Plastic Jellyfish
posted in Conservation |I was just reading an Article by Janice Neitzel at triplepundit.com about plastic bags. She estimates that around one million plastic bags are used every minute….. hmmm, as she says, that’s alot of plastic bags.
She goes on to state that the Marine Connection estimates that over a million birds and 100,000 marine animals, including whales and turtles, die each year from plastic debris mistaken for food. Really scary statistics.
Personally I bring a cloth bag to the grocers when I go shopping but that is kind of the European tradition. I remember when I used to live in the US, the baggers at the grocery store would place two bags around a bottle of wine, another one for the ice cream, then a fourth to put them both in so I didn’t have to carry seperate bags. (okay, ice cream and wine are not the best combination, it was just an example). If it was a particularly large shopping trip, you could sometimes leave the shop with an excess of 20 seperate plastic bags. That is potentially 20 dead marine birds or animals.
Unfortunately my understanding of this problem was superficial until I started diving and mistaking floating bags for jelly fish myself. The North of the Red Sea around Eilat and Taba was where I first saw a big problem with plastic bags. On every dive, especially closer to shore, we had at least five to ten bags float by. We gathered as many as we could but the next dive was full of them again. Of course putting them in a bin on land was certainly no garuntee that we wouldn’t be collecting them on the next dive or the one after that.
In the last years, many first world nations have heard the plea of the conservation and protection groups and action has been, and continues to be taken. In Janice Neitzels article “Ooops, thats a plastic bag, not a jellyfish” she cites that IKEA has opted to motivate buyers away from Plastic bags and totally eliminate their use in the future. Of course most of the bags that actually make it into our waterways originate from second and third world nations in areas like South East Asia, Africa and South America and not the places where IKEA operates.
A worldwide ban on the use of plastic bags seems a little unrealistic at the moment but that would be the best solution. However, as plastic is a petroleum based product, and world oil reserves are estimated to last only another thirty or fourty years, there is an end in sight.