Tubbataha Trip

Last March I went on a trip to one of the diving spots in the Philippines: Tubbataha! It definitely is an amazing spot with plenty of sharks, mantas, and impressive coral formations.

A Hike Up Mount Pinatubo

In January of this year we decided to go hike up Mount Pinatubo. Those of you who like volcanoes probably already know that this is not some ordinary mount. Pinatubo is an active volcano in the Philippines, not far from the capital city Manila. In 1991 it gained worldwide notoriety when it erupted spectacularly, spewing an ash column 7km high.

Luckily for me, and the 20 million other people who live in its vicinity, Pinatubo has been relatively quiet lately, and is open to the public. You can hike up the crater side, and even swim in the lake that formed over the years in the crater itself.

A Weeks Worth Of Plastic

So last week I decided to do an experiment and log all the plastic trash I generate in a week. Each time I go diving I almost always spot some piece of plastic floating on the surface or littered across the seabed, so I know first hand the damage that plastics can do. I was wondering how much of that plastic could potentially have been mine many months, or maybe even years ago.

I was shocked when I found out how much plastic trash I generate in a week. After tallying everything carefully, it came to a garbage bag full of it, and that only after a week! It is not surprising that some enterprising spirits were able to build an entire ship out of plastic trash. They aptly called the ship the Plastiki, and are currently sailing across the oceans to raise awareness about the damage disposable plastic wrappers and containers pose to our environment.

Plastic Profile Day Seven

On the 324th birthday of Daniel Fahrenheit, and the 34th day of the Deep Water Horizon disaster, I have the same amount of plastic to throw away as I usually do. Since Fahrenheit gave us the first common scale for measuring temperature (later superseded by the Celsius scale) I thought it pertinent to highlight the contribution plastic makes to global warming.

Nowadays it seems that the oil industry is synonymous with the rising trend in climate change. The more hydrocarbons we consume, the more carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere. In my last post I already mentioned that no less than eight percent of world oil production goes to manufacturing plastics, and that is expected to increase as our appetite for plastic grows unabated.

Cheap and plentiful oil has resulted in cheap and plentiful plastic. Over the years, however, it has gotten harder and harder to extract oil from the ground, and we have had to venture in hostile territory to get to it. The ever volatile situation in the Middle East has forced many nations to seek out oil reserves in deeper and deeper waters around their coastline. The North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico oil rigs are a good example. Although these rigs are situated in a less politically volatile region, we seem to have swapped out environmental safety for political safety. The Deep Water Horizon disaster is a stark reminder of the risks deep water drilling carries. This is now officially the worst oil spill disaster in the United States, and its effects will be felt for years to come.

If getting to this precious oil is so fraught with danger, should we not use anything that requires oil sparingly? Logic would say yes, but unfortunately we are not rational creatures. Just look at the amount of petroleum our cars use, or consider all the plastic wrappers we throw away on a daily basis. All made with oil. The best example of our wasteful consumption habit is bottled water. The Pacific Institute estimates that the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil were used to produce the plastic water bottles consumed in 2006. In countries like the US, water from taps is perfectly potable and often even better quality than their bottled counterparts.  In fact, many consider bottled water a great big scam, making consumers pay many times more for something they can get out of their tap. Worse, the production of the bottle contributes to our insatiable demand for crude oil.

Plastic Profile Day Six

Yesterday was Biodiversity Day, and today is World Turtle Day.  Biodiversity Day has been celebrated since 1993 (although the day on which the celebration is held did change) and World Turtle Day since 2000. Since their inception, public and political awareness has definitely grown, but it seems everything we have done so far has had little effect on the declining trend of biodiversity on our planet.

In an extensive survey conducted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), scientist concluded that there is overwhelming evidence the the natural world is being destroyed as fast as ever. The diversity of life, from sea grass to mammals, has worsened overall since 1970. Meanwhile pressures that erode diversity, from overfishing to alien species invasions, have increased.

One of these pressures is also due to our insatiable demand for plastic products. Plastic, after all, is a petro-chemical product. No less than eight percent of world oil production goes to manufacturing plastics. The rate at which plastic is consumed grows by about 9% a year, so more and more oil will be used to fulfill our demand for this product.

We only need to watch the news to see what kind of pressures oil production can cause. It has been a month now and BP has still has not been able to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists and researchers warned that the thousands of barrels of oil still gushing into the Gulf are contributing to a potential ecological disaster of unknown proportions.

Plastic Profile Day Five

Another day and another load of plastic to dispose of. This time I have more than usual. I went for Vietnamese take out, and ordered a couple of dishes (Beef pho and some rolls). Each dish and its associated condiments (sauce, fresh chili, etc) was packaged in its own container, so my take-out adventure resulted in a lot of plastic waste. The Vietnamese restaurant is probably a 5 minutes walk away from my apartment, so you can effectively say that this plastic was only used for about 5 to 10 minutes - the time it takes me to get back to my apartment and arrange the food on my dinner plate.

All these containers used for only a couple of minutes, and then to think that these very containers last for decades. Last year a comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the environment and human health was released. One of the lead authors of this review was quoted as saying:

“Plastics are very long-lived products that could potentially have service over decades, and yet our main use of these lightweight, inexpensive materials are as single-use items that will go to the garbage dump within a year, where they’ll persist for centuries”

After logging all the plastic waste I have accumulated so far, this is clearly true. Not a single item I threw away was used multiple times. The pictures portrayed here is another stark reminder why we should not use such long-lived materials for single-use products. The first picture shows an albatross chick with a green plastic hook stuck in its mouth. The second picture shows the hook after it was removed. It appears to be one of those bags that is used to hold fruit in a supermarket. Just look at the size of all that plastic mass that was inside this chick. If it was not removed, its pretty likely that chick would have died.

Plastic Profile Day Four

Yesterday I had a picture of a dead albatross with bottle caps and other plastic objects visible inside the decomposed carcass. Of course, albatross are not the only birds suffering from the plastic scourge. In a 2005 study, researchers found that 95% of all dead fulmars (a type of seagull) washed up around the North Sea contained fragments of plastic. One dead bird from Denmark had 20.6 grams of plastic in its belly, equivalent to about 2 kilograms in a human-sized stomach.

Although the dead albatross featured in yesterday's post was found on Kure Atoll, and the fulmar study focused on birds in the North Sea, we can be pretty sure the same problem exists across the globe. In fact, Kure Atoll lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific, making the fact that plastic is literally everywhere even more poignant.

Just look around your own area and for sure you will see plastic waste every few hundred meters. In developing nations where environmental policy enforcement may not be what it should be, the situation is likely to be far worse. The picture above is a good example. It shows a man in a dugout canoe paddling through a sea of plastic garbage along a Manila waterway.

Plastic Profile Day Three

Just like yesterday, lots of plastic collected today. Noticeable difference this time though: no plastic bags from the supermarket, and no coffee cup caps! Sad but true, today I went without drinking coffee, and its an experience I rather avoid.

But then again, at least I spared the environment two caps that my usual drinking habit incurs on a daily basis. Thinking about it, there must be a lot of caps with my name on it somewhere.

In fact, a study in 2001 concluded that the mass of plastic in the North Pacific garbage patch was approximately six times that of plankton. Six times the amount of plankton, and that was over 9 years ago! I wonder what the ratio is now.

As you probably know, plankton is an essential part of the food chain. If plastic starts to displace plankton, it is bound to end up in this chain. The picture on the left shows a dead Laysan albatross with bottle caps and other plastic objects visible inside the decomposed carcass.