WiLD Blog

 In Annapolis, Maryland officials are considering a bill to ban the use of plastic bags in the city, in an effort to protect marine life. Plastic bags are often the cause of death of marine life in Chesapeake Bay and it’s tributaries. Internationally, an estimated 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine mammals are killed each year according to the environmental group, Planet Ark.

A world without plastic bags seems hard to imagine, but it already exists in other countries. For three months, I studied abroad in Australia, one of the few countries that have banned the use of plastic bags.  Instead, grocery stores either use biodegradable plastic bags or they sell cheap reusable cloth bags. For less than a US dollar you could get a reusable, environmentally friendly cloth bag.  They were also more sturdy and useful than a regular plastic bag. I even bought a few back home for my family to carry their groceries in.

Royal tern with plastic bag around its neck. Thousands of wild animals die every year due to plastic bags.

While in Australia, I also saw the consequences of plastic bags. We visited an aquarium as part of one of our field trips were we saw a sea turtle being rehabilitated. It was found washed ashore and sick, because it mistook a plastic bag as a jellyfish. Sea turtles (and other marine life) cannot digest plastic bags, which blocks up their intestines. The campaign to stop the use of plastic bags in Australia was partially due to the large amount of sea turtles and other marine life being killed by plastic bags.

It was interesting to come back to the US and realize how many plastic bags are being used and how they’re actually quite unnecessary. They’re such a large part of our grocery experience. Unfortunately they’re also part of a beach experience. Anyone that’s been to some of the beaches here in San Diego has seen litter and plastic bags. Bags are the 5th most common form of beach debris.

However in the US there is movement towards viable alternatives. Some stores are actually selling reusable cloth bags. Also, if you don’t want to buy cloth bags, opt for paper instead of plastic, since it takes less time for it to biodegrade and is less harmful than using plastic. In addition, remember to pick up your litter at the beach.

Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution.

-Calvin Lee

Ecological footprint is a term that was coined in 1992 by Canadian ecologist William Rees. It measures the amount of natural resources an individual, a community, or a country consumes in a given year. Footprinting is a measurement of people’s demand on nature and compares human consumption of natural resources with the earth’s ecological capacity to regenerate them. It is now widely use as an indicator of environmental sustainability, and is commonly used to explore the sustainability of individual lifestyles, goods and services, organizations, industry sectors, neighborhoods, cities, regions and nations.

The last special issue of TIME magazine on global warming has a very good article that gives 51 things we can do to reduce our ecological footprint. What I like about the article is a scale that shows the impact of the action, the time horizon, and the feel-good factor. Some of these actions require a collective change (i.e. companies, government), while others depend upon individual choices. I was surprised to see that some personal actions have a great impact on the ecological footprint, rivaling the collective ones. Here are four individual actions that have a large positive impact on the environment:

Ride the bus

More than 30% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are caused by cars. Public transit saves an estimated 1.4 billion gallons of gas annually, which translates into about 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.

If you live in the San Diego area, the city has a decent public transportation system. About two months ago I decided to take take the bus or the trolley at least twice a week. For a while I used the excuse of not knowing what routes to take, but the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System website has a useful website to figure out the best routes and times (http://www.sdcommute.com/Rider_Information/Trip_Planning/index.asp). You will discover that using public transportation instead of driving has some other advantages besides reducing your ecological footprint: You don’t have to get stressed about traffic and you will have extra time to read.

Skip the steak

The international meat industry generates about 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, even more than the transportation industry- according to a 2006 U.N’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Most of those emissions come from nitrous oxide in manure and methane, which is a byproduct of bovine digestion. Methane produces a warming effect 23 times greater than carbon, while nitrous oxide warming effect is 296 times greater.

By switching to vegetarianism a person reduces its carbon footprint by up to 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year. In comparison, switching to a hybrid car reduces an individual’s carbon footprint by up to one ton.

Say no to plastic bags

That plastic bag that you got in the supermarket has a usable lifetime of approximately five minutes (what usually takes you to take your groceries from the register counter to your house). But it takes up to 1,000 years to biodegrade in landfills that emit harmful greenhouse gases.

Every year, more than 500 billion plastic bags are distributed worldwilde (California produces 20 billion bags, a staggering 4% of the world’s total!!). Annually, it takes about 12 million barrels of oil to produce the world’s grocery bags.

They add a tremendous cost to cities like San Diego that are able to recycle less than 5 percent of the plastic bags tossed out by people (read a San Diego Union Tribute article on the issue ). Additionaly, many of these plastic bags end up in the oceans where animals die when they ingest them or get caught in them.

The solution is very simple: use a cloth bag or tell the cashier you don’t need a bag when you can carry things without the need of a bag. Brake the bag habit .

Consume less

One of the three Rs (Recycle, Reuse, Reduce), reducing your consumption of goods, is the one with the highest positive impact in the environment. The less you buy and consume, the smaller your ecological footprint in the environment will be, and the extra waste produced will be zero.

Saul