Posted by Tina
The scientist whose workk caused plastic bag hysteria has revised his estimates. PJ Media reports:
The scientist whose findings environmentalists used to shame us into bringing our own reusable bags to the grocery store now says that his estimate of one million tons of plastic floating in the ocean may have been off by a factor of perhaps 143. His latest estimate ranges from 7,000 to 35,000 tons, and even most of that has biodegraded into granules.
Cózar’s team didn’t find country-size islands of plastic bags strangling baby birds and sea turtles. It found “micro plastics.” What people think of as a dump doesn’t look like floating junk. Instead, ocean current “convergence zones” are swirling with flecks of plastic – like a snow globe half a minute after shaking – and with considerably less plastic trash than expected.
Also doubtful: The environmentalist claim that 1.5 million marine animals choke to death each year on plastic bags that ran away from home for a life at sea. They’ve revised their estimates downward to 6.6 percent of that, but even the new figure has no empirical support.
In California, many cities have actually banned single-use plastic bags as a result of the successful PR campaign conjuring islands of floating plastic and animals who desperately need a Heimlich maneuver.
Correction appreciated. The public wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Is that too much to expect?
Nevertheless, we should not be dumping plastic bags into the ocean. Microscopic plastic granules are mistaken for food by some of the baseline core contributors to all life on this planet — microscopic animal plankton. Plastic shopping bags are made from propylene gas. A waste “greenhouse gas” from natural gas production that would otherwise be vented to the atmosphere but instead is captured and solidified into polypropylene. Such plastic products (there are various sorts, hard and soft) are easily recycled into hybrid, encapsulating wood chip construction wonder products that can be completely submerged without problems of decay.
Yet ignorant political activist pinheads like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Chico City Councillor Ann Schawb spearhead anti plastic bag ordinances based on faulty, incomplete, and questionable information.
Thanks for the added information, Pie. Recycling is the best idea for everything we use. It’s a wonderful and fascinating industry that I think has just begun to get it’s legs.
I worked as a member and volunteer in the “Ecology Club” in the high school that created the first experimental public recycling center in California. It was funded by the evil corporation, Coors beer.
Er … I mean the first large experimental public recycling center for consumer glass bottles and metal drink and food containers. The Boy Scouts (of whom I was also a member up to the lowly rank of Eagle) had already covered paper recycling, which we also did at the Coors funded site.
It only took four years and Safeway started up the same recycling and eliminated the necessity for the Coors funded site at the old independent supermarket site now occupied by Trader Joe’s in Lafayette California.
Wow that’s quite a story. Coors was always a great company that treated its employees well. I’m not at all surprised they would sponsor such an endeavor. My own first lessons in conservation were around the streams in Colorado and New Mexico where my dad always had us collect the discarded bottles and cans. It really made him angry that people didn’t carry their trash away.
We seem to have some of those “small world” connections, my family worked for Coors, my German uncle was the brewmeister…and my beautiful Irish Setter came from Vintage Farms in Lafayette.
Congrats on that Eagle rank, no small feat.
Re #6 Tina : Another thing I learned in Scouts, if you carry it in, you can carry it out. We did. No garbage left behind. We logged 100s of miles hiking the Sierra.