aDayWithoutPlastic.org

It's a simple idea. One day without plastic. Just a day. Think you can do it? We do.

Here's what's at stake: your health and the future of the ocean.

So, live like you love the ocean. Make June 8th, World Ocean Day or September 19th, International Coastal Cleanup Day YOUR Day Without Plastic.

Or pick your day, tell us how it goes.

And get a pluckfastic.org sticker for your reusable water bottle now!

Friday, September 14, 2007

Did Missing Turtles Eat Plastic Bags?

Did Missing Turtles Eat Plastic Bags?

Posted September 14th, 2007 (TOPP)

George Shillinger in Monterey, CA -- Mistaking them for jellyfish, Stephanie, Windy, Drexelina and Champira ate a bunch of plastic bags. Ingesting the bags weakened them because they were unable to digest their real food. They couldn’t avoid the nets, or they starved.

One of the divas of the Great Turtle Race, Stephanie Colburtle, hasn’t sent us a message for more than 100 days. We’re a little concerned about her and three other turtles: Windy, Champira and Drexelina. The other seven turtles are well on their way to their distant feeding grounds off Peru and Chile. This week, we’re looking at all the possibilities of what could have happened to the missing turtles.

“Last year on the beach in Costa Rica, a turtle defecated a plastic bag,” says TOPP researcher Jim Spotila, who’s been monitoring leatherbacks at Playa Grande, Costa Rica, for decades. The Drexel University professor founded the Leatherback Trust to save the leatherback turtle from extinction. “So I think they encounter them quite often. They pass them through their digestive system, or they get caught in their gut. They could starve to death. When we do necropsies on turtles that get caught in nets and drown, we find plastic bags. Are they weak because they haven’t been able to eat? Is that why they get tangled up and get caught? It’s hard to tell.”

The tons of plastic that’s dumped into the oceans ends up concentrating in giant eddys the size of football fields. Here's an animation from the GreenPeace Web site that shows how plastic accumulates in the ocean over time.

And here are photos of plastic bags taken from the stomach of a green turtle that died, plus pieces of netting, and, with the bags laid out, a compressed piece of styrofoam.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

On September 15th, join more than a half a million volunteers around the world who will hit the beaches and shores of the ocean, lakes and rivers and make them cleaner.

Take 15 seconds and sign up at: www.coastalcleanup.org

Our ocean is becoming a place full of plastic as every minute we throw away more than a million oil-based plastic bags, consume mountains of plastic bottles and heaps of single-use stryofoam ware. These are among the leading items picked up by the Coastal Cleanup Army of volunteers.


Please, please join us. You'll meet people who care, just like you. And you'll learn about all the things that end up, eventually, in the ocean (or ALMOST in the ocean in this case!)
And then you can start finding ways to get non-essential plastic out of your life. It's not so hard.