LiveGaia - Holistic Living, Sustainable Life

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Plastic, it is so everywhere in our lives, so many places we hardly even notice it. Bags, wrappers, containers, bottles and on and on, I’m typing on it now. Some of it is easily recyclable, which is great for those who bother to do it (ever peeked in your neighbors trash can!!). I have a fleece jacket made from recycled plastic bottles and our decks are made from recycled plastic. That’s great, and all power to infinitely recyclables.

A whole lot of plastic isn’t recycled though, some just can’t be and many don’t fall in what will be taken by recycling facilities (how frustrating is that!). Of course there are all those people who still don’t bother with any plastic recycling at all. So where does all the non-recycled go when we throw it into a bin with a big plastic bag in it? Well like most things we throw away it ends up in the ground in manmade trash mountains we call landfill. An awful lot of it doesn’t though, and just bangs around until it ends up blown or floated into the sea.

One of the things that makes plastic so recyclable is that it resists biodegrading. It does though photodegrade, being broken down by the photons in sunlight. This means it just breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces but doesn’t go away. So out of sight out of mind, unless you are a bird or a fish or other living being who can’t figure out why your belly is full while your starving to death, or dying of toxic poisoning. We all learnt about food chains in school so you’ll be guessing right it doesn’t end there.

There was a false myth started before our space adventures that the great wall of China was the one man made thing you could see from space. Now we scoot around up there we know this isn’t true. But there is something that is visible. Somewhere out in the Pacific ocean there is a naturally occurring vortex, the North Pacific Gyre. It’s like the plug-hole of the oceans, everything end up there, but here there’s no way out. Remember the plastic running wild and free, this is where a lot of it ends up. Now nicknamed the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’. Twice the size of Texas, 3.5 million tons, 80% plastic and growing.

I think it was Einstein who said "to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result is insanity". I’m starting to wish the oil is going to run out soon, because we don’t seem able to make change unless we absolutely have to. When we do have to, or really, really want to enough, we are pretty darn ingeniously creative as a species, or at least we produce folks who are. When we do finally really make a shift out of the fastest buck, throwaway mentality that grips the world economy, there will be a hellava lot to do. I can imagine though an entirely different world where we return to a deeper and more authentic relationship with ourselves and the world we live on. I can see it now, fleets of solar powered cargo tankers sailing into the Great Pacific plug-hole harvesting the valuable plastics to integrate into a cradle to cradle infinite loop of recyclable use.

In the meantime, let’s remember that insanely monstrous continent of plastic garbage every time we are in a checkout line with a plastic card in one hand and anything plastic in the other.