“Plastic, plastic everywhere”

The North Pacific Gyre is getting an increasing attention. After a series of videos published on vbs.tv (Vice magazine’s internet television network,) the Globe and Mail reserved a full page today to this area located in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. Spreading on 26 million kilometres and described in the article as “a slow-moving, clockwise vortex of water,” the North Pacific Gyre has been collecting plastic waste for decades. Plastic isn’t biodegradable but rather disintegrates into smaller and smaller pieces, which end up being eaten by surrounding fish and travelling birds. The article offers compelling examples on its devastating effect on the environment.

Dr. Safina, who is also president and co-founder of the New York-based Blue Ocean Institute, has seen the deadly effects of plastic on the albatross, which spends six months raising a single chick.

The parents go on foraging trips as long as 12,800 kilometres, which can take upward of three weeks. They feed their chicks and immediately leave again to search for food, he said.

“There’s almost nothing else I can think of where the parents work so hard, so exhaustively, for so long to raise the next generation. And then you see the chick that’s five, 51/2 months old, almost ready to fly, but it’s dead. And the carcass is starting to rot, and right through the rib cage you see that this bird – that is on an island in the middle of the ocean – is packed with cigarette lighters.”

It also quotes Cathy Cirko, vice-president of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, who ridiculously tries to defend the production of new plastic, when recycling existing products would be sufficient.

“You can deliver more volume per kilogram of material than you can with other materials.”

Another reason is its ability to meet technical requirements to advance the way people live, she said, giving the example of pills being packaged in individual plastic bubbles for safety, or the availability of berries from Argentina year-round because of the durable plastic cases in which they are shipped.

“Also, demographically, we’re a country of smaller households,” Ms. Cirko said. “When you get into families of one and two, you get into portion packaging and servings for one person that in the end use more packaging.”

Maybe she should get in touch with adopters of the local food movement in order to understand why eating Argentinian berries year-round is not exactly a reasonable thing to do, or maybe she should simply stop to find excuses for her lobbying group and start to face the reality.

Plastic has been on the radar of the Canadian media for a couple of months, as controversy arose around bisphenol A, a chemical component of many plastic items suspected to make its way through our hormonal system and disturb it. In April, the federal government announced its intention to ban the chemical from plastic baby bottles.

And today also, the Toronto Star has an editorial written by Craig and Marc Kielburger, co-founders of Free the Children, on the presence of oil and plastic in our daily lives. They praise scientific research on biodegradable plastic and encourage the public to reduce their consumption.