deformed turtle

This one is for Martin. And here’s a  film of another deformed turtle – 6 pack plastic holders are responsible here

You think they would know what plastic looked like – lord knows there’s enough of it in our oceans

Yeah and here are some stupid ducks choking on plastic

Plastic Free Breasts

Whats in plastic might cost you your lady lumps. Not a nice subject I know but check out this breast cancer website – it might help you keep your bits.

Washed ashore

Just a Drop in the Sea, Eigg Beach Originally uploaded by suewhite

100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from ingestion and/or entanglement with marine litter. 
A plastic bottle can take over 450 years to degrade.
Over 50% of all marine litter is plastic
15% of marine litter is on the beach, 15% on the surface of the sea and the remaining 70% on the seabed just waiting for a big storm to bring onto our beaches.
It is estimated that 2 billion sanitary items are flushed down the toilet every year in the UK.
Studies show there are over 2000 items of litter for every 1km of UK coastline, that’s 1 bit of litter for every 50cm of beach surveyed! 
Over 35% of all the marine litter on the beach is left by beach users!
Over 170 different marine species have been found with plastics in their stomachs.
Estimates for cleaning up beaches around the UK range between £14 million and £157 million annually!
These stats were taken fronm the Surfers Against Sewage website

Polystyrene poison

Hollywood Farmer’s Market-11

Downloaded from Flickr theres this from the trash detective – check out the rest of his photos

I’m not sure I can “have a nice day” if there is this much Styrofoam in the garbage. Read more about why Polystyrene is hazardous to your health and to the environment ask rosie

Local authorities, industry and coastal communities spend approximately £14 million a year to clean up beach litter in England and Wales alone (Environment Agency, 2004).

Annually the UK and maritime leisure industry is worth up to £11 billion.

Harbour authorities also have to pay to keep navigation channels free of litter – a survey of 42 harbour authorities reported that £26,100 is spent per year in some ports to clear fouled propellers and remove debris from the water

Some estimates put the cost of marine litter to the fishing industry at over £23 million a year (Environment Agency, 2002).

If you want to know more about the state of British beaches got to adopt a beach

How much rubbish is on your beach?

April 18, 2008 and the Ocean Conservancy released a report based on their beach cleanup efforts. On one day 380000 volunteers picked up six million pounds of rubbish data sheets ahowing rubbish break down by type location and source are available to download

Why is there all that plastic on the beach…

Hot diggory dog, From 2009 those big ships will not be allowed to dump non-biodegradable, lasts-for- ever plastic in the Mediterranean where it will inevitably wash up on our beaches.

Why have they ever been allowed to do it at all??

As of May 1, 2009, ships will no longer be allowed to dump waste into the Mediterranean. The new rules, announced by the United Nations Environment Programme, ban the dumping of “all plastics, including but not limited to synthetic ropes, synthetic fishing nets and plastic garbage bags” as well as “all other garbage, including paper products, rags, glass, metal, bottles, crockery, dunnage (loose material used in ship storage), lining and packing materials.”

see any number of blogs for more or try treehugger for more

But 80% of plastic rubbish in the sea comes from the land

You still have to give it up plastic that is

Water

In April 2007 I gave up bottled drinks.

Turn the world state we use 15 million bottles a day every day in the UK – www.turntheworld.com. Which is backed up by the Independent which states that Britons use 275,000 tons of plastic bottles each year – 15 million a day.

And a lot of that has got to be bottled drinks.

Its now its a year since I have a fizzy drink out of a plastic bottle. Not that that was so hard I mean fizzy drinks are basically diabetes in a bottle, corpulence in a cup tooth rotting badness in liquid form….

No bottled water was my drink – the sportsman aid the clubbers choice. That was back in the days of my youth now I think waht a total l rip off – its stupidly expensive and creates a mountain of waste. Water from thetaps is just as good. You can believe me or read more here

Americans dont know where plastic comes from

Heres and interesting post on an interesting survery

http://gracefulflavor.net/2007/04/30/70-of-americans-dont-know-plastic-comes-from-oil/#comment-47920

I bet a lot of Brits dont either

Mermaids tears

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6218698.stm

Among clumps of seaweed or flotsam washed up on the shore it is common to find mermaids’ tears, small plastic pellets resembling fish eggs.
Some are the raw materials of the plastics industry spilled in transit from processing plants. Others are granules of domestic waste that have fragmented over the years.
Either way, mermaids’ tears remain everywhere and are almost impossible to clean up.
Raw materials
Dr Richard Thompson at the University of Plymouth is leading research into what happens when plastic breaks down in seawater and what effect it is having on the marine environment.
He and his team set out to out to find out how small these fragments can get. So far they’ve identified plastic particles of around 20 microns – thinner than the diameter of a human hair.
In 2004 their groundbreaking study reported finding particles on beaches around the UK. Historical records of samples taken by ships plying routes between Britain and Iceland confirmed that the incidence of the particles had been increasing over the years.
Now the team has extended its sampling elsewhere in Europe, and to the Americas, Australia, Africa and Antarctica.

They found plastic particles smaller than grains of sand. Dr Thompson’s findings estimate there are 300,000 items of plastic per sq km of sea surface, and 100,000 per sq km of seabed.
So plastic appears to be everywhere in our seas. The next task was to try and find out what kind of sea creatures might be consuming it and with what consequences.
Thompson and his team conducted experiments on three species of filter feeders in their laboratory. They looked at the barnacle, the lugworm and the common amphipod or sand-hopper, and found that all three readily ingested plastic as they fed along the seabed.
“These creatures are eaten by others along food chain,” Dr Thompson explained. “It seems an inevitable consequence that it will pass along the food chain. There is the possibility that chemicals could be transferred from plastics to marine organisms.”
Other contaminants
There are two ways in which this might happen. Firstly, the Plymouth scientists want to establish whether there is the potential for chemicals to leach out of degraded plastic over a larger area after the plastic has been ground down.
The second aspect of this research is focusing on what happens when plastic absorbs other contaminants.
So-called hydrophobic chemicals such as PCBs and other polymer additives accumulate on the surface of the sea and latch on to plastic debris.
“They can become magnified in concentration,” said Richard Thompson, “and maybe in a different chemical environment, perhaps in the guts of organisms, those chemicals might be released.”
Whether plastics present a toxic challenge to marine life and subsequently to humans is one of the biggest challenges facing marine scientists today.
The plastics industry’s response is that much of the research is speculative at this stage, and that there is very little evidence that this transfer of chemicals is taking place in the wild.
It says it is doing its bit by replacing toxic materials used as stabilisers and flame retardants with less harmful substances.
Whatever the findings eventually show, there is little that can be done now to deal with the vast quantities of plastic already in our oceans. It will be there for decades to come.