A study of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is underway

Scientists study huge plastic patch in Pacific.

Australia Town-Good on ya!

Check this out fellow plastic watchers. Now this is taking the initiative.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090709/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_bottled_water_ban

Bottled Water Disaster

My brother passed this along. The numbers are scary, but the pictures are even scarier. 

Recycled Air

I found out via David Pogue from one of his "Tweets" on Twitter that Delta Airlines had a big recycling program. Here's an article from Delta's Blog that talks about it. Mind you, it's a bit biased being that it's THEM talking about THEIR recycling program (and from 2008 no less), but it sounds good. Now if only we could get independent proof.

Up, Up and (Do) Away! (with plastic cups)

Fellow BTPH travelers. When soaring at 30,000 feet, does your flight attendant serve you several cups of water, each in its own plastic cup. Why not keep the first cup and have them refill that with your favorite hydrating liquid? On average, 54,159,736* passengers per month travel on US domestic flights. If, conservatively, each passenger has 1.5 drinks (some flights don't serve any, others serve 2 0r 3) Those 1.5 drinks becomes 81.2 million cups in just one month of air travel. And that is just for U.S. flights. That, my friends, is a lot of cups.  So I encourage you to save your cup and while your at it, tell the person in the seat next to you to save their cup also. Better yet, bring your own reusable cup.

Safe travels. 

 *Data source: faa.gov and bts.gov

More For The Creative Recycler

Continuing in my theme of getting creative with recycling, I have recently discovered a nifty website called Superuse.org. They are made up of a group of designers, architects and other creative folks interested in new ways to recycle. So why not check out their site and instead of chucking all those plastic water bottles, make a lovely Mother's Day gift out of them.

Plastic thoughts

Here is an interesting website. Send it around to raise awareness.

Here's another one. There are many interesting statistics and lots of info on this site about plastic, aluminum and glass.

A few quick stats:

In 2006 36 BILLION (plastic) bottles of water were sold in the US. That is approximately 4 billion pounds of plastic (just from water bottles). Add to that soda and juice bottles, and the salad type containers from the previous blog, and the numbers get kind of heady.

According to some reports a one-liter plastic water bottle uses 1/4-liter of oil to produce.

And now a chart:

Recycling Rates by Material and Class, 2006

		Aluminum cans	PET plastic bottles	Glass bottles	Total
11 Deposit states	Carbonated	78.7%	71.2%	72.7%	76.1%
	Non-carbonated	49.3%	35.2%	36.4%	36.9%
	Average	75.8%	44.4%	63.6%	61.4%
39 Non-Deposit States	Carbonated	35.1%	13.6%	12.4%	24.2%
	Non-carbonated	35.1%	13.6%	12.4%	24.2%
	Average	35.1%	13.6%	12.4%	24.2%
US Total	Carbonated	45.4%	27.0%	29.4%	36.9%
	Non-carbonated	42.1%	21.5%	21.4%	29.0%
	Average	45.2%	23.5%	27.8%	34.7%

23% of PET plastic on average. Not good. 

Now the good news. Some legislation is being passed to try to stem this ugly plastic tide. See this website to find out if your state is included and what they are doing.

Ok, enough stats for today. Thanks for reading.