Welcome To ... The Crapola Islands

Again, our friends at the Plastic Pollution Coalition are making headlines...they've created a new country: The Crapola Islands, a place that "nature could not have created alone", where "the emerald waters teem with sea turtles and the sea turtles teem with tiny pieces of plastic garbage".


Drop by the Crapola Islands website and become a citizen - but beware, to become a citizen you must take the following pledge (suitable for framing and placement near the coffee machine at your office!):

"I, (state your name) pledge allegiance
to the nation of the Crapola Islands.
and by that I mean:

I will use less disposable plastic items
and not go through like 5 styrofoam cups a day;

I pledge not to be that guy.

I further pledge to spread the word
and bring others to the cause because together,
we can solve the plastic pollution epidemic.

Honestly, I see like zero downside to this."

Don't be that guy - but do havva Happy Monday!

BBC: Hip to the Tip

Another report from the UK's BBC2 on the oceanic plastic pollution problem. Documentarian Simon Reeve has made a couple of ace short reports of his trips around the world, exploring the dodgy, pear-shaped state of the world's natural environment (what there is of it, such as it is...), and this is his latest and it's quite stonking - in it, he really takes the biscuit and reminds us that it's time to stop faffing around.

Tell your mum that it's naff and to give it a look - that British accent has a way of calming and focusing the viewer - and frankly, RAP's essentially NorthAmerica-centric campaign right fancies any and all international insight and raised-awareness. Fab, indeed.

Stay spot-on and get gobsmacked - watch it on your telly, it's totally brill!

Tara (TTFN!)!

[OH YEAH, don't forget to contact your CA senator to tell them that you want them to pass AB 1998, the California bag ban bill! Please sign Surfrider's AB 1998 Action Alert as well - it's crunch time!]

Spread the Trash Talk!

Just a Friday quickie to provide a link to Heal The Bay's new "Trashed" website. It's an interactive site that shows causes, effects, facts and other details about plastic pollution in the ocean. HTB wants to raise awareness about the problem and how we can help - "spread the trash talk" as they put it - and they'd love your help.

The site is great for kids (of all ages!) - plus it's got "widgets & banners" that you can dress up your own website/newsletters/blogs and Facebook/MySpace accounts with, in order to help get the word out about the plastic pollution problem that's "trashing" our ocean. The website even provides a way to "trash your friends and family". Hmmm...(raised eyebrow)...could make for an interesting weekend.

Take a moment to visit the 'normal' Heal the Bay website too. They are good friends of ours, do great work...they "get it". ;)

Pau hana!!

Missing the Point?? #2

Plastics manufacturers, on one of their websites, at least partially own up to having a hand in the problems of “pollution and marine debris” in this recent article. (Side bar: “marine debris” is the plastics industry’s term for oceanic plastic pollution…their term just sounds better. Don’t be swayed by the double-talk – marine debris is made up of stuff like logs, dead whales and…the Flying Dutchman. Plastic pollution is called “plastic pollution”.)

Another part of the article mentions that plastics manufacturers need to “raise the profile of bag recycling efforts” – that, instead of actually taking a lead in collecting and dealing with their own instant trash, known commonly as “single use plastics”. The plastics industry is all about promoting the idea of us common citizens doing the actual work of cleaning up after their products. Kinda Us VS Them, in a nutshell. It’s not how responsible citizen-manufacturers should handle problem situations. But, then again, they ain’t responsible citizens of the local neighborhoods feeling the brunt of the resultant pollution, so why would they care, right?

It’s a sad state that the grinning “suit” in the byline misses the point that his group creates a nearly-instant item of trash – essentially handing it to us along with the burden of dealing with its apparently-too-tricky disposal (“too tricky” in that much of it ends up as pollution & litter, despite all of the industry’s sweat-soaked efforts to the opposite). It’s not often that someone hands me a piece of their trash to deal with, but the plastics industry exercises this action as an everyday function of “normal” business. When we try to better our surroundings by stopping the flow of this waste into our community…their idea of helping to address the problem is to sling a lawsuit at us and tell us that we are “anti-business”…niiiice. Luv ya buddy, come over for dinner sometime, NOT!


Again, the plastics industry is not a “neighbor” in the figurative (much less the literal) sense of the word - they demonstrate to us that they are a simple entity bent on simple survival, simple self-preservation, simple easy MONEY, and simply trampling any efforts that seek to better the environment and…our neighborhoods, efforts which may harm their too-simple business model. Small minds seeking the least creative, collaborative, and constructive solutions. A lawsuit? C’mon, that’s grade school, playground-diplomacy thinking – d’you mean to tell us that you can’t think of a way to 1) fix the problem that you created, 2) make money doing it, 3) become champions of communities AND 4) set an example for other industry? A 1) win, 2) win, 3) win, 4) win opportunity - Try it, you’ll like it.

Beans for Bags in Rio!

Subtitle: Rio De Janiero Takes a Strong Stance Against Plastic Bags!

Great ideas from Brazil - a beans & rice CRV for plastic bags, read on:

From our Rio-via-San-Francisco Surfrider RAP rep, Melissa Legget:

Bags, Now Only of Reusable Material

RIO-

The government bill mandating that plastic bags distributed by stores be substituted for reusable bags was approved on June 24, 2009 by the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro (Alerj). The bill, proposed in 2007, took almost two years to be voted on because of pressure by various economic groups. Finally, the bill has finally been signed by Governor Sergio Cabral, making the legislation into law.

In those two years, sixteen parliamentary amendments were incorporated into the original government bill. An original amendment stated that stores continuing to use plastic bags would have to buy back each bag for R$.03 (US$.015) or give a kilo of rice or beans for every 50 bags returned to the store, even if that particular store did not distribute the particular bags in the first place. In the latest version of the law, stores are no longer required to buy back bags but will have to give at least a R$.03 discount for every 5 items to clients who choose to use their own bags. In the final text, the food exchange program was maintained.

Stores will also have to put up signs informing customers that plastic material takes more than one hundred years to decompose. Fines for not complying with the new law could reach more than R$10,000 (US$5,000). Large companies will have one year and small companies will have three years to implement the new legislation. The president of Alerj, Jorge Picciani (PMDB), affirmed that he will meet with business entities and write a new bill incorporating proposed alterations to the bill approved yesterday.

The bill was proposed in 2007 by the then State Secretary of the Environment, Carlos Minc, today Brazil's Minister of the Environment. The government's justification for the bill is that plastic bags cause grave problems for the environment, principally to streams and rivers, where the accumulation of this material provokes floods in regions close to rivers. Pressure by commercial entities and the plastic industry delayed the voting process.

BRAVO!