Plastics: Part One

Don’t Recycle
You might think that is a drastic statement, but recycling should be the last thing on your mind especially when you say the nasty work “Plastic”, which if you remember Dustin Hoffman and “koo koo ka choo, Mrs. Robinson”, you know that was the key word for his future ”Plastics”, along with TV dinners, saucer shaped houses and flying cars (by the way, I’ve been waiting a long time for my flying car, but that’s another column). Now plastics have made our lives easier, but have also become a bane of our existence. Plastics have changed our lives big time, saved money on shipping, manufacturing, some are pretty durable for shipping, a big part of our cars, etc. But when our culture has long been buried like “Planet of the Apes” (another movie reference for the baby boomers, eh?), what will our legacy be other than “Plastics”, Good, Bad, or Ugly.

Petroleum
To create plastics requires petroleum, 70% from natural gas, a non-renewable natural resource (it’s like ‘land’; they don’t make any more it). We’ve been trying to wean our society from using petroleum, gasoline, like trying to wean those wily squirrels in our yard from eating the pears from our pear tree (another column?). You might say, “Well, we have made a concerted effort to try and recycle the plastic we use”:
“Wrong!”
Then why do I find myself digging into trash cans at all kinds of events to rescue bottles from the landfill (along with aluminum cans, uck!) Believe me, there is still a considerable amount of plastic filling up our landfills: Did you know nationally, less than 6 percent of all plastic gets recycled, compared to recycling rates of 50 percent for paper, 37 percent for metals and 22 percent for glass, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency? Only about 37 percent of soft drink bottles and 28 percent of milk and water bottles are recycled the rest ends up as trash; and that’s the crux of this column, and you say “Finally”!

Plastics in our Environment
Toxic chemicals leach from the ubiquitous plastic (see BPA below) we throw away and can end up in our streams and rivers. These plastic bottles and plastic sacks are “photodegradable” which means the sun “slowly’ breaks down the plastic to smaller and smaller pieces which becomes food and ‘poison’ for for all sorts of critters such as turtles, fish, frogs, birds, etc. So all these plastic sacks in the trees and bottles in the ditches do more than just trash our lives!
They poison our lives.

There is a large floating island of trash in the Pacific Ocean, called a ‘gyre’ (about the twice the size of Texas) made of 90% plastic flotsam and the plastic is slowly breaking down and slowing poisoning any animals there. http://greatgreengadgets.com/gadgets/2009/02/16/the-widening-gyre-of-plastic-pollution-in-the-ocean/

Water Bottles
Plastic water bottles have become a common place item in this world of ‘Exercise. Stay fit. Stay hydrated. Stay hydrated…Seems, now a days, we all need to have water close to us and it seems everyone is selling bottled water, but the water in the bottles has less over-sight and/or guarantee of safety than the water that comes out of your water tap (some of the water in these bottles actually come from Your tap water: read the label!). Yes, we all need to stay hydrated, but say no to the plastic bottles.

Reuse
Make sacrifices: buy a reusable metal bottle--aluminum has been linked to Alzheimer’s--or hard plastic made in the good old USA, BPA free (‘Bisphenol A’ has been linked to health problems) and fill it up with tap water....let it set for a while to get rid of the chlorine taste or put some lemon in it……and when it’s gone, refill it again.
Sacrifice! Or get a good water filter; you’ll save money in the long run.

Tune in next week folks for Plastics Part Two: Reducing and Recycling in Brentwood
Keep those cards and letters.
(See this also at www.BrentwoodHomepage.com)