Carbon Free Girl - A Race Car Driver's Journey to Be Carbon Neutral

our oceans are beautiful - and full of trash

January 3, 2009

That's it plastic, this is war!

We currently consume between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags globally every year. That's one million plastic bags every minute. It takes between 60 -120 million barrels of oil to make those bags and these bags can take decades to break down. With only 1% of these bags being recycled, plastic bags have become an environmental disaster.

According to a report from Greenpeace, scientists found that 80 percent of the oceans' litter originated on land. This litter is dangerous for sea life. Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swallow indigestible shards of plastic. Scientists estimate that every year at least a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die when they entangle themselves in debris or ingest it.

You may have already heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an island of trash in the Pacific that marine biologists estimate to be twice the size of Texas -- it consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons. This man made island of garbage lies between Hawaii and California. Four currents in the northern Pacific create a huge clockwise vortex called the North Pacific Gyre- it's 10 million square miles and at the eye of that vortex lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

I am not asking you to give up plastic just for the sake of the seabirds and sea turtles - there are consequences for humans as well. I love the way it was said in an article I Stumbled Upon called An Ocean of Rubbish:

"Discarded plastic water bottle photodegrades after a few years into polymers that nueston - floating organisms at the top of the water - ingest. Little fish eats neuston. Small fish eats little fish. Big fish eats small fish. Human orders big fish for dinner at neighborhood restaurant. Human develops (select your health problem here). The end. Poetic justice is a bitch."

Moral of the story: Plastic Bags Blow - so help out by getting yourself some Inconvenient Bags!

Life is short. Race hard. Live green. And don't use plastic bags.

Leilani