A Word About Recycling with Ollie Maier
A few weeks ago, I talked about the floating island of plastic in the ocean. Then just the other day, there was a couple of articles in USA Today discussing it more in length. Several of the items really caught my eye. I Will cover a few of them, hoping you find them as interesting as I did.
For example, we didn’t realize this floating island of plastic debris, located between California and Hawaii, is twice the size of Texas. “The patch includes about 1.8 trillion pieces of trash and weighs 88,000 tons – the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets.”
To me, that means it’s no little thing!
The patch was first discovered in the early 1990s, and has been growing ever since. Although it is located between California and Hawaii, most of it, because of ocean currents, comes from other areas. Although the United States contributes about 121,000 tons each year, much of it comes from countries around the Pacific Rim.
“Overall, worldwide, most of the plastic trash in the ocean comes from Asia. In fact, the top six countries for ocean garbage are China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand.”
This island is estimated to be about 10 feet thick for the most part. However, this floating island does not contain all the plastic it collects. Much of it breaks down into smaller pieces the size of a fingernail or grain of rice. In that state, some of it sinks to the bottom of the ocean in what is referred to as "Marine snow" as it falls to the ocean floor. A study reported there may be as much as 70 million tons of plastic waste on the sea floor.
As it is going down, which can take weeks before reaching the ocean floor, many fish think this "Marine snow" is food and take it into their digestive systems, however, it won’t digest. Many of the fish, over 700 species including deep water fish, now harvested from the ocean have this plastic in them, both in their digestive system and even in their blood.
And something that really surprised me was it's not just fish or marine life that's affected, it's us.
Rolf Halden, a professor of environmental health engineering at Arizona State University, said every human being in the developed world has traces of plastic constituents in his or her blood.
In the previous article, we mentioned much of this plastic gets into the ocean through rivers feeding into it. But how does it get into the rivers? Through streams feeding into the rivers which have plastic items that should have been recycled or just put into the trash – some plastic items are not recyclable at all locations. And thus, unfortunately, very year, as many as 12 million tons of plastic garbage are swept into the oceans worldwide.
Enough about that floating island of plastic garbage, just try not to contribute to it by recycling or putting non-recyclable plastic in the trash for the landfill.
Speaking of your recycling plastic, here is what local citizens recycled at the Green Guy Recycling Service dropoff site last month, August:
• Metals: 2,343,093 lbs.
• Cardboard: 268,360 lbs.
• Paper: 43,570 lbs.
• Glass: 36,735 lbs.
• Plastic: 14,492 lbs.
• Monitors: 5.611 lbs.
• Electronics: 4,232 lbs.
• Used Oil: 1,509 Gallons
• Used oil filters: 400
• Used Tires: 907
There was a number of other things also recycled there such as printer cartridges, rechargeable batteries, Styrofoam peanuts, plus some recycled items sold to citizens at a greatly reduced price which doesn’t show up in the above weights. Again, we should all be very proud of these amounts – thanks for info Maria. We also appreciate everything recycled at other drop-off sites and curbside. A big thank you to all of you who recycle and are good stewards of all the blessings we have been given. Keep up the wonderful work.
Enough for today, till next week, do have a pleasant one.
--Ollie is a local citizen concerned with the environment and helping others. A retired Air Force fighter and instructor pilot, he is a graduate of Leadership San Marcos and received his degrees at Texas State University where he worked on staff before totally retiring. For questions or comments, he invites you to call him at 512-353-7432 or e-mail omaier@txstate.edu.
