.
While I’ve always tried to be “conscious” in an environmental sense, I have only very recently begun to try pay much closer attention to my plastic use - and more importantly, it’s disposal.
The problem as I see it isn’t necessarily in the use of plastics, it’s in the cultural equivalence:
Plastic = Disposable
That’s the attitude that needs to be rethunk.
It really is near impossible to go completely without using plastic - it really is everywhere - but we need to make a conscious effort to really re-use when it’s even remotely possible.
I use plastic baggies for lunch sometimes, but I try to use them MANY times. If it just had a sandwich in it yesterday, why can’t I re-use it for tomorrow’s sandwich? And what about the baggies that your deli meat comes in? If you use the last of the ham or cheese, just use that bag again for your sandwich. And plastic beverage containers? Absolute idiocy. When we buy a beverage in a plastic bottle, we are buying a plastic bottle filled with someone’s tap water (plus some colors, sugars, caffeine, and/or carbonation). I will NEVER buy another plastic bottle filled with anything. Can you pledge to do the same?
While I like the idea of banana leaves, that sort of thing makes only as much sense as one’s biome safely permits. Where I live, the most common large-leaved plant that for its size could serve as tableware is probably the rhubarb, but rhubarb leaves being toxic to humans, I wouldn’t care to chance it. A lot of large-leaved plants in the temperate to subtropical areas of the U.S. tend to be poisonous; elephant ear and bird-of-paradise (which when not in flower might be mistaken for a banana plant) also come to mind. Unless you know your plants, washable and reusable plates and such would be best, IMO. We don’t have to throw everything away, especially if nature doesn’t afford us the luxury. I could buy banana leaves, but aside from ritual usage in certain temples or for occasionally cooking maybe Central American-style for the novelty of it, if I can’t just go out and get them off the plant, it seems like a bit of a conceit. But I’ve never priced them, so I don’t know how cost-comparative they are to styrofoam plates. And I’d have to keep them frozen, I expect, until I needed them. Dunno…in the larger scheme, maybe it’s not a bad idea even up here in the chilly North.
Hmm. Googling around, looks like the canna lily’s leaves would be suitable for plates - but NOT the calla lily. Don’t mix 'em up! The first one’s related to the banana, in fact (“canna” rhymes with “banana” in case you need a mnemonic, and parts are edible or at least nontoxic), but the calla can put the hurt on you.
What to do in the case of take-away? I don’t see why paper products can’t be retained and preferably improved upon (for moistureproofing using beeswax as opposed to paraffin, say, and stop with the bleaching) to assure biodegradability.
Whichever paradigm works. It’s just as well to think of discarded organic material not so much as trash but as a contribution. Personally, I prefer composting to just throwing things around, but at least an apple core breaks down, doesn’t it, and something else can eat of it into the bargain, too.
I buy plastic frequently, it usually says Nalgene. I’ve been using Nalgene labware for longer than I can remember. I don’t throw it away. We carry our meals in Japanese lunch boxes, some are plastic and some are stainless steel. We have been using the same ones since the early seventies. They all have locking clamps on the lids and we can carry just about anything in them and we have never ever had a leak, plenty of leeks but no leaks. I carry my tea in a thermos whether or not it is hot or cold and filtered water is in multiple liter bottles that are in a soft sided cooler, my wife puts her same orange coloured bottle in the fridge at work everyday. We do use the occasional plastic wrap but few things beat the way my wife can wrap a sandwich in butcher-paper.
all righty!!!
lets see the video 
Maybe not banana leaves in the US. Maybe corn husks instead. I did go to a fast-food restaurant in Mumbai and the plates were made of some kind of leaf sewn together with thread. Really cool.
I reuse bags as much as I can. I used to buy pre-made frozen bird food for my pet birds. The bags it came in were so heavy-duty I started buying the ingredients instead and making the bird food myself. I also reuse other bags that stuff comes in as much as possible. Recently I learned that you can fuse plastic bags together with an iron and sew the pieces together to make things. I use a cloth bag for grocery shopping, but as I walk to work I find plastic bags in the street every day. I’m going to sew a backpack out of plastic bags and be the envy of all my environmentalist hiking buddies.
I also reuse plastic bottles. Instead of Nalgenes I use Gatorade or similar bottles. I’ve got a Naked Juice bottle I was given for free in Stehekin Washington while I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I drank the stuff inside and still use the bottle. I also found a nice 1-liter bottle on the trail. I washed it and used it on my trip and still have it. I rarely buy plastic drink bottles myself since I don’t like caffeine or corn syrup.
I’m going to start carrying a set of eating utensils with me and I usually bring a cup if I’m going somewhere for coffee.
But I’m only one person in a sea of 6 billion people. The amount of plastic everywhere in Mumbai alone – knee deep in many places – was very depressing. I wish more people cared and not just sensitive white American bird-lovers like myself.
Waste is waste. It is not the fault of plastic.
I was on the shores of the Bering Sea in my youth, and was surprised how much human generated trash was washed up on the beaches. We need to be careful what we put into the environment, or it will outlast our species!