Oceans, Waves and Beaches

Spend 30 minutes and get educated by a man who is at the forefront of discovering the larger issues and challenges surrounding plastics.

Great piece in the Reader (a local, San Diego pub) on bags, bags… everywhere. Urban Tumbleweeds, check it out.
Simultaneously Encinitas, with the help, support and nudging from some stellar local activists, helped push forward a local bag ban. Details on that here. Special kudos to Elizabeth Wiles for leading the charge, seeming while representing Surfrider’s [...]

There will never, ever be enough videos to educate about the impact we’re making on the globe.
In my mind, it’s pretty clear… we’re competing with Dancing with the Stars and Grey Anatomy.
We’re competing with Yahoo, Goggle and eharmony.
We’re competing with the top issues in our collective minds.
When I say we’re competing with those things, I [...]

I was visiting a good friend at his office yesterday. I noticed he was drinking some water, and after the summer drive to his office I was parched. I asked for some water and he grabbed a FIJI (not what he was drinking) in a single-use plastic container and handed it to me.
I was really [...]

Check out this poster (go here for the full-size version to read the fine print).A plastic six-pack ring lasts 450 years.A cigarette butt lasts a decade.Etc.8 million tons of waste are hitting the oceans each day.Our oceans may well be the swing vote for humanity, let’s not trash them.

Sea of TrashBy Donavan Hohn, New York Times
Off Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and steepen into whitecaps. Quiet with concentration, Chris Pallister decelerates from 15 knots to 8, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel and, like a skier negotiating moguls, [...]

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(from Reusablebags.com)
Recycling Can Fix This, Right?
Wrong.
Recycling has its place — in fact, we offer bags made of recycled PET because we support sustainable paths for the world’s overabundance of plastic.
However, it’s not the complete solution.
Recycling rates for plastic bags are extremely low. Only 1 to 3% of plastic bags end up getting recycled.
In addition, economics [...]

There have been murmurings about Nalgene bottles being bad for your health for seemingly as long as Nalgene bottles have been around. The odd part of that message has always been the fact that the “Nalgene crowd” was usually the type of person that was opting to reduce use of plastic bottles and… reuse their [...]

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