It's time for plastics to be diverted from US landfills

Packaging, packaging, packaging!

ip has joined the global boycott of plastics used for packaging, especially of food for commercial sale.

From Biomass Magazine:

Estimates suggest 200 billion pounds of plastic is produced every year. Due to the technical limitations or inconvenience of recycling, only a fraction of that material resurfaces in new plastic products. It takes no imagination whatsoever to throw away plastic and doom it to the fate of a thousand years in a landfill, but plastic waste doesn’t just threaten terra firma.

The Pacific Ocean is home of the world’s biggest landfill: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Air and ocean currents form a huge, slow-moving spiral of debris—mostly plastic—accumulated from all corners of the globe through decades. And unlike biological material, plastic doesn’t biodegrade and decompose. Instead, plastic photodegrades, meaning it shatters infinitely into smaller and smaller pieces without actually chemically breaking down. Because of this, the amount of plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch only grows. 

The tiny plastic bits, called nurdles or “Mermaid tears,” are reported to outnumber plankton in the vast region six-to-one and are mistaken as food by bottom feeders and other filter feeders, which poses a threat to the entire food chain. The water-bound garbage dump has gotten so large it has split into eastern and western patches. Reports indicate the eastern patch, located between Hawaii and California, is twice as big as the state of Texas. 

The Pacific Ocean is home of the world’s biggest landfill: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Air and ocean currents form a huge, slow-moving spiral of debris—mostly plastic—accumulated from all corners of the globe through decades. And unlike biological material, plastic doesn’t biodegrade and decompose. Instead, plastic photodegrades, meaning it shatters infinitely into smaller and smaller pieces without actually chemically breaking down. Because of this, the amount of plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch only grows.The tiny plastic bits, called nurdles or “Mermaid tears,” are reported to outnumber plankton in the vast region six-to-one and are mistaken as food by bottom feeders and other filter feeders, which poses a threat to the entire food chain. The water-bound garbage dump has gotten so large it has split into eastern and western patches. Reports indicate the eastern patch, located between Hawaii and California, is twice as big as the state of Texas.

If the BP calamity leads to the use of the stranded wind that Doug Wiken suggests to convert plastics to fuel in this process, currently being developed in India (incidently still recovering from Union Carbide's crime at Bhopal).

"... a much bigger opportunity obviously shines under the bonnets of cars. And the Zadgaonkars say it’s only a matter of time. “We’ve had a couple of vehicles running on our fuel for the last two years and they’ve been performing just fine,” says Umesh, who points to a list of reasons why their fuel should power your vehicle. “It has all the properties of motor spirit, even better flammability, can be calibrated to meet Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) norms and vehicle performance improves with use of plastic fuel.” It also scores points on the emission front: vehicles run on the plastic fuel have successfully passed PUC tests."