Whatever floats your boat…Maiden voyage creates awareness of how fast plastic trash is growing.

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Posted by admin | Posted in Recycling issues, Uncategorized | Posted on 21-04-2010

Voyage of the Plastiki

 You know the drill. We’re gulping from plastic bottles at ever faster rates, with per capita use more than doubling by the decade. (We bought 3.3 billion plastic bottles in 1993 and 15 billion in 2002.) 

About 40 million plastic bottles a day become trash with a recycling rate of merely 19% in 2003.

If the numbers are so big you can hardly wrap your mind around them, maybe David de Rothschild can help. The adventurer is setting sail between California and Sydney, floating on the deep, blue sea. In a boat made of plastic bottles.

De Rothschild, the British heir to a major bank fortune, came up with a unique way to publicize the plastic bottle trash issue. He built a boat. A 60 foot boat. A catamaran made out of 12,000 two liter soda plastic bottles. It’s aptly named the Plastiki and recently she set sail from the Bay of Sausalito California.

Even the ship’s construction is eco-thoughtful – using glue made from cashew hulls and sugar. Billionaire de Rothschild and his crew departed Sausalito, California on March 30 bound for Sidney, Australia, a voyage expected to take about 100 days and cover 11,000 nautical miles.
De Rothschild hopes the ship’s expedition will bring attention to the global waste problem.

Eco-warrior David de Rothschild

“We’re needlessly losing millions of seabirds and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals from ingesting plastic every year,” said de Rothschild.

“I decided to take this ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem and build a boat out of the very items that we were seeing ending up in our natural environment.”

Flating garbage island twice the size of Texas

One of the main sights the voyage of the Plastiki will highlight will be when the Plastiki passes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous and deadly island of floating ocean trash, twice the size of Texas, consisting of discarded plastic bottles and bags.

Ship of 12,000 plastic bottles

Follow their voyage on Twitter @Plastiki learn and learn more at their website: http://www.theplastiki.com/
(Comment by My Green Mind’s I Michael Grossman. We welcome your comments as well.)

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Island’s disappearance giving pause to climate change doubters.

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Posted by admin | Posted in Climate change | Posted on 12-04-2010

my green mind on sea level rise
Now you see it…

Those who dispute climate change may want to plan their next vacation on beautiful New Moore Island, a tiny paradise in the Bay of Bengal in the Sunderbans. If you go, don’t worry about the dispute that’s been raging for years over the sovereignty of the island, claimed both India and by Bangladesh as their own.

Don’t worry because the island has disappeared. Completely. It’s gone. Vanished.

Scientists confirm the 3 by 3.5 kilometer island has fallen victim to the world’s rising water levels, a result of the climate change some insist isn’t happening. It took global warming to end the contention between the two nations. Now you see it. Now you don’t.

Incidentally New Moore Island isn’t alone. The AP reports that at least five other island in the region are also threatened by the rising waters. Some scientists predict that by 2050, 20 million people will be displaced by rising sea levels. The nearby island of Lohachara was submerged in 1996, forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland in Ghoramara.

Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies in Jadavpur point to an alarming increase in the rate of sea level rise over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal. Until 2000, sea levels rose at a rate of about 3 millimeters annually. For the past decade, that rate has increased to 5 millimeters.

The My Green Mind blog, by the way, is written in the US in Rhode Island where few if any are questioning the reality of  either rising waters or climate change these days. The rain fall total for March in Rhode Island was 15.39 inches, unprecedented in 100 years of weather history according to the National Weather Season.

Comments by My Green Mind’s I Michael Grossman. We’d love to have your thoughts on this issue.

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