|| Reduce plastic bag use - bring your own bag!

CAST'S REUSABLE BAG CHALLENGE 09

THE FLOATING PLASTIC ISLAND

A VISUAL LOOK AT PLASTIC BAG STATISTICS - CHRIS JORDAN

DOWNLOAD A BAG REMINDER CARD HERE

CHECK OUT THIS SLIDESHOW ON PLASTIC BAG CONSUMPTION - University of Florida

Have you been to the Summit County landfill? On any given day you can see plastic bags lining the landfill’s fence or dancing in the branches of surrounding aspens and forests. Not a pretty site!

It’s a shame to think that plastic bags can only be recycled once! Most often, recycled plastic bags become composite decking like Trex.

In the good words of County Recycling Manager, Kevin Berg, “Plastic bags aren’t a recycling problem, they are a consumption problem.” Do you make the connection? The issue starts at the stores not at the recycling site.

Plastic bags are made from petroleum. So a plastic bags lifecycle begins at the same place you fill up your car. And we’re experiencing a gas crisis?

Americans use between 300 and 700 plastic bags in one year and most of these end up in the landfill. Not only do they blow out of landfills like they do here in Summit County, but plastic bags photodegrade or break down into small toxic pieces when exposed to sunlight. These small bits can seep into our water and soil.

A plastic bag’s useful life may be counted in minutes but it can take a plastic bag hundreds or even thousands of years to completely break down in a landfill environment.

There are options for recycling plastic bags but it condones and even encourages single use behavior. People often use more plastic bags when they know that they can recycle them later. Sometimes the act of recycling goes without complete understanding for all that is involved… such as the use of non-renewable resources in the production phase!

Why use plastic bags in the first place? We have readily available alternatives and solutions to plastic bags - reusable bags that you can bring to the store every time.

Remember to bring your own bag! Each reusable bag has the potential to eliminate the use of an average of 1000 plastic bags in its lifetime.

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|| cast's 2009 reusable bag challenge

Help Summit County kick the single-use plastic bag habit! Remember to BYOB (Bring Your Own Bags) every time you shop. Look for the Reusable Bag Challenge poster (shown here) at participating stores. Your reusable bags will be tallied between March 1st and September 1st, 2009, in the Reusable Bag Challenge. The "winner" of the challenge will receive $5,000 from Alpine Bank for a solar panel insulation for a local school.

The High Country Conservation Center and Summit County Towns have joined forces with the Colorado Association of Ski Towns (CAST) in the 2009 Reusable Bag Challenge. The purpose of the challenge is to raise awareness regarding the environmental and social costs of single-use plastic shopping bags and to promote the use of reusable shopping bags through a ‘friendly competition’ between members of CAST.

Download a CAST Reusable Bag Challenge info sheet here.

For more information about the challenge, please contact Jen Santry at jen@highcountryconservation.org.

Summit County's Participating Stores:

BigHorn Materials, Silverthorne
City Market, Breckenridge
City Market, Dillon
Safeway, Frisco
Skee Vue Grocery and Liquors, Breckenridge
Vitamin Cottage Natural Grocers, Dillon
Wal-Mart, Frisco

Twenty-six Mountain Towns Partner to Reduce Disposable Bag Consumption

Twenty-six mountain towns in the Western United States are collaborating on a voluntary initiative to reduce consumption of single-use, disposable shopping bags. Beginning March 1st, participating towns will compete in the 2009 Colorado Association of Ski Towns (CAST) Reusable Bag Challenge sponsored by Alpine Bank, a friendly competition to determine which town can minimize their use of disposable bags the most. The competition will end on September 1st 2009.

Participating Colorado towns are Telluride, Aspen, Mountain Village, Snowmass, Basalt, Breckenridge, Silverthorne, Dillon, Frisco, Steamboat Springs, Grand Lake, Granby, Winter Park, Fraser, Estes Park, Crested Butte, Vail, Avon, Eagle, Gypsum, and Mnt. Crested Butte. Jackson Hole, WY, Park City, UT, Sun Valley, Ketchum, and Hailey, ID will also take part in the 2009 CAST challenge.

Community organizers in competing towns have been working with their municipal governments, local businesses and grocery stores to prepare for the challenge. The list of partnering organizers ranges from environmental and sustainability groups like Summit County’s High Country Conservation Center to the Carbondale Rotary Club to the Girl Scouts troop #214. Once the competition begins, local participating stores will be responsible for tallying the every reusable bag used or purchased by a customer at checkout. The ‘winner’ will be determined on a per capita basis by which community uses the most reusable bags during the six-month period.

The winning town will receive a $5,000 grant from Alpine Bank to install a solar panel system at a public school. Shoppers will be able to identify participating grocers and retailers by the presence of the 2009 CAST Reusable Bag Challenge poster, which will be hanging on the entrance.

Some info from CAST about environmental issues associated with plastic bags:

• Currently, the United States uses 100 billion plastics bags per year at an estimated cost of 4 billion dollars and 12 million barrels of oil.

• Plastic carryout bags are made in a number of different sizes and thicknesses and are typically manufactured from either high-density polyethylene (HDPE-recycling symbol #2) or from low-density polyethylene (LDPE-recycling symbol #4). The LDPE bags are thicker and are generally used by department stores and other commercial retail outlets. The HDPE bags are typically thinner, cheaper and are used much more widely by supermarkets, pharmacies, and convenience stores and restaurants. These bags are termed “single-use” bags because they are intended for one time use for customers to carry their purchases from the store, followed by disposal or recycling.

• Plastic bags are recyclable, however, very few are actually recycled. Research conducted by the County of Los Angeles in 2007 found that this is largely due to the logistics of sorting, high concentration rates that reduce the quality of the recycled resin produced, the low quality of plastic used in the bags, and the lack of cost efficiency due to lack of a suitable market for the recycled resin. Various estimates suggest that only 1% of plastic bags are being recycled.

• Plastic bags never biodegrade. They photodegrade, meaning they simply break into smaller pieces of plastic. Every plastic polymer ever created still exists today.

• Plastic bags are a significant component of litter in the environment primarily due to their durability and lightweight. Even when disposed of properly, plastic bags are often blown out of trash receptacles and are easily carried by wind and water to become entangled in vegetation, clog storm drains and contribute to free floating plastic debris in the marine environment.

• We can live without plastic shopping bags in our lives. If one person uses one reusable bag for one year, this individual will reduce the number of plastic shopping bags used and thrown away in this country by 500-1,000. Of all of the lifestyle changes we will need to make to exist in a truly self-sustaining society, this represents a relatively easy step in the right direction.

BagIT - A documentary about plastic bags and other plastics...

REEL Thing Productions, a production company based out of Telluride, CO, is working on a feature-length documentary—working title BagIT—about plastic bags and other plastics and their effect on the environment and on human health.

WATCH BAGIT FILM TRAILER HERE

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|| The floating plastic island: Plastics, Plastics everywhere and not a soda to drink?

There is a plastic something growing in the Pacific. Scientists have described it as a plastic “soup” and some even call it a plastic "island."

It was discovered over a decade ago as floating plastic garbage between the coasts of California and Japan. At the time, sailors and researchers sized the Pacific garbage patch as larger than the state of Texas. Since then, biologists have dedicated their lives to studying the plastic mass. A few years ago it was reported to have grown to double the size of Texas. Now, this plastic sea monster is double the size of the United States!

Also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Pacific Garbage Vortex, this diagram shows how trash (yellow dots) entering the sea from land along the Pacific coast is caught by the gyre. On its way, the trash is conentrated and eventually ends up in one of the two shown gyres. As a consequence, in these areas, the surface water contains six times more plastic than plankton.

You may have seen the gloomy photos of sea turtles gagging on plastic bags or sea birds nesting in beach landfills. However, it is difficult to relate to such tragedies when Summit County is over a thousand miles away from the Pacific coast. Plastics still have a substantial affect on our mountain community as well as other ecosystems. In fact, the majority of the ocean’s litter originates on land.
Yes, nearly 80 percent of the sea’s garbage started its journey inland. Think about it. Here in Summit County, not only do plastic bags and bits blow into our forests and trees, they find their way into our water systems including pristine rivers. In the city, plastics sneak into storm drains. From Lego blocks to barbie dolls, these petroleum-based plastics are eventually carried out to sea. So in reality, all of us, in the mountains or on the coast are responsible.

The ocean is a vast being and you can start to see why some people have got away with throwing debris, chemicals, cars, dead bodies… into its seemingly bottomless pits. Once garbage is dumped, the ocean gobbles it up and the garbage magically goes away. In the past, trash would break down in a fairly short time with the help of marine microorganisms. Once plastics were introduced into the stream, everything changed.

Instead, we created a massive plastic sea monster. Once again we’ve thrown manmade materials into nature and now have to reap the consequences. Unfortunately, we’ve out-smarted and somewhat defeated natural bacteria needed for biodegradation.

Plastics photodegrade or break down with the help of sunlight into tiny toxic bits that microorganisms refuse to digest. Even more frightening is that these small plastic polymers are sponges for pesticides, electronic wastes, and other pollutants. Not only has man created indestructible plastic particles that will out-survive even the hardiest cockroach, we have doused the particles in dangerous toxins and pollutants. And all of this is free-floating in our oceans?

Once these toxic plastic fragments are released into the ecosystem, they accumulate in underwater currents known as gyres. In this plastic garbage whirlpool, scientists have found everything from syringes and cigarette lighters to toothbrushes. Marine biologists have even found natural zooplankton and other small sea creatures mixed in with thousands of colored plastic crumbs referred to as a “plastic-plankton soup.” Other items such as drums full of hazardous chemicals, barnacle-covered volleyballs, and plastic coat hangers have also been discovered in this whirlpool waste.

Researchers have recently discovered that there are six pounds of plastics for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton in the ocean. The problem is that zooplankton and plastic bits are ingested by fish and other sea creatures. Poisons then pass into our food web! I don’t know about you but I rather not eat from the plastic-plankton soup.

Now you are aware of the issue; and to some of you it may seem like the ocean is a faraway place and somebody else’s problem. But it is everyone’s problem! Until we stop relying on plastics as a way of life and we change our consumption behaviors, plastics will continue to be produced, used once or twice, and discarded. Why risk the plastic bottle or bag you use becoming a part of the floating plastic dump?

Become a part of the solution! Remember your reusable bags at the store, buy foods that aren’t wrapped in plastics, and speak out against needless plastics. Every step you take to decrease unnecessary plastics in your life makes a difference.

Want to know more?

The Los Angeles Times put together an excellent online presentation called Altered Oceans: A five-part series on the crises of the seas with part four of the series focusing on the hazards of plastic ocean debris. Check it out here.

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|| Chris jordan's Running the numbers:

Running the Numbers looks at "contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics." Plastic Bags, 2007 (below), depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds. Click here to see Chris Jordan's entire exhibit including his other exhibit Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption.

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