BlueTube

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Bring Your Own Fork

Have you noticed more people saying no to straws and fewer waiters automatically plunking one in every drink? Word has gotten out: Plastic straws are bad. Straws hurt the environment and the creatures in it, as this viral video of the sea turtle with a straw stuck up its nostril so convincingly illustrates.

Plastic knives, forks and spoons are no better than straws. Like straws, they are used briefly, then tossed. They slip through the cracks in waste-sorting facilities and can’t be recycled. Like straws, if disposable utensils are not landfilled or incinerated, they end up loose in the environment, left behind on park benches, scattered on sidewalks. Many wash downstream and end up in the middle of the ocean. Some plastic cutlery are compostable, but these won’t break down in the ocean, only in industrial composting facilities which are rare. Ocean Conservancy has a list of the most dangerous types of ocean trash, and plastic utensils are number two, right after fishing gear. Yet, we say no to straws and gratefully accept plastic utensils.

We know now that it’s easy to drink without a straw, and giving them up was no big deal. Life will stay the same too once we forgo disposable cutlery. People ate in the pre-plastic-fork world. They were given reusable utensils which were washed and reused, or they brought their own. We can do it again, and the school lunches, picnics and to-go salads will be just as good, but with fewer forks floating in the ocean. That’s a great reason to say goodbye single use… hello Reuse! Start bringing yours along today.

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Plastic Waste in the Cafeteria

Have you been in a school cafeteria lately? There are tables of smiling faces, a roar of excited conversations and a lot of plastic waste. Missing from most cafeterias are reusable trays, real silverware and glasses. Dishwashers are absent from the kitchens too. Schools embraced single-use, disposable plastic in their lunchrooms because it makes feeding hundreds of kids easier. But as plastic waste piles up in landfills and the environment, some schools are trying to wean themselves from disposable plastic.

Laurie Conlin, Nutrition Manager for Brevard County schools, says they are making progress. Foam trays were replaced with biodegradable trays two years ago. This year straws are absent from spork kits at high schools. High schoolers still get plastic-wrapped sporks and paper napkins but are encouraged to drink milk sans straw. There is still plenty of single-use plastic in cafeterias that Conlin would like to replace, though she explains: “It’s difficult to find good alternatives because plastic is inexpensive, works well and cuts down on labor.” Throw-away plastic has advantages, but there are serious drawbacks as well.

A Day’s Worth of Polystyrene Lunch Trays

Health: Styrene is used to make foam, polystyrene trays that children in many schools eat off of five days a week. We like to think that children aren’t ingesting this plastic, but can we be sure, especially with hot food or acidic food or when children poke holes in trays with their sporks for fun? Styrene is not classified as a carcinogen by the EPA though long-term exposure is linked to problems with the central nervous system. Headache, fatigue, weakness, depression, hearing loss and peripheral neuropathy are symptoms of a compromised central nervous system.

Environment: Tens of millions of tons of polystyrene are produced each year. It is difficult to recycle, and the best-case scenario is that this plastic ends up in an incinerator or landfill after use, and not in the environment. There is a recent bit of good news about the polystyrene floating in the ocean. It was thought to last thousands of years because microbes that might eat polystyrene find it unappealing. New research shows polystyrene breaks down in sunlight into carbon and carbon dioxide, two harmless building blocks of life, and decomposition takes only decades or centuries and not millennia. Still, decades are a long time to wait for polystyrene to decompose, especially when its useful life is over in minutes.

Kids Aren’t Dumb: Students are barraged with messages about the sorry state of our environment. They are told about an island of plastic twice the size of Texas and growing in the middle of the ocean. They learn that soon there will be more plastic than fish in the sea. They know that plastic bags kill dolphins and sea turtles. Then they eat lunch in the cafeteria. If plastic waste is really a problem, why do their cafeterias produce so much of it? The message doesn’t fit reality, and kids know this. Perhaps students think plastic waste isn’t really a problem. Or maybe they are afraid that plastic waste is a huge problem that nothing can be done about, and we’re all doomed.

Plastic waste is a problem, but it’s not beyond our control. Sixth-graders at Thomas Star King Middle School in Los Feliz, California were shocked to learn that the foam trays used in their cafeteria were landfilled and not recycled. Students collected the discarded trays one day, all 1260 of them, and strung them up from a tree in the center of campus. That got attention. Two years later the entire school district switched to paper trays.

Finn and his Reusable Container

Finn Mollison is on his high school’s student council in Melbourne, Australia. He explains: “There is a swell of energy among the student body for action concerning the environment and sustainability, but this energy is largely directionless.” Many students want to reduce waste but don’t know how to go about it. Finn worked hard to provide students with a simple way to reduce plastic waste in their school’s canteen. Months of consultations led to a change in school policy that students, staff and the state education board agreed on. A few months ago students started bringing their own containers to the cafeteria. They wash them at home and bring them back the next day to use again. Finn says his project is slowly building up steam, but some habits are hard to change. He thinks that rewards or discounts would encourage more students to bring their own container.

Laurie Conlin says the Brevard County school district is looking for bright ideas and biodegradable lunch ware. They listen to suggestions from parents and students carefully. Rather than scare school children about environmental problems, let’s empower them to help solve these problems. Challenge your student to come up with workable solutions. Cutting down on plastic waste in the lunch-room is not easy, but it’s doable, and success here will inspire students to tackle other problems.

Cleaning up plastic waste in the environment is doable too. Grab a bag from the BlueTube at your beach. Collect trash. Throw it away. When you add your clean, used plastic bags, you make it easier for others to be part of the solution too. If your beach doesn’t have a BlueTube yet, buy one here.

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Earthworms at Risk

Any gardener or school child can tell you that earthworms are good. Earthworms eat dead, rotting vegetation and excrete nutrient-rich castings that help plants grow. Their tunnels bring oxygen down through the soil and drain excess rainfall so plant roots can survive. Earthworms help produce the food we eat, whether that food is grown in your backyard or in vast fields in Iowa. So when scientists tell us that earthworms in soil contaminated with plastic are in danger, we should be concerned.

A recent study shows that eating plastic is harmful to earthworm health. Scientists reporting in Environmental Science and Technology found that worms (Aporrectodea rosea) lost 3% of their body weight after 30 days in soil contaminated with HDPE compared to a control group of worms that gained 5% body weight in soil with no plastic over the same time period. HDPE is a common type of plastic used for plastic bags and bottles, like milk jugs.

We don’t find many plastic bags and milk jugs in agricultural fields. However, plastic is used in agriculture more than ever before. Plastic covers greenhouses, wraps bales of silage, prevents weeds, lines irrigation ponds. It’s used for plastic netting to keep birds from eating crops, pots to grow seedlings in and drip irrigation. Agricultural plastic is very useful. Theoretically it can be recycled, yet once the useful life of agricultural plastic is over, it’s more likely to be landfilled, burned, or left in a pile on site that will eventually fragment into small pieces and contaminate soil. Microplastics from toothpaste, soaps and washing synthetic clothes are also unintentionally added to soil when sludge from sewage treatment plants is spread over fields as fertilizer.

We first recognized that plastic waste was a problem in marine environments, and most studies focused on the effects of plastic on marine animals. Plastic flows downstream into oceans where it breaks apart into small pieces and is eaten. Oysters that eat plastic have slow sperm, shriveled eggs and below-average offspring. Lugworms, marine cousins of the earthworm, are less fleshy, less numerous and less successful at reproducing in plastic-infiltrated mud. It’s not only filter feeders and mud eaters that eat plastic. Anchovies can’t differentiate between plastic and food when plastic is colonized by algae, and algae quickly colonizes plastic in the ocean. The effects of plastic on terrestrial animals haven’t been studied much until now. 

Recent scientific studies show that problems with plastic waste are not confined to oceans. Tiny fragments of plastic are everywhere. Plastic floats on the ocean surface, settles on deep ocean sediments and is suspended in the water between. Plastic is in remote mountain air, arctic snow and agricultural fields. It’s in our drinking water and our excrement.

Though it’s an enormous problem, there are things we can do to help. Be aware of the plastic you use. Are there alternatives? Can it be reduced or reused? Help clean up plastic waste in the environment too. BlueTubes make this easy. Grab a bag from a BlueTube next time you’re at the beach, pick up trash and throw it away. Reuse your plastic bags by adding them to a BlueTube and they will be used by others to keep the beach clean and keep plastic out of the ocean. No BlueTube at your beach? Buy one here!

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Fashion: The Good News

We stuff our large closets with cheap, synthetic clothes that don’t biodegrade. These clothes are sewn by garment workers laboring in often unsafe conditions for poor pay in developing countries. If you missed BlueTube’s last post on why our appetite for new clothes is bad for the environment and for garment workers, read it here. This post highlights companies and trends that keep the fun in fashion without sacrificing sustainability.

Fast Fashion is blamed for many of the industries problems. Companies churn out the latest fashions fast, compressing the time it takes styles to move from the runway to garment factories, onto store racks and into your closet. Because these clothes are inexpensive and super trendy, consumers update their wardrobe constantly. One company, H&M, is working hard to make fast fashion less wasteful. H&M encourages customers to recycle clothes. Bring in a bag of unwanted textiles, any brand, holes, stains, single socks are ok, and get 15% off your next purchase. Items in good condition enter the used clothing market. Other items live on as rags or are shredded for insulation. H&M uses recycled fibers in some of their clothes.

A new mindset is developing among fashionistas. They want access to clothes, but don’t want to own them, at least not for long. They don’t mind if their clothes spend time on other people’s bodies first either. The “ick” factor, which used to be associated with wearing used clothes, is evaporating as shoppers demand sustainability and low cost. When people buy new, many look for good quality clothes that can be easily resold. We share cars (Uber and Lyft), homes (Airbnb), and now we share clothes. Companies and savvy individuals are growing the clothes-sharing business.

Recent college graduate and former BlueTube intern, Sierra Harnett, has a great eye for fashion. She makes extra money buying stylish, well-made clothes at thrift stores and selling them on her Instagram boutique, @shopmns_. Sierra explains that it’s less expensive and more sustainable for consumers to shop this way. “I like to show people that they can find stylish pieces secondhand without contributing to the wasteful fast fashion industry.”

Rent the Runway was started in 2009 by Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, two classmates at Harvard Business School. They describe their company as a “closet in the cloud.” Customers can rent a dress for a special occasion or rent an entire wardrobe. One hundred sixty dollars per month lets customers swap out anything in their rented wardrobe, anytime, with hundreds of thousands of items to choose from.

Poshmark is a peer-to-peer clothes sharing site where people buy and sell fashion. “Seller stylists” upload the Poshmark app, photograph their clothes and accessories and display them in their online closet. Buyers peruse the website for favorite styles, brands and sizes. Purchased items arrive in the mail two days later.

Thredup started up in 2009 as a men’s shirt swapping business when co-founder, James Reinhart wanted to get rid of a closet full of clothes he didn’t wear anymore. Today it’s the largest online consignment and thrift store. Sorry guys, Thredup now carries only women’s and children’s fashions. Customers sell as well as buy on Thredup. The company sends out “cleanup” bags to mail good quality clothing you no longer want. Your unwanted clothes are inspected, photographed and listed on the site. You get money, and someone else gets to wear your old favorites, for awhile.

Second-hand shoppers are multiplying, reports Thredup. Forty-four million women bought second-hand in 2017. One year later fifty-six million shopped for used clothes. Women want to be seen in new styles. Because sustainability is now a priority and clothing is one of the most polluting industries, it makes sense to buy secondhand.

Traditional retailers are joining the second hand market too. Arc’teryx, an outdoor clothing brand, just launched a used gear program. They will buy back their used gear, clean it, repair it and sell it. Their motto is “keep gear in play, in the wild, and out of storage, basements or landfills.

With BlueTube, we keep plastic waste out of the ocean, and sustainable fashion helps. Want to do more? Grab a used plastic bag from the BlueTube at your beach, fill it with trash and throw it away. If your beach doesn’t have a BlueTube yet, buy one here.

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Plastic Clothes Waste

When I said I was writing a piece on fashion, my sisters laughed and my girlfriend rolled her eyes. No one takes fashion advice from me. I’m no authority on fashion but I do know about plastic waste, and the two are tightly woven together. Our insatiable consumption of fashion is responsible for mountains of non-biodegradable garbage, tiny plastic fibers in our oceans and cruel work conditions. My advice? If you’re concerned about plastic waste and human rights, take a careful look at your clothes.

Most things we buy rise in price over time but not clothes. Twenty dollars buys more clothes today than it did in 2000. We buy twice as many clothes now as we did thirty years ago, but wear them only half as long. We wear clothing on average only seven times before it’s thrown away or relegated to a dark corner of our bulging closet for long-term storage.

There are two reasons why clothes are cheap: cheap labor and cheap materials. Labor prices plunged once trade barriers eased and clothing manufacturers moved factories to developing countries. In 1965, 95% of clothes sold in America were made in America. Today only 2% of our clothes are made here. Chances are your clothes were made in Vietnam, Bangladesh, China or some other low-wage, skimpily-regulated country. Because our clothes are manufactured far from home, consumers are often unaware of the conditions they are made under.

Garment workers toil long hours in unsafe conditions for poverty wages. Some workers are children. Stories of sweatshop conditions and human rights violations are rife. Here are two of many incidents. In 2013 Rana Plaza, a poorly constructed building housing clothing factories in Bangladesh, collapsed. Managers knew the building was unstable after cracks developed, yet garment workers were ordered to remain at their sewing machines. One thousand one hundred thirty-four people perished when the building fell in on them, and another 2500 were injured. Today in the Xinjiang Region of China, Muslim minority Uighurs are sent to internment camps and “re-educated” to cleanse them of their religion, culture and non-Chinese thoughts. Some are then forced into factory jobs that produce goods for Gap, Adidas and other western brands. Low wages result in low prices for clothing, but the human cost for garment workers is dear.

The materials our clothes are made of has shifted from natural fibers like cotton, linen and wool, to less expensive petroleum-based materials like polyester, nylon and acrylic. Synthetic fabrics, like other plastics, do not biodegrade. Like other plastics, synthetic clothing persists in landfills and the environment once they’re thrown away, and we are throwing away more clothing than ever before. In 2000, Americans generated 9480 thousand tons of textile garbage. By 2015, America threw away16,030 thousand tons of textile garbage, enough to account for 6.1% of landfilled waste.

Sending textile waste to landfills is better than having it end up in the ocean. However, scientists realized recently that microfibers from clothing make their way to the ocean from our washing machines. All clothing, both natural and synthetic, shed tiny fibers, especially when washed. Natural fibers biodegrade, but like the clothing it comes from, the synthetic fibers persist. We haven’t figured out how to stop these fibers from flowing into the ocean yet.

Well that probably took some fun out of shopping for clothes. Look for BlueTube’s next post on fashion. It highlights companies and trends that keep the fun in fashion while making it more sustainable too.

Finally, while there’s no way to get microfibers out of the ocean, it’s easy to get larger chunks of plastic out of the ocean when they have washed ashore. Grab a clean, used plastic bag from the BlueTube on your shore, pick up plastic debris then throw it away. Reuse your plastic bags by adding them to a BlueTube so others can keep beaches clean and keep plastic out of the ocean too. Buy a BlueTube for your beach and keep it free of plastic waste.

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Ghost Crabs

It’s always fun discovering new things about the plants and animals that share our beaches. Ghost crabs, for instance, sometimes eat other ghost crabs. There are other interesting facts about this common beach resident. The same species of ghost crab (Ocypoda quadrata) lives from Rhode Island to Brazil. They blend in well with the beach and when threatened, disappear down burrows they dig in the sand. Above their two-inch-wide bodies are bulging eyes on the end of stalks that swivel independently; ghost crabs can see forward and backward simultaneously. Like other decapods (crabs) they have ten legs, eight for scuttling and two for pinching.

Burrow

Though adult ghost crabs are terrestrial, they return to the water to keep their gills moist. Perhaps you’ve seen ghost crabs hold tight onto the sand as waves wash over them. They are wetting their gills. They can also wet their gills by standing in damp sand and wicking moisture up their hairy legs.

Ghost crabs mate year round. Males lure females to their burrows, and along with sperm, insert a fluid which hardens, thus ensuring that other males won’t fertilize their mate’s eggs. Females carry fertilized eggs underneath their body until they are ready to hatch and then release the eggs into the ocean. After several planktonic larval stages, the lucky ones wash ashore as little crabs.

Fun with Ghost Crabs

During the warmest part of the day, ghost crabs hunker down in their burrows with a plug of sand closing off the opening. They emerge when the sun goes down. The best time to hunt ghost crabs is when it gets dark. Shine a light in their eyes and watch them freeze. Scoop them up with a net, put them in a bucket, release them when the hunt is over. In the photo, children in Malaysia tie strings to ghost crab legs so the crabs can’t escape while they are being played with. Ghost crabs make good temporary pets that can be released when the thrill wears off. Put them in a tank with plenty of sand to dig in and a bowl of salt water to keep their gills moist. Feed them.

Ghost crabs eat just about anything, each other and donuts included. Coquina clams and mole crabs from the swash zone make up the bulk of their diet with seaweed and dune plants on the side. When sea turtle eggs and hatchlings are in season, they feast on those too.

A lot of animals feast on sea turtle hatchlings and eggs, including raccoons. In an effort to save the sea turtles, raccoons were removed from a beach. This caused the ghost crab population to swell because raccoons weren’t there to eat ghost crabs. Sea turtle casualties rose even higher than before the raccoons were removed. We want to help, but interfering with the food chain doesn’t work. Instead, lend a hand and clean up plastic on our shores and in our oceans. Grab a clean, used bag from the BlueTube at your beach. Pick up plastic trash that has washed ashore. Throw it away. If your shore doesn’t have a BlueTube, sponsor one today!

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Compostable Plastic

You could buy 1000 bio-based, compostable, Natur-Ware forks for $44.95 online, but should you? After the picnic is over, what do you do with the forks? How do you make sure they get composted? And is compostable plastic the answer to our plastic waste problems? Here’s a quick look at a complicated question.

Not an environmentally friendly option

We want to use the most environmentally-friendly plastic available, but the options are confusing: bio-based, biodegradable, compostable? We use these terms interchangeably, though they mean different things, sometimes. Bio-based plastic is made from organic material, like corn starch. There’s a huge variety of bio-based plastic, but it doesn’t all biodegrade. Biodegradable usually refers to petroleum-based plastics that are coated with an additive that enables microorganisms to break them down. Biodegradable plastic can take decades to break down, and toxic residue might still remain. Compostable plastic is made from organic materials, like bio-based plastics, and can be turned into soil-enriching, toxin-free humus after time in an industrial composting facility.

The Biodegradable Products Institute certified our Natur-ware forks as compostable. Each fork is stamped with the word “compostable” to avoid confusing them with other plastic forks. I asked Lisa at Natur-Ware where my post-picnic forks could be composted. Lisa said they would not break down in the ocean or my backyard compost bin, but only in a carefully managed industrial composting facility, Compost facilities shred materials coming in then control moisture, oxygen and the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in an aerobic environment to keep the bacteria and fungus that turn our forks into humus happy. Unfortunately, there is no industrial composting facility that will take my used forks within a hundred miles of BlueTube headquarters. Our forks can last as long as the petroleum-based forks we want to avoid if they aren’t composted in an industrial composting facility.

There are plenty of industrial composting facilities, but many take only take yard waste. Yard waste is simple to compost. Anyone who has left a pile of leaves in their yard knows that if left long enough, the leaves will eventually turn to dark brown, earthy-smelling humus. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans produced 35 million tons of yard waste in 2015, and 61% was composted. Composting gets more complicated when food and compostable plastic are added.

We produced 40 million tons of food waste in 2015, but most of this (95%) ended up in landfills or incinerators. Only 5% of our food waste was composted. Some industrial composting facilities take yard waste plus pre-consumer vegetable waste. When post-consumer food waste, the stuff we scrape off our plates, is added, pathogens must be controlled. When meat and dairy are added, the compost pile smells and attracts vermin. When compostable plastic is added, it takes more time to produce humus. Bacteria go through banana peels and apple cores much faster than they can digest compostable forks. The longer a composting cycle takes, the less money the facility makes selling humus. Despite the challenges, there are facilities that take compostable plastic, post-consumer food waste and yard waste. Go to www.FindaComposter.com, put in your zip code and see it there’s an industrial composting facility near you.

San Francisco leads the nation in composting. Residents have separated their food waste (compostable plastics included) from recyclables and trash since 2009. People in San Francisco have a financial incentive to reduce landfilled trash because their garbage cans are more expensive to empty than their compost and recycling containers. By 2020, San Francisco aims to shrink landfilled trash to nothing and earn an impressive zero-waste status.

Private composting companies are going into business in many cities. For $29 a week, Compost Now in Raleigh, North Carolina will pick up food scraps and compostable plastic from your doorstep and deliver finished compost to your yard.

Some communities offer residents subsidized or free compost bins. Municipalities save money on waste hauling and landfill tipping fees. Residents have greener and healthier gardens, lighter and better-smelling garbage cans, and the satisfaction of knowing their organic waste isn’t festering in the landfill, producing global-warming methane. Residents won’t get compostable forks to compost though.

If you live in San Francisco, Raleigh or any other composting city, buy the forks. But without an industrial composting facility nearby, forget about compostable plastic for now.

There’s still loads we can do to help solve our plastic-waste mess. Want ideas? Carry reusable cutlery and eliminate the need for disposable forks. Help clean up the plastic waste in our environment. Grab a used plastic bag from the BlueTube on your beach, pick up plastic and throw it away. Keep informed with BlueTube’s Trash Talk.

Choose to reuse!

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Goose Barnacles

While many animals die cruel deaths due to plastic in the marine environment, goose barnacles (Lepas spp.) thrive. In order to reach adulthood and leave their easily-eaten planktonic larval stage behind, goose barnacles have to cement themselves onto floating debris in the ocean. Floating debris used to be rare. Then goose barnacles depended on encounters with wood, pumice, coconuts, sea turtles or whales. Now discarded milk jugs, laundry detergent bottles and flip flops are readily available as rafts for goose barnacles. The more stuff floating in the ocean, the greater the chance of a goose barnacle making it past its larval salad days and to reproductive maturity.

Barnacles are crustaceans like crabs, shrimps and lobsters. Adults develop hard shells that enclose soft body parts. Feather-like appendages called cirri fan out from the shells and grab edible bits from the water. Some barnacles, the ones along the coast on rocks and dock pilings, are sedentary. Goose barnacles attach to floating substrates with their tough, orange stalks and travel on ocean currents. The ride ends when their raft washes ashore.

barnacle goose

You may think the goose barnacle got its name because it resembles a goose, but the story is better than that. In the 12th century, Gerald of Wales, the Archdeacon of Breton, claimed that certain geese did not hatch from eggs like other birds, but hatched from nests of barnacles attached to floating wood. Thus, these geese were considered seafood and could be eaten on fast days. Maybe it was a ploy, but in County Kerry, Ireland, Catholics ate goose on Fridays until the 18th century. Today we have a barnacle named after a goose and a goose named after a barnacle.

Gerald of Wales could have just eaten barnacles. It may not have occurred to him, but they are a delicacy in Spain and Portugal. Simmer goose barnacles in salt water, sauté in olive oil, add lemon, cream and scallions, and you have barnacles fit for a feast-day.

I got to the part of the cooking video where the sizzling barnacles were splashed with sherry before wondering how much plastic a bowl of today’s barnacles might contain. Barnacles are indiscriminate eaters. Their feathery legs pull in anything that’s the right size: zooplankton, detritus, plastic. Plastic that leaks into the ocean eventually fragments into tiny pieces that are too small for a barnacle to attach to but just the right size for a barnacle to eat. And they do eat these fragments. Some of this plastic is excreted, some sheds off as they molt and some plastic remains packaged in succulent flesh until it heads up the food chain in a tasty bowl of barnacles or as a meal for a fish.

barnacle raft

Does eating plastic harm goose barnacles? Based on frequent, personal observations of gaggles of goose barnacles on plastic trash that washes ashore, no. You may think an ocean with more goose barnacles is a good thing. It’s never that simple though. When barnacles cement themselves onto a plastic fishing buoy, they turn the slick, inhospitable buoy into a more livable habitat for other animals. The presence of goose barnacles enables other species, even those that normally stay in the shallow end of the ocean, to climb aboard the buoy and ride. With lots of barnacle-covered plastic traveling the seas, there’s more opportunity for species to travel to new parts of the world. A plastic trash raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was found with crabs from the west Pacific as well as species from the east Pacific. These animals would normally be separated by thousands of miles of ocean. More ocean plastic means more misplaced species that could become nuisance exotic species. If exotic species thrive, they can eat more, reproduce faster, outcompete local species and wreak havoc on on the ecosystem.

This is something to think about next time you’re at the beach and come across plastic trash weighed down with goose barnacles. Grab a bag from the BlueTube at the beach. Pick up plastic and throw it away. By depriving goose barnacles of a chance to settle down, you may may prevent an invasion of foreign crabs. Add your bags to the BlueTube so others can do the same. If your beach doesn’t have a BlueTube, sponsor one!

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Incineration

Once early man discovered the secret to fire he started burning trash. Now we’re in the Plastic Age, and our trash is more tenacious than anything our ancestors threw out. Our nonbiodegradable plastic waste piles up in the oceans, washes up on beaches, enters our food chain. Burning plastic gets rid of it, but is it a viable solution to our plastic-waste mess?

The first trash incinerator in the United States was built at Governor’s Island in New York City in the 1880’s. Two million people lived in the city, they all produced garbage, and clean air was a luxury that hadn’t been invented yet. Incineration kept City residents from wading through their own trash.

Incinerators multiplied in the United States until the Clean Air Act of 1970 put an end to uncontrolled burning. Pollution control equipment had to be installed on incinerators or they were closed. In 1990 the EPA passed strict incinerator regulations on dioxin and mercury, then widely recognized as dangerous toxins. Once again, equipment was installed to meet the new regulations or the incinerators closed down.

Modern incinerators are much cleaner than before, and they also generate electricity with the heat produced. At these “waste-to-energy” or “renewable energy” plants, enormous cranes maneuver municipal waste from the pit where the garbage is tipped into a fiery combustion chamber. Heat from the burning trash converts water to steam which spins a turbine and produces electricity. Selling this electricity helps offset costs of running the plants.

Renewable Energy Facility 2

The newest, most advanced, cleanest incinerator in the United States is Renewable Energy Facility 2 in Palm Beach County, Florida. This plant serves 1.27 million people, burns 3000 tons, or 660 garbage trucks full of post-recycled waste per day and produces 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 44,000 homes. Incineration reduces the volume of trash by 90%. The remaining 10% is bottom ash, minus metals which are recovered and recycled, and fly ash captured from flue gas. The ash is buried in the landfill, but in the future ash may be used to make concrete. Because Facility 2 keeps biodegradable trash out the landfill, methane, a potent global-warming gas that is created by anaerobic decomposition, is not produced. Facility 2 even has a rainwater collection system and cistern that provides water needed to make steam.

Our incinerators are better than ever before, yet we only burn around 12% of our municipal solid waste. Ray Schauer, with the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, leads waste engineers from around the country and the world on tours of the plant. “How come this isn’t done more?” is the question Schauer is always asked afterwards. Palm Beach Renewable Energy Facility 2 took a whopping $672 million and ten years to build before it started operations in 2015. It was the first incinerator built in 20 years, and there hasn’t been one built in the United States since. Schauer says tipping fees in the urban northeast are creeping towards $90 per ton. At this rate he expects incineration to beat out new landfills for economic reasons. Countries in Europe and Asia with expensive land and energy are building more incineration plants now.

Incineration is one solution for our plastic waste mess, but right now it’s hard to compete with less expensive alternatives. What can we do here and now? Reduce, recycle, reuse and help clean up plastic waste that’s leaked into our environment. Grab a clean, used plastic bag from the BlueTube at your beach. Pick up trash. Throw it away. Reuse your plastic bags by adding them to a BlueTube, and help others keep shores clean and get plastic out of the ocean. If your favorite stretch of shore needs a BlueTube, sponsor one today!

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Single Use

As plastic packaging, plastic straws, plastic utensils and plastic cups proliferate, so has the term “single use.” Ten years ago “single use” wasn’t in our vocabulary. Now it’s Collins Dictionary word of the year. Single use is plastic that’s used once then tossed. Because plastic doesn’t biodegrade, it piles up in our environment. Plastic waste has been quietly accumulating for years, but now it is impossible to ignore: it collects in our oceans, washes up on our beaches and, eventually, enters our food chain.

Enough already!

Governments are attempting to slow the flow of single-use plastics. The European Union passed a ban on plastic cutlery, plates, cotton-buds, straws, drink stirrers and sticks attached to balloons. These are easy to live without since alternatives exist. Taiwan is banning plastic cups, straws, bags and aims to be free of single-use plastic by 2030. Countries, including South Korea, Jamaica, Bangladesh, Rwanda and Kenya ban plastic bags. Kenya has the strictest bag ban. Producing, selling or using a plastic bag in Kenya is punishable by $40,000 in fines or four years in jail. Ghana’s president proposed a bag ban in 2015 after plastic bags and other plastic waste clogged storm drains during heavy rains, caused massive flooding and killed 150 people. Ghana is still working on a plastic ban.

When a video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck up its nose went viral, straws became the most hated type of single-use plastic. In the United States, where reducing single-use plastic is a state and local issue, New York City, Hawaii, California, Miami Beach and Seattle have plastic straw bans in place or pending. Bans are creating a huge, new market for paper straws. Aardvark, the company started by the inventor of the straw in 1888, is building a larger factory to keep up with the demand. Other increasingly banned items include foam cups, foam containers and plastic bags.

Businesses are reducing single-use plastic too. Dunkin Donuts is getting rid of polystyrene cups worldwide. Starbucks, which doles out one billion straws per year, will be strawless by 2020. Kraft/Heinz has committed to making all its packaging worldwide recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025.

Choose to Reuse!

But there’s no need to wait for governments and businesses to act. We can reduce single-use plastic from our lives now by bringing our reusable water bottles, coffee mugs, bags, to-go containers and flatware with us. It’s great to finally see our use-and-toss habits being curbed, but we still have a big plastic-waste mess to clean up. As Bill Nye the Science Guy says, “To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pickup other people’s trash.” And BlueTubes are all about picking up other people’s trash. Grab a clean, used plastic bag from the BlueTube at your beach. Pick up other people’s single-use plastic that’s washed in from faraway or has been recently dropped. Throw it in the garbage. When we reuse our plastic bags by adding them to a BlueTube, we make it easier for everyone to clean up our plastic-waste mess. If your beach doesn’t have a BlueTube, it should!

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