Do we have the courage to face the reality of our times?

On the boat I work on we save all of the garbage we catch in our nets over the course of the day. Most days we fill a bushel basket,and it mainly consists of celophane balloons and plastic bags.Im all for the bag bans many towns are implementing, and I wish soda,and milk companys and many others would only use glass containers for their products. Theres just to much plastic being used and its a big waste of our oil supply, not to mention some scientists are finding a link between cancer and foods that are contained in plastic.

The plastic six pack holders are a menace!

I have 700' of road frontage and I know what pigs people are. I think we need more deposit containers and more glass.

Glass is 100 percent recyclable, many times over. With a little responsibility, we'd be able to clean up the earth if we quit using plastic containers and went back to glass......

The key word is responsibility (at both the consumer AND producer level), and we know that just isn't going to happen......

I agree about glass but one of the big factors in plastic packaging is weight, for shipping purposes. Weight = cost and fuel use.
No sure where the balance point is, though it makes a good case for local/regional bottling facilities where practical.

One major downside to plastic bag bans is illness borne by unwashed re-usable grocery bags;

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/201...tomach-flu-outbreak-to-reusable-shopping-bag/

Personally, I prefer paper. Trees are renewable after all.

We try to recycle plastics, but it is hard here in Livingston county, Michigan. This is a very conservative area, the red county of Michigan, and there are 0 recyclying programs here. They refer to those programs as "That Al Gore chit". These folks are never going to change, until they assume room temperature. My wife saves up our plastics and takes it to her mom's house every month or so. She lives in a blue county, they have curbside recyclying.

www.andelaproducts.com/pulverizers

Those are some truly disheartening images BG.

Sad state of affairs when you dissect birds and observe that garbage we put out. Incredibly sad.

Andrew

Michigan passed a bottle bill in 1972? It could never get passed today. Whenever a recycling bill comes up for other food containers, the industrial folks all get the paid shills to work against it. And conservatives always, always, come down against anything enviornmental here.

Same here with glass, it was not accepted in the curbsite recycling but everything else was.

So.....a local brewery (Boulevard Brewing Co) started up a glass recycling program by putting these purple recycling bins around in parking lots and its gotten so popular that the suburbs partner with them to bring glass recycling to their area and they are apparently branching out to other towns in the area too.

It's only five cents . . . but come Spring time you will find folks walking alongside the roads here in Maine collecting cans and bottles. Fast food wrappers and cigarette butts however . . . that's a different story.

The beaches of the northern Hawaiian Islands look just like that. There is a plactic dead zone the size of texas just north of there.
We dont need to go to mars and space before we fix what we have done to the earth.