Disposable Plastics

We've offered suggestions in the past of things that you can do to reduce your reliance on single use plastics. Here are three of our own tips that we will recycle:

• Get reusable bags for grocery shopping
• Save and recycle packing material
• Use biodegradeable lures rather than soft plastics

The best solution to single use plastics is, simply, not to use them. Water bottles, plastic silverware and plates, plastic beer cups, and the ubiquitous plastic bags...single use items, use 'em once and they end up in the landfill...if we're lucky.

Plastics used in single use items tend to become brittle and break into smaller pieces. Add a little bit of wind to the equation and plastics find their level. Often, this is in a body of water. Maybe your local impoundment, maybe the ocean. When that happens, you get bite-sized chunks that wildlife and fish often mistake for food.

Quite honestly, a good deal of the evidence indicating that wildlife mistake plastics for food is anecdotal. But, when the anecdotes start adding up, they are hard to ignore.

In a recent Marine Turtle Newsletter, for example, Collette Wabnitz and Wallace Nichols noted that "...relief of gastrointestinal obstruction of a green turtle off Melbourne beach, Florida, resulted in the animal defecating 74 foreign objects over a period of a month, including four types of latex balloons, different types of hard plastic, a piece of carpet-like material, and two 2 to 4 mm tar balls."

That's pretty graphic anecdotal evidence.

It would be impossible to measure the absolute rates of plastic ingestion. A research project of that magnitude would almost impossible.

The visual evidence of plastics in the ocean is staggering. The images at seaturtle.org will give you a pretty clear picture of the problem. Single use plastics make absolutely no sense.

For more Stewardship Tips visit www.RecycledFish.org