The Oyster’s Garter

Illegal pot plantations cause severe environmental damage in northern California.

Some operations go beyond the careful placement of grow-bags and pots. “Some bulldoze large areas of land to create a sunny clearing, often at or near the tops of hills,” Allman says. Creeks and rivers below are flooded with silt once winter rains come. LeDoux has witnessed first-hand the devastation this can cause to breeding salmon and other fish. Erosion and contamination combined with fertilizer-laden runoff and water drafting does not bode well for fish species in some of Northern California’s most remote creeks and rivers. “The cumulative effect of illegal marijuana cultivation on fish in these streams is a serious issue,” she says. “We need a think-tank on this whole problem. It needs to be addressed as soon as possible.”

Does Whole Foods need to get in on this act with extremely expensive sustainably grown weed? And would it be stocked with the wine or with the produce?

Via Metafilter

Compact flourescent bulbs (CFLs) can save a vast amount of electricity, but they contain mercury, which we really, really don’t want leaching out of our landfills. (Previously on TOG.) In order to properly dispose of broken bulbs, people used to have to go to their city’s hazardous waste drop-off (which nobody was going to do for a couple lightbulbs) or to IKEA (the only store that took them back.)

However, the NYT reports that Home Depot will start accepting CFLs for recycling. Since there’s way more Home Despots than IKEAs, this will hopefully encourage proper disposal. Switching to CFLs is totally worth the small recycling inconvenience - Eric and I save 30% on our electricity. Happy illuminating!

Because of all the traffic on this post, I wanted to clarify that I am completely convinced that there is lots of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, and that it is a serious environmental problem. My issue with the plastic:plankton ratio is that it doesn’t accurately measure the amount of plastic.

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation is great at raising awareness of the problem of trash in the North Pacific Gyre. They’ve tirelessly lobbied for political change, coined terms like “plastic soup,” worked in the schools, and are sailing the Junk raft to Hawaii as we speak. However, as part of their quest to make the enormity of the plastic problem understood, they’ve been claiming that there is six time more plastic than plankton in the North Pacific Gyre. The 6:1 ratio has appeared in PBS, The Seattle Times, and has been repeated all over the internet.

Though I admire Algalita’s work, the 6:1 plastic:plankton ratio is deeply flawed. Worse, it is flawed in a direction that undermines Algalita’s credibility: It may vastly underestimate plankton and overestimate plastic. Here’s why, based off the methodology published in Moore et al’s 2001 paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

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Jocelyn Ford of the the Science Friday blog lives in Beijing, and she has posted an account of the on-the-ground repercussions of China’s plastic bag ban. China banned extremely thin single-use plastic bags, but not the thicker bags more common in the US. Ford admits that the new bag surcharge has made her more careful about bringing her own bags to the food market, but worries that banning thin bags has only led to more widespread use of thick bags:

Take my local hole-in-the wall shop that sells stuffed pancake (yum!) Until last week, the shop did takeaway orders in ultra thin bags less than 0.025 millimeters, or 0.00098 inches thick. It’s now upgraded– the shop not only uses thicker bags, it’s ordered bags with the shop name on them. The shopkeeper proudly told me they were “environmentally friendly.” Looks to me like the new regulation has encouraged him to add to the garbage and pollution problem. The tiny bags are not easy to reuse.

In a classic case of the law of unintended consequences, Ford says that many shops have also started to give away free paper bags, which create more air and water pollution than plastic bags. (It’s true! See this handy chart from the Washington Post.) Ford believes that China should have legislated biodegradable bags - except, as she point out, they are made from corn.

So are biodegradable bags a solution? The corn starch bags Ford mentions are still under development, and they are based off ethanol biofuel byproducts. Since corn ethanol biofuel has proved to be food-price debacle, this is probably not the solution. Most commercially available biodegradable bags are based off a mixture of corn starch and petroleum-based polyesters. While they do biodegrade (which does solve the problem of cute large animals choking and drains clogging), it means that biodegradable bags are both competing with food supplies and polluting the environment with tiny molecular- and cell-sized bits of polyester. Little bits of plastic can be a huge problem at the base of the food chain, due to accidental ingestion by non-charismatic but ecologically critical animals like insects and earthworms

I still think that plastic bag bans are a move in the right direction, but Ford’s anecdotes about the Chinese ban show that a nuanced approach may be necessary. Should all disposable bags, including paper, be taxed? How can the Chinese government encourage people to reuse bags instead of simply switching types of disposable bag? And what approach might the US (when we finally catch up with Ireland, Bangladesh, and South Africa) take to control the plastic problem?

You might wonder - I rather hope you wonder - why the Oyster’s Garter has been so silent this week. I have been running frantically about preparing for a month-long research trip to Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela. (as well as helping Eric host our Very First California Seder.). I’ll be studying an invasive tunicate, Trididemnum solidum, that is overgrowing Curacao’s coral reefs. I will also be serving as a dive buddy for a classmate studying traditional Curacao fish traps.

I’m not sure how frequently I will have internet access, but I will post on my adventures as much as possible. And I’ll be contributing a mighty deuterostome-related entry to Coral Week. I’ve never been diving in warm water before, and I expect to be spoiled utterly rotten. I also expect to come back totally jacked, since I’ll be filtering liters and liters of water (for particulate organic carbon, if you’re curious) with a hand pump.

In the future, your plastic drink bottles and plastic computer cases could be made out of smokestack emissions. At least, that’s what Science Daily says about news from the American Chemical Society meeting. Chemists are very excited about using carbon dioxide emissions as a raw material for making polycarbonate plastic. One of the authors of the report, Thomas Muller, said, “Using CO₂ to create polycarbonates might not solve the total carbon dioxide problem, but it could be a significant contribution.”

It’s tempting to snort “Oh, great, MORE cheap plastic crap.” In fact, as I was writing this, there was significant cynical snortage. But a solution that a) makes it economically desirable to reduce the amount of emissions going into the atmosphere; and b) turns something harmful into something useful is a good solution in my book. It’s not the Magical Fix-Everything Plan that puts a unicorn in every pot - obviously, as the state of the North Pacific Gyre demonstrates, we’ve got to get a lot better about reusing and recycling the plastic that we’ve already got. But wouldn’t it be neat to have a DVD made out of smoke?

David Meyerson from VBS.TV emailed me this video series on trash in the North Pacific Gyre. VBS sent a reporter, a producer, and a cameraman out on the ORV Alguita with Charles Moore of the Algalita Foundation (previously 1, 2, 3). The resulting film series is called “Garbage Island,” and is part of a larger VBS series on toxic pollution.

I have only watched the first episode of their 12-part series, but I strongly suspect they get to the gyre and find a soupy mass of plastic. Be warned if you’re at work - the density of F-bombs from the narrator rivals the density of plastic in the gyre. (Also be warned that this series may aggravate the latent hipster-loathing a hypothetical person might have developed while living in Brooklyn. But I digress.)

If you want to learn even more about the Algalita Foundation’s exploration of the trash problem, Dr. Marcus Eriksen will be talking at Scripps Institution of Oceanography next Wednesday, April 16th, at 12:15 PM. (set up by yours truly - *pats self on back*) His talk is open to the public, so any interested locals should come on by. Email me if you’d like more details or directions.

Planktos, the science-deficient private company that wanted to fertilize the oceans with iron, has gone out of business. Plankos was notable for the inanity of its arguments and the belligerence of its CEO. In fact, they couldn’t resist one parting shot, blaming their bankruptcy on ” a highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders.” How very shocking!

Thanks to Rick for the heads-up and the high-five! Now let’s keep our beady little crusader eyeballs on Australia’s Ocean Nourishment Company, which is apparently still in the urea-dumping business.

The New York Times reports that a mere 33-cent tax on plastic shopping bags in Ireland has reduced use by 94%.  Apparently it’s more of a social sanction than an actual financial hardship - using plastic bags has become tacky. I wonder if this holds for all segments of Irish society.

The only faint stirring of this kind of social pressure in the US has been the designer “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” obsession last year. People waited in line for hours to buy this $15 canvas bag by some extremely important bag designer.  The bag in question spawned a bunch of responses, including bag emblazoned with “I’m Not a Plastic Bag, Either” and “I’m Not a Smug Twat.”

Clearly, the New York model is ridiculous, especially since I bet the above bag is SO last season by now. But reusable bags don’t have to be snooty - Trader Joe’s sells perfectly excellent bags for 99 cents. Do you think that the US would ever pass a plastic bag tax? Would lobbying for one cause Americans  to perceive environmentalism as yet more out-of-touch silliness from rich white people?

Jack Shafer over at Slate likes to snark at the New York Times, but this time he’s out of his league. Shafer claims that the NYT story on mercury levels in sushi was “scaremongering,” and that studies on seafood consumption in Chile, the Seychelles, and Samoa proved that there is no such thing as mercury poisoning.

Pity Shafer’s Biology 101 teacher, since he clearly missed the bit about the food chain. All fish are not created equal. Methylmercury (the toxic form of mercury) reaches the ocean from the atmosphere, usually via coal fumes, and is incorporated into phytoplankton. Each step up the food chain indirectly incorporates more phytoplankton, and thus more mercury. So zooplankton-eating fish (like sardines) have far less mercury than fish-eating fish (like tuna or swordfish).

The NYT article dealt specifically with bluefin tuna, a top predator in the relatively polluted Mediterranean and North Atlantic. People in Chile, the Seychelles, and Samoa aren’t gorging themselves on bluefin tuna, not when a single fish sells for $45,000. They probably aren’t eating many other top predators on a daily basis, not when Chile’s anchovy fishery is the most productive in the world, and the Seychelles & Samoan islands teem with coastal reef fish.

However, there are people who eat a lot of top marine predators - the Inuit and other Arctic native peoples. Their diet of seals and whales is trophically comparable to tuna, and they are suffering severe health effects from mercury and PCBs. I’m all for Shafer keeping a sharp eye on the NYT, but ignorant criticism without even a perfunctory grasp of the biology (he doesn’t even mention that bluefin tuna are critically overfished!) does not help either people or tuna.