Paul Humphreys's Weblog

Paul Humphreys's Weblog
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Wednesday March 26, 2008

The plastic tide...

Last night the BBC ten oclock news had an article on the pollution of our oceans by plastic items. This was the first of a series about this problem and how certain countries are acting to solve this. A diary from Midway describes the daily articles. It seems birds are feeding their chicks on lumps of the stuff and the chicks then die. Other marine life suffers when they get tangled up in it too. If the world struggles to come up with agreements on Co2 emissions what chance of agreements on this pollutant? One thing about plastic that I had not appreciated was the beads that are the raw ingredient for plastic items often find their way into our seas too. One good thing that has emerged on this topic was that Wyevale a garden centre company in the UK is going to start accepting plastic pots to be recycled. Did you also know that decomposing peat also adds its own burden to greenhouse gas emissions? Bad enough that areas of the countryside are be destroyed by peats removal. We have a lot too do...

( Mar 26 2008, 01:14:19 AM PDT ) Permalink