High on the list of my pet-peeves would be the amount of packaging that is involved in the products we purchase and the amount of waste that ends up in our landfills and oceans (please watch the video suggested at the end of the blog). During the past month I have been conducting an experiment to see how much trash I could reduce, reuse and recycle for a class assignment. For starters, I started a compost for my kitchen vegan waste. Then I began looking at the containers food comes in, realizing they are usually reusable and many even have ziploc type closures, so instead of throwing out those bags and using a new ziploc bag for food storage, I am reusing bags I would of normally discarded. Two small changes that over a period of time will make a large difference.
A few years back my daughter Ashleigh went on a research campaign to learn about the hazards of plastic, she is now known as, the plastic police among her family and friends and our personal consultant for product buying and container recycling.
Here are some of the FAT Facts on plastic that she learned that I would like to share with you
* A plastic milk jug takes 1 million years to decompose.
* A plastic cup can take 50 - 80 years to decompose.
* Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every HOUR.
* Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1 million sea creatures every year.
* Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
* Today, Americans generate 10.5 million tons of plastic waste a year but recycle only 1 or 2 % of it.
* An estimated 14 billion pounds of trash, much of it plastic is dumped in the world's oceans every year.
* The worldwide fishing industry dumps an estimated 150,000 tons of plastic into the ocean each year, including packaging, plastic nets, lines, and buoys.
* About 1,200 plastic soft drink and salad dressing containers could carpet the average living room.
* Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas.
* In 2008, Americans alone created 250 million tons of trash and recycled and/or composted 83 million tons of it – the equivalent of a 33.2% recycling rate.
* Most disturbing Nearly every piece of plastic EVER made still exists today.
This is the Skinny on what YOU can do!
* Buy your milk and juice in plastic containers, they can be recycled, cardboard ones cannot be.
* Be careful when opening plastic bag type food containers, the resealing ones work great to use over and over instead of buying Ziploc’s.
* Wash and save your plastic containers from foods like yogurt, butter, cottage cheese, use for storage containers.
* Recycle the inner tubes of your paper towel and toilet paper rolls – they are cardboard!
* Aluminum foil can be added to your recycle with can
* Don't buy bottled water! What do you think happens to the 2 million beverage bottles Americans use every 5 minutes?
I would urge you to watch this history channel video titled, Sailing the Great Pacific Garage Patch, produced by Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. It is so worth seeing, just click below.
In closing... I leave you with this reminder
Treat the earth well.
It was not given to you by your parents,
it was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children.
Ancient Indian Proverb
No comments:
Post a Comment