{"id":83980,"date":"2017-08-25T05:25:06","date_gmt":"2017-08-25T09:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=83980"},"modified":"2017-08-24T23:07:04","modified_gmt":"2017-08-25T03:07:04","slug":"column-from-here-and-back-again-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=83980","title":{"rendered":"COLUMN: From Here and Back Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Jim Coufal<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Banning Plastic Bags – Another View<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As Madison County wrestles with whether to ban plastic bags or not, residents have expressed many views, for and against. I find many of those against the ban give trivial, convenience and even self-serving, local reasons; the bags are handy for collecting dog do-do, for lining garbage cans, easier to carry than paper and so on. They overlook the saying, \u201cThink globally and act locally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking globally, the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of Texas. It consists of human-made debris, largely plastic, including a large portion of plastic bags. There are similar smaller garbage patches in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Off the Bay of Biscay, plastic detritus has been found as deep as 12,000 feet.<\/p>\n

Often these oceanic garbage patches are described and even pictured as looking like the open top of a large landfill. There apparently are such areas, but Angelicque White, associate professor at Oregon State University, who has studied the “garbage patch” in depth, warns that \u201cthe use of the phrase \u2018garbage patch\u2019 is misleading. … It is not visible from space; there are no islands of trash; it is more akin to a diffuse soup of plastic floating in our oceans.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plastic in such soup continuously breaks down until it is microscopic plastic (microbeads), which run through the food chain like DDT. The DDT actually adheres to microbeads\u2014double trouble. Scientists are still investigating the effects of such microbes, but have already found crustaceans and other filter feeders suffer reduced reproductive abilities.<\/p>\n

In larger forms, scientists find plastics in the oceans are responsible for the death of one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year from ingesting or getting trapped in plastic detritus, including plastic bags. Land animals also suffer, and when they die and decompose, the plastic often remains to move on, consumed by another.<\/p>\n

How does this immense global problem connect to us locally? About 80 percent of the debris in the GPGP comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia. Trash from the coast of North America takes about six years to reach the GPGP, while trash from Japan and other Asian countries takes about a year. The remaining 20 percent of debris in the GPGP comes from boaters,\u00a0offshore\u00a0oil rigs and large\u00a0cargo\u00a0ships that dump or loose debris directly into the water. The majority of this debris\u2014about 705,000 tons\u2014is fishing nets. More unusual items, such as computer monitors, footballs and LEGOs come from dropped\u00a0shipping\u00a0containers.<\/p>\n

A 2017 study conducted by scientists from the\u00a0University of California, Santa Barbara<\/a> and the\u00a0University of Georgia<\/a> concluded that of the 9.1 billion tons of plastic produced since 1950, close to 7 billion tons are no longer in use. The authors estimate that only 9 percent got recycled<\/a> over the years, while another 12 percent was\u00a0incinerated<\/a>, leaving 5.5 billion tons of plastic waste to litter the oceans or land.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s foolish to assume our local use of plastics, including plastic bags, doesn\u2019t contribute to this massive problem.<\/p>\n

Besides the particles’ danger to wildlife, on the\u00a0microscopic level<\/a>,\u00a0the floating debris can absorb organic pollutants<\/a>\u00a0from seawater, including\u00a0PCBs<\/a>,\u00a0DDT<\/a> and\u00a0PAHs<\/a>. Aside from toxic effects, when ingested, some of these are mistaken by the\u00a0endocrine<\/a>\u00a0system as\u00a0estradiol<\/a>, causing hormone disruption in the affected animal. These toxin-containing plastic pieces are also eaten by\u00a0jellyfish<\/a>, which are then eaten by fish, which are then eaten by animals up the food chain, including humans, resulting in their ingestion of toxic substances.<\/p>\n

In a landfill, single-use bags take up to 1,000 years to degrade. According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. An estimated 12 million barrels of oil is required to make that many plastic bags. Four out of five grocery bags in the U.S. are now plastic.<\/p>\n

Regarding solutions. San Jose, Calif., passed a law making every bag cost 10 cents.\u00a0<\/a>People in San Jose stopped using bags by about 90 percent, and the city reported an 89 percent drop in the amount of bag litter in its storm drains. San Jose estimates it is saving $1 million a year by not having to repair municipal recycling equipment that previously got jammed with plastic bags.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, the city saved landfill and transfer station bag litter control costs estimated at $318,000 a year.<\/p>\n

Along with the\u00a0think globally, act locally\u00a0example provided by San Jose\u2019s action, the legislation is also an example of\u2014borrowing from Native American thought\u2014thinking ahead seven generations while acting now. Environmental management follows the precautionary or preventive principle that if a threat of serious or irreversible damage to the environment or human health exists, a lack of full scientific knowledge about the situation (and I will add human convenience) should not be allowed to delay containment or remedial steps if the balance of potential costs and benefits justifies enacting them.<\/p>\n

In other words, “prevention is better than cure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jim Coufal of Cazenovia is a part-time philosopher and full-time observer of global trends. He can be reached at madnews@m3pmedia.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Banning Plastic Bags – Another View As Madison County wrestles with whether to ban plastic bags or not, residents have expressed many views, for and against. I find many of those against the ban give trivial, convenience and even self-serving, local reasons; the bags are handy for collecting dog do-do, for lining garbage cans, easier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23677,23810,23808,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-wellbeing","category-opinion","category-top-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43meu-lQw","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/madisoncountycourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/coufal-CMYK.jpg?fit=226%2C228&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}