Real Reason Coke Is Not Ditching BPA.

As a side note to the below article, I would like to comment that to this day, you can go into Mexico and buy and exchange your Coca-Cola, Topo Chico and yes, beer bottles any day of the week.  Unfortunately for myself and them, I am no longer willing to risk being caught in the cross fire of a firefight between the Mexican Military and the Drug Cartels to do this.  Yes, a country that is in the midst of a turmoil that we hopefully will never know here, still has a returnable bottle program that spreads across international borders and works.

From the April 29th article, " The Real Reason Coca-Cola Isn't Ditching Bisphenol A" at Treehugger by Lloyd Alter

"The REAL reason that Coke isn't talking is that they know perfectly well what the real answer is to the issue of how to get rid of BPA in cans: bring back the returnable bottle system that they have spent fifty years trying to destroy. As I noted in my post Recycling is Bullshit, the switch to disposables has enabled Coke to centralize production, eliminate the independent bottlers that served each community or region, and ship the stuff around the country on the interstates paid for by the taxpayers.

They have become hugely profitable because they have shifted the cost of taking back and dealing with the container from the company to Ariel and me and everyone else who pays for the garbage pickup, the landfill and the recycling costs.

Right now, there is no proven, reliable replacement for Bispenol A epoxies for acidic products like tomatoes or Coke. If people want to stop being exposed to it, they should demand returnable, refillable glass bottles. The stuff tastes better in it anyways."

Read the entire story here.

NY Bottle Bill Update

One year ago the state of New York (with the help of NE Region Surfrider chapters!) instituted the “Bottle Bill” – essentially a bottle-deposit on plastic bottles. According to Surfrider’s NE Regional Manager, John Weber, “If you believed the critics of bottle bill expansion, it was all gloom and doom, the economy was going to grind to a halt, overtaxed consumers were going to end up in the poorhouse, etc, etc. As you can see the actual results were a little different.”

Yo! Vive La Différence!

Not only did the state pick up a cool 120 MiLliOn bucks in unclaimed deposits, but, as we read in the recent press release, “The number of registered redemption centers which take back empty containers grew by 113 in 2009 and an additional 131 as of October 2010. Many of these small businesses have been able to expand and increase their employees’ wages and benefits.”

Yo! Helloooo Green Economy!

Sadly, no studies have been completed that can give us any statistical insight into the health changes New Yorkers experience by ingesting so much BPA from drinking out of all those bottles…hmmm...

Yo! Something to ponder this weekend! - have a plastic-free one…

Let Them Drink Bubbles

Paris wants to reduce plastic bottle use. Will they Ban the Bottle? Non! They will dispense carbonated water at public fountains to redirect sparkling water fans toward refilling reusable bottles. How refreshing and au courant! Get this: the Italians have been doing it for years, grazziverymuch.

Read about it in the Guardian UK and the NYTimes.

Could something like that happen in the USA? Fat chance, Pierre - the portly plastics and bottled-water lobbyists would bums-rush our capital and execute a full-court press on our impre$$ionable politicians. "OH, THE JOB LOSSES!","TAX-PAYER BOONDOGGLE!"...ZZZZzzzzz...

Riiiiight...those Frogs are on to something!

Nestle: Chummin', Not Chuggin'

Great news, clean-ocean lovers! Nestle foods, who controls one-third of the bottled water market, reports a 5% drop in sales of bottled water. Niiiiice. Not the 50-100% reduction that we were hoping for, but a start is a start.

National Public Radio's Marketplace reported it yesterday, and if the numbered estimate is Nestle's numbered estimate, we can probably tack on a couple of extra percentage points. (wink) Nestle's brands span the likes of Perrier, Poland Spring, Ozarka and (get this) Pure Life... Listen or read the article at the Marketplace website.

Speaking of Poland Spring, seize the opportunity to see the new film about bottled water, and the bottles they come in - it's called Tapped. We've mentioned it here previously. It not only details how Nestle commandeers, free of compensation, local aquifers across the state of Maine, it also shows some simple "experiments" - like washing them in a dishwasher - on plastic bottles that yield some unhealthful outcomes. The film is currently touring around the country and the creators make it readily available (for a small rental/showing fee) to groups interested in spreading the word on the foibles of bottled water.

Glug, glug, glug...

Breaking Bad Habits

Rise Above Plastics. A simple concept, right? All one has to do is stop using single use plastic bottles and start using reusable shopping bags at grocery and retail stores. Well at least that's the start. Wow, now that is a perfect example of easier said than done!

To be perfectly honest, I think breaking my smoking habit was a hell of a lot easier than weening myself off of single use plastic containers. Quitting smoking was easy. I started to take Zyban, picked a quit date and changed nothing. I kept smoking as I normally did and on the day that I decided to quit, I just stopped buying and smoking cigarettes. Done.

Yet for the past year or so I have really been trying to cut myself off of these stupid shopping bags and plastic bottles. I have a huge selection of reusable shopping bags in my front hallway in my house and a few in my truck yet still I forget them 60% of the time at those locations. The result, My grocery bill grows by a few dollars every time and I gain one more green bag to be left behind the next time I leave the house.

On the plastic bottle front I am a little more successful and that may be because that there is a water mill a 1/2 block from where I work and it takes no time to go down there and refill my jug every day. Of course it also gives me an excuse to take a long break from what I am doing. At home, we use a Brita filtration system and it is really no longer an issue especially since we rarely drink soft drinks anymore.

But those damned bags!! They are everywhere! It's not enough to remember to bring them with me to the grocery store or a retail store, that is only a fraction of the places that use them. I walk into the hardware store, there they are. I walk into the industrial marine supply company, here you go. I walk into a restaurant to pick up carry out, you guessed it, there they are again. I am not surprised at all that 14,000,000,000 bags are used in the US alone each year. They are constantly being offered to you and are utterly inescapable.

So what is the solution? For me personally, I have started to leave my bags in a bucket on the passenger side floorboard of my truck so I see them every time I climb in or get out and it seems to have helped out. I think I forget them only 20% of the time now.

What about everyone else and you? I don't know if this is even a problem for those who read this blog. I am assuming that many who come here have made a conscious decision to stop using the single use bags and are looking for more stats and numbers to be able to educate others with. That is why I initially started to subscribe to it. And that is where I think lies the key; not to force it upon others but to subtly educate one or two people at a time and let them make the decision on their own.

Forcing others to conform by implementing penalties or bans, in my opinion, is counterproductive. The hair on the back of my neck stands straight up and my face turns red when someone tries to force me to do something I don't understand, or want to do in the first place, and I know that I am not alone. I did not quit smoking because someone made me do it although many have tried. I did it because I saw my Father die of Lung Cancer. BIG WAKE UP CALL!! The man that raised me, was the big bad FBI agent, was in perfect health and my excuse to not face the dangers of smoking died in a matter of months right in front of me. At that moment I was very educated and very motivated.

We need to take all the videos, pictures and statistics that we see and ingest and keep them in the back of our head and when temptation strikes us or when an opportunity to politely influence another arises, we are armed with the right tools to help them and ourselves break our plastics habit.

In order to rise above plastics, we need to help everyone rise above ignorance as well!

Letter of the month

Junk Raft nearing Hawai'i

Take 15,000 bottles and strap it to an old Cessna 310 cockpit, make a raft... and sail it from California to Hawaii to raise awareness about plastics in the ocean. Check out the below video from the edge of the North Pacific Gyre

Check out their site here.

Cheer them on and support their journey.

Sea of Trash

Sea of Trash
By Donavan Hohn, New York Times

Off Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and steepen into whitecaps. Quiet with concentration, Chris Pallister decelerates from 15 knots to 8, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel and, like a skier negotiating moguls, coaxes his home-built boat, the Opus — aptly named for a comic-strip penguin — through the chaos of waves. Our progress becomes a series of concussions punctuated by troughs of anxious calm. In this it resembles the rest of Pallister’s life.

A 55-year-old lawyer with a monkish haircut, glasses that look difficult to break, an allergy of the eyes that makes him squint and a private law practice in Anchorage, Pallister spends most of his time directing a nonprofit group called the Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK (pronounced GO-ay-kay). According to its mission statement, GoAK’s lofty purpose is to “protect, preserve, enhance and restore the ecological integrity, wilderness quality and productivity of Prince William Sound and the North Gulf Coast of Alaska.” In practice, the group has, since Pallister and a few like-minded buddies founded it in 2005, done little else besides clean trash from beaches. All along Alaska’s outer coast, Chris Pallister will tell you, there are shores strewn with marine debris, as man-made flotsam and jetsam is officially known. Most of that debris is plastic, and much of it crosses the Gulf of Alaska or even the Pacific Ocean to arrive there.

The tide of plastic isn’t rising only on Alaskan shores. In 2004 two oceanographers from the British Antarctic Survey completed a study of plastic dispersal in the Atlantic that spanned both hemispheres. “Remote oceanic islands,” the study showed, “may have similar levels of debris to those adjacent to heavily industrialized coasts.” Even on the shores of Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic, the survey found on average a plastic item every five meters.

FULL ARTICLE