AKA trash vortexes, these accumulation zones for human material waste obviously affects marine life in many frightening ways.... If you think it's easy to 'look the other way' while marine life suffers deformity and death....consider the way plastics break down into toxin absorbing 'nurdles'. These highly toxic man-made krill like particles are ingested by feeders from top to bottom -infecting the entire food chain from sand worms to sharks and YOU.

We must consciously begin to reduce our output and impact. How much food do you buy comes with plastic packaging? Do you use plastic bags? Shipping containers fall off ships regularly all around the world...do you buy local or imported goods? How can we get companies to change the packaging materials they use? Seek alternatives and tell your friends....

"In Australia around 1 million tonnes of plastic materials are produced each year and a further 587,000 tonnes are imported. Packaging is the largest market for plastics, accounting for over a third of the consumption of raw plastic materials – Australians use 6 billion plastic bags every year!

Plastic packaging provides excellent protection for the product, it is cheap to manufacture and seems to last forever. Lasting forever, however, is proving to be a major environmental problem. Another problem is that traditional plastics are manufactured from non-renewable resources – oil, coal and natural gas." (Source: NOVA Science in the News. Making Packaging Greener: Biodegradable Plastics. Published by the Australian Academy of Science)

- S. Innes

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Quotes

'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children'. ~ Native American Proverb.

'We never know the worth of water till the well is dry'. ~ Thomas Fuller, Gnomologial, 1732.

'Economic advance is not the same as human progress.' ~John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957.

 'Till now, man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.' ~ Dennis Gabor, Inventing The Future, 1964. 

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