Samina Cabral

Do you remember Hilex Poly? They are the plastic bag manufacturer based in South Carolina that expressed disappointment when a single use plastic bag ban passed in Seattle two years ago.

On Wednesday Hilex Poly was awarded the 2013 Society of Plastics Engineers Environmental Division's Award for Plastics Recycling Technologies and Applications. Which sounds more like the title of a textbook than an award for innovations in plastics recycling solutions and commitment to sustainability. The company received the award for its "Bag-2-Bag®" recycling program.

The average age of an albatross in the wild is 50 years but on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) a Laysan albatross known as Wisdom is at least 62 years old and earlier this month she hatched a chick for the sixth consecutive year.

Bruce Peterjohn, chief of the North American Bird Banding Program at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research in Maryland estimates that Wisdom, the bird in the left of the picture, has probably raised at least 30 to 35 chicks during her breeding life maybe even more.

A female albatross can only lay one egg a year and then a significant portion of that twelve month period is taken up incubating and raising the chick. Sometimes an albatross will take a year off from laying an egg if they have raised a chicks consecutively. Wisdom however must be a really good mom because she has nested every year since 2008.

People like to complain about the price of gasoline but if consumption is consumption than those same people should be whining about the cost of any item that is made of plastic or packaged in plastic for that matter.

Why? According to the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland: “The volume of oil used every year in the production of plastics equates to approximately five percent of the world's total oil consumption. Approximately 40 percent of all plastics are used in packaging, which puts special pressure on the packaging industry to reduce dependence on oil.”

Perhaps it’s not the price of milk that is rising, it’s the added cost of that plastic jug; or consider toys both made of plastic and packaged in the material. Double the plastic, double the price!

Method (people against dirty), the makers of an eco-friendly line of liquid soap products for the home and body, have debuted their sustainable bottle made from a blend of plastic marine debris and post-consumer recycled plastic. The packaging has been roughly a year in the making.

The company worked with volunteers from Sustainable Coastlines Hawai’i and the Kokua Hawai’i Foundation to collect several tons of the rigid, opaque plastic needed to make the bottles from Hawai’i’s beaches  -it’s like shell-collecting: done by hand but not quite as delightful.

NOAA’s Marine Debris Program will distribute $250,000 in grants to assist the five states along the country’s west coast that are expected to be impacted by tsunami debris from last year’s disaster in Japan.

Funds will be used to remove stuff such as the 132-ton concrete slab teeming with life that broke off from a Japanese dock and washed up on an Oregonian shore almost a month ago.  

The Japanese government reported that the March 2011 tsunami washed away an approximate 5 million tons of debris into the Pacific and of that astronomical amount about 70 percent sank. NOAA and the Japanese were kind enough to do the math for us and estimate 1.5 million tons remain floating a-sea in the North Pacific in an area “roughly three times the size of the lower 48 states.” However, this is not a concentrated amount of stuff: it’s likely been scattered and it will arrive on coasts north of the Main Hawaiian Islands and east of Midway Atoll over many years.

This week Mike Lee, an environmental reporter with the San Diego Union- Tribune, wrote an article that discussed the recent findings of a study about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” conducted by UCLA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

A rapid increase in the amount of plastic trash floating at sea has impacted the marine environment but not in the way you are thinking.

Yesterday Cinco De Mayo parades marched merrily through cities from Seattle to Kansas City (their celebration featured a Chihuahua parade) and Mexican heritage was celebrated with traditional dancing and music. The Battle of Puebla was fought and won on a May 5th a long time ago but the climate change battle is ongoing and 350.org staged events of their own over the weekend to raise more awareness.

The idea was simply to “connect the dots” between global warming and extreme weather through a series of images featuring dots, and the people and creatures in areas that had been affected or are continuing to be affected by the issue.

"We just celebrated Earth Day. May 5 is more like Broken Earth Day, a worldwide witness to the destruction global warming is already causing," said Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, a global climate campaign. "People everywhere are saying the same thing: our tragedy is not some isolated trauma, it's part of a pattern."