Our Plastic World

I saw a link to this video on Facebook the other day.

http://vimeo.com/8177268

Far as I can tell, its a promo for a kickstarter project to raise money to make a movie about how bad plastic is when you toss it in the ocean.  OK, plastic is bad.

No, those arent colored rocks, thats plastic on that beach.

The solution to the plastic problem is simple. Stop pumping oil out of the ground.  No oil, no plastic.  Of course that would impact lifestyles that people have become accustomed to.  What can you give the kids for their birthdays that isnt made out of plastic?  What sort of clothes can you get that arent made out of plastic?

Some day when we no longer make plastic, we will have to go down to the beach to get our plastic, like a five gallon bucket or a beach ball or a pair of flip flops.  Sorry, they dont wash up in pairs.  You might have to mix colors.  With luck, you might find a right and a left in your size.

Walk into any sporting goods or outdoor store and the smell alone will tell you that you have stepped into a plastic goods emporium outgassing massive quantities of plastic fumes.  I am surprised that the state of California doesnt require stores to put warning labels on their doors to warn customers that the air inside these places is toxic.

One of the grander REI plastics emporiums.  Looks like they set this one up in an abandoned cathedral.

The irony of it all is that the people who shop in places like REI are lovers of the outdoors and generally lead healthy lifestyles, that is of course except when they go into an REI store and breathe the air there.

Sally Jewell, REI CEO sporting some REI plastic products.

Oh, & I just read that Sally Jewell, CEO of REI has just been nominated by Mr. Obama to become Secretary of the Interior.  So how does this bode for the elimination of plastic from the environment?  Not well, I imagine since plastic is REIs number one money making product.  If you took all the plastic out of an REI store, what would be left?  Not picking on REI here in particular.  Its not any worse than any other store, its just that the irony is deeper.
Anyway, not participating in the plastic culture is next to impossible since everything made today contains plastic, at the very least in its packaging.

Is that a plastic gyre?  No its thousands of plastic kayaks come together for a photo op. 

And then theres myself.  I use plastic string to lash my kayaks together,  and then I cover them with a plastic skin and then I seal the skin with a plastic coating.  I could do like Svend Ulstrup, a kayak builder and teacher in Denmark who only uses non-plastic materials in his kayaks.  I used to be like him, but like the convenience of plastic. It doesnt rot as fast as natural materials.  You have to let it sit out in the sun for two years to get it to start breaking down. Still, people love plastic because its shiny when its new but Ill stop using it if I can convince people that shiny isnt everything.

 

But if someone wants to come and picket my shop and make a movie about how I am polluting the ocean, Id be willing to stop, and I would also stop wearing polyester fleece clothing even though its warm and fuzzy.  Yes, every time I run the fleece through the washer, thousands of little polyester hairs break off the thing and go down the drain during the rinse cycle and from there on to the waste processing center in West Oakland and from there into San Francisco Bay and from there with the next outgoing tide through the Golden Gate and into the Pacific.  And from there, into the digestive system of all sorts of marine creatures who have no idea why they are feeling bloated even though theyre hungry. 
Im starting to talk myself out of wearing polyester fleece.  How about you?

Read More..

Plastic kayaks Pros and Cons

Recently, a friend let me paddle his plastic kayak, a boat that he was quite fond of.  I never turn down an opportunity to try out other kayaks and so I got in this one and paddled away.  The boat looked very pretty with its white bottom and yellow top and was still new and shiny, but the bow seemed too blunt and pushed too much water, creating much noise in the process. It wasnt a flaw that you would be likely to notice just by looking at the boat, but it was readily apparent once you paddle it.
I reflected on this and came to the conclusion that I couldnt be the only person that noticed this problem with that boat.  But given that the manufacturer had already invested in a mold, he probably had to sell a certain number of boats before he could recover the cost of the mold.  Only after that point could he consider making a new mold.  The longer he held on to the old mold, the cheaper the cost per boat would be.
And that, in a nutshell is one of the major problem of mass produced boats.  The thing that makes mass produced boats cheap is that they involve a minimum of labor.  Make a mold, and once you have a mold, you can squirt plastic into it and out comes one shiny boat after another.  But the mass production is a good thing only if you have designed a good mold.  The manufacturer had better built a number of prototypes and tested them for good design before committing to a mold.
If users give the manufacturer feedback on design flaws, he really cant do much until his first mold is payed for. And this is more of an issue for small manufacturers who, lacking deep pockets need to pay as they go.
If you buy a custom boat from an experienced builder, you pay more than for a production boat, but you are also less likely to be a victim of design flaws.  I suspect the custom builder gets to build a lot more boats and gets a lot more design experience than the builder of production boats.  I might be wrong, of course, given that I dont really know what credentials production boat designers have or whether production boat manufacturers even have experienced designers on their teams or just hire consultants or copy someone elses designs.  If anyone knows, Id like to hear from them.

Read More..

Never Mind the Plastic Problem

See my previous post about the problem of plastic polluting the oceans.
This post here, is a never mind disclaimer to that post.   Stay with me while I try to explain my reasoning.
Sure, plastic is a problem, but then so is everything else.  How about acidification of the oceans?  Seems like when it comes to degradation of the environment we have lots of contenders and the average lay person non-scientist doesnt know what to do because just about everything we do potentially messes up the environment.  I am surprised that nobody is doing rankings of which of the many environmental affronts is the worst.
Actually, it seems that people are using the market to decide.  The invisible hand will tell us which environmental affront is the worst based on which environmental groups video on youtube gets the most clicks, or whose kickstarter anti environmental affront revelation project gets the most donations.
Anyway, barring those kinds of metrics, I am here to tell you to stop worrying about plastic.  Sure, plastic is bad, but plastic is also a handy thing to have. And in spite of all the problems that plastics create when tossed in the ocean,  there are worse threats to the survival of the bio-crust on our planet.
Of late, I am reading that potentially the greatest threat to the bio-crust is anthropogenic heating of our atmosphere. For those of you that havent seen that adjective before, anthropogenic is a non-gender specific replacement for man-made. Once we get the earth hot enough, that increase in temperature will trigger all sorts of other processes that will guarantee that the earth will continue to get warmer without us doing anything further to help with the process.  Its kind of like starting a fire, for a while there you have to mess around with the wood to get it to burn.  You have to stick kindling under the logs and newspapers and stuff like that to get the logs burning, but once you get them going, they will keep burning on their own without any help from us.  Its the same with heating up the planet.  We had to burn lots of carbon to put enough carbon dioxide in the air to heat the earth up to the point where it could keep getting hotter on its own, but now were almost there or maybe were even there.

Permafrost in Siberia is melting and releasing methane into the air.  Methane is also bubbling up off the ocean floor off the coast of Siberia.  Methane is even better than carbon dioxide in keeping the heat in.  Its like going to Home depot and buying six inch thick insulation for the attic instead of just putting in the two inch stuff.  House is gonna be warm now.
Anyway, if this business about runaway heating is true, then we dont really have to worry about plastic in the ocean because getting cooked in our own juices will be way worse than having ocean critters eating little bits of plastic and dying and leaving the oceans fish-less.
Looked at from the human standpoint, not having any fish to eat will be the least of our problems in a massively overheated world.
Not my job here to give advice on how to stop global over heating.  Dmitry Orlov over at the cluborlov website advocates praying for a meteor to hit us and put an end to the oil burning that is generating all the extra carbon dioxide.  I personally advocate just using less of everything, but I see where that will never become popular for people to do on a voluntary basis, so maybe the ability of prayer to enlist the help of a higher power is not a bad way to go.

Read More..