ScubaTribe

One of the most amazing inventions of all time, and one of the most common at the same time. Can you think back to a time before plastic bags? What kept your food fresh? What did you carry things in? How did you live?

The next time you walk into a shop, look at all the products lining the shelves. Nearly everything is wrapped securely in an airtight, vacuum sealed, germ free plastic bag. Bread, meat, vegetables, pillows, motorcycle parts, furniture accessories, products from every aspect of our modern world. Some even include several layers of wonderful, gleaming, plastic security protecting them from the evils of the open air.

When you finally assemble all these wonderful items in your plastic coated shopping cart and bring them to the checkout, you are faced with one of the most morally difficult questions of our time, “Paper or plastic?” Should you be party to the death of a tree? Lets face it, paper bags are no real gem of modern science anyway. If it is raining, you are certain to be picking up your shopping from a mud puddle in the parking lot, thank goodness all the contents are wrapped in plastic. They tear easily, and reusing them for anything but fire kindling or to line the paper recycling bin is a little ambitious. Plastic however is unaffected by water, is relatively difficult to tear (unless you shop at some of the cheaper markets) and is reusable in so many wonderful ways. So plastic then, why not?

On a typical food shopping trip where ten kilos of total grocery weight is purchased, providing there are no heavy cans in those bags, between 5 and 10% of that weight will be none other than glorious, wonderful plastic. All that plastic then comes home with you and is from that point on, your responsibility. So what can you do with it? Well, for starters most of the packaging for the products you purchase goes directly into the bin. The bags you have acquired can be used for carrying snacks to work or school, holding bits and bobs that otherwise would get spread around and make a mess, or most commonly, for lining the garbage can. Again the wonderful properties of plastic are an advantage here. If you have a particularly messy, wet, and otherwise nasty bit of something to dispose of, no worries, drop it in the bin. The plastic bag you inserted beforehand will prevent any of that icky stuff from leaking out and make your home a more wonderful place to live.

Another layer of plastic for our safety and peace of mind is often added after this step in the Hefty or King Size variety. This occurs just before it is hauled off to wherever plastic is taken. Recycled? Reused? Plastic Heaven? What does it matter as long as the mess is cleaned up, it is not deposited in your backyard or anywhere remotely close to it and you can’t see or smell it anymore. There, all that plastic is gone and you can head back to the shop to pick up another load.

Now where that plastic goes is something of a mystery. A land fill is one option, far from your town, out in the country where it is buried along with all the millions and billions of other plastic bags and food scraps and lead based paints and…. You get the picture. Plastic will remain for centuries upon centuries leaching poisons into the ground water long after we are dead and gone.

Sometimes it is burned to create energy, alternative fuels they are called. This sends those poisons out into the air in one fail swoop so we don’t have to worry about the time release scenario. Of course we filter that air as much as is legally required so tat makes it all better. No matter, the poisons still get out and they certainly linger. A plastic bag will endure, have no fear about that.

What often happens to plastic bags is that they are placed on a barge with all our other wastes and sent out to sea. Now if you flew over the ocean, you wouldn’t see thousands or millions of barges sitting in an inconspicuous place in the middle of the sea waiting for the waste on board to magically disappear. The barges always return to port but strangely empty. This is a wonderful way to dispose of plastic. Dump it into the deepest darkest reaches of the sea. No one can see it down there, no one can smell it and it is certainly nowhere near anyone’s backyard that I know of.

The only real problems with this method arise from the fact that that poison still leeches into our environment (Of course it takes a while longer for us to get it back) and the bags that get loose from the mass on their way down to the depths end up floating around in the sea. Now this is relatively okay until this bag attaches itself to a coral reef and chokes off the supply of sunlight and plankton so necessary to the survival of that reef. Or until it is mistaken for a Jellyfish by a hungry Sea Turtle and ingested. All well and good you may say but remember the longevity of plastic. The turtle or dolphin or sea bird that attempts to eat that glittery, all purpose, and highly durable plastic wonder bag will soon find out how enduring they are in the grand scheme of things. A sobering statistic, it is estimated that over a million sea birds, marine mammals and sea turtles die each year due to ingestion of plastic bags. So, paper or plastic?

We were on a Dive site off the coast of Taba (I can’t remember the name of the site, Henry’s Hill or something) enjoying the scenery. On this particular site, it was common to see large Napolean Wrasse, several different types of Moray Eels and occasionally a few Rays swimming about.

We had been to 25 meters around the northern side of the hill, we were a group of 8, and had seen a bit of everything the site had to offer. Viz was pretty good, about 15 meters, which isn’t too bad for the Mud Flats of the Northern Gulf of Aquaba. We had returned to the Plataeu which lay in about ten meters and were preparing to ascend to our safety stop depth on the mooring line when one of the group spotted a strange shape at the edge of Viz and duly rang the alarm.

We all had a good look, it was difficult to see exactly what it was but my first impression was a wayward ray cruising near the surface. After a few minutes of squinting and gesticulating the arguement moved us toward the thought that it was a rather large Jelly fish. The current was nearly non-existent but it was heading our way so we waited. Eight people, hanging on a mooring line, all attention towards the mystery animal making its way slowly toward us.

As it came nearer I became absolutely sure it was a jellyfish as the amount of activity around it was evidence of a large population of small fish feeding away. It seemed to be in a half eaten state as one side was curiously shaped and the bunch beneath that should be its tentacles were not trailing anything of length.

When it came within 10 meters I was shocked, and a bit surprised to see that it was actually a rather large plastic bag drifting aimlessly through the water. Fish were all around it, picking at it and eating the algae off its well crusted edges. As a nursery for small fish, it was quite bountiful but I could imagine what it would do to a Turtle or other such creature who was in the habit of eating Jellyfish.

I did grab the bag and took it topside with me, possibly robbing several families of small fish of a food supply, but I felt justified in doing so.

In the Red Sea, I have seen so many plastic bags and so few Jellyfish that whenever I dive there now, I automatically sign “Plastic Bag” to my group and wait in the hopes that I will be proven wrong. Sadly, I am almost never proven wrong.

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.

A couple years ago, we were diving at St. Johns in the south of the Red Sea near the Sudanese border with Egypt and I found this cigarette pack laying on a coral ledge at about 24 meters. It was a bit of a shock in such a rarely visited area, and then only by divers and fishermen, that such an item would be so carelessly discarded into the sea. Since that time I have taken many pictures of garbage floating around in the sea and lying on the bottom.

It is true that this cigarette package will deteriorate rather quickly, it probably has already, and return to its baser elements, possibly even adding to the environment in which it sits, but that is not true with most of the things we dump into the sea. Take for instance the plastic bags floating everywhere in all nearly our oceans, rivers and lakes. They will spend hundreds of years choking corals, killing sea turtles and generally just hanging around before they deteriorate enough to where they can’t cause problems anymore. Or the barrel after barrel of Nuclear waste dumped in places like the Farralon Islands off of San Fransisco or the deep sea trenches. These will be there, even after all visible evidence of the barrels is gone, emitting dangerous radiation for eons.

Look at the plastic bag, balloon, candy wrapper or whatever it is that you are currently holding or have nearby. Chances are this will either end up in a landfill, excreting chemicals into the ground water, sitting at the bottom of the sea in a designated waste dump, or floating about in the oceans for a lucky turtle to mistake for a jellyfish. No matter what we dump, it finds its way into the water eventually. In first world nations such as the US and European countries, waste is treated and handled in ways where the impact is reduced in many cases. Recycling has reduced the amounts that find its way into our natural world but most countries make no such efforts.

We need to produce less, recycle more and generally take all our actions, no matter how small or insignificant they seem, into account. Nearly every product you purchase, or daily routine you engage in has some effect on the natural world. Think before you act or any actions may be too little, too late.

Okay, so now I have built the site (still working on it so don’t be too critical) I guess I should write a post or two in the realm of its subject line. The Environment, specifically the Marine one, is that subject.

Everywhere we hear about new challenges facing the Marine environment. From Overfishing and Pollution to Threatened Species and Extinctions, the list of stresses we have placed upon our oceans is long and dirty. Just last week I read an article (can’t remember where) about the Farralon Islands off of San Fransisco where the US military dumped several thousand ordinary steel drums of Nuclear waste between the 50’s and the 80’s. The waters surrounding these Island have since been designated a Protected Area but the ramifications of all that highly toxic waste sitting on the bottom can never be truly measured.

According to the NOAA “Current estimates note that 10 percent of all coral reefs are degraded beyond recovery. Thirty percent are in critical condition and may die within 10 to 20 years. Experts predict that if current pressures are allowed to continue unabated, 60 percent of the world’s coral reefs may die completely by 2050 (CRTF, 2000). ”

These are sobering statistics considering that coral reefs are responsible for around 80% of the biodiversity found in our oceans.

Thankfully, more attention is being brought to these issues and work is being done on local, and to a lesser degree, global scale. With the work of organizations such as Greenpeace and the WWF as well as countless others, progress is being made. Too little too late??? It depends on us.

Have a look at the NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation site for up to date info on the plight of the worlds reefs.