Decline, decline, decline

I saw a comment on a discussion forum about a charity wristband that they writer had accepted, but he didn't think it was a good thing to be making stuff out of plastic. He realised it was just more stuff.

My answer is to not accept it. Or, worst case, if you've taken it without thinking go back, and tell them you don't want it, and why. It's difficult with charities, especially those you admire and support, but they still have email to get in touch.

I decline stuff all the time, and I feel better for it. Flyers, catalogues, whatever they're handing out. There was a couple of guys handing out plastic bottles of water at my local train station recently. They gave me some weird looks because I turned them down. They took a step or two to follow me, thinking I had mis-heard, "It's free!" - "I don't want it, thanks."

Don't take it, decline it, say "No thanks."

Newport Beach - Balloons

Here's a stock photo of Newport beach...similar blowy conditions to yesterday.

And here's a bunch of litter pulled off the beach, including a spoon, toy gun caps, the ubiquitous soy sauce fish lid, and the remains of four balloons.

Here's why I picked up what was left of the balloons, and why you shouldn't buy them:

Aloysius the talking dolphin tells us why he doesn't like balloons

This link has ten things to do to save the ocean, including not releasing balloons

Newport Beach - fishing line

Not sure why, but the beach was way busier than it was, say, three months ago.  Perhaps it is something to do with the weather. Anyway, regular readers will know the form by now.  Here's a picture of the beautiful beach...

 and here's a picture of trash I picked up from it.  This is not all the trash I saw - I was on an R&R trip - but I picked up what looked like the most dangerous. Fishing line, and what looks like a used chemical light, and a golf ball. Oh and some kind of plastic bracket.

Here's another shot - of the dune this time.

Here's more line that I had to wade into the sea to get.  It was in a big clump of seaweed.  Easy to spot because of its turquoise colour.  It got me to thinking that all line should be a hideous colour that would be easier to find, and less likely for creatures to eat or become entangled in.

We were lucky enough to see from the beach a pair of humpbacks cavorting and breaching. How privileged I felt, and of course sorry that their ocean was full of fishing line, chemical lights, bottles, bottle tops, chupa chup sticks and lids from plastic soy sauce fish.

More Plastic Trash on Newport Beach

Here's the north end of Newport Beach.

On this trip there was plastic trash everywhere I looked. lots of the trash was in fragments - small pieces of plastic or polystyrene.  So much I couldn't take a pic of it all at the time - but here are some example pieces.  How someone could lose that pink toy, I don't know.  Fishing line, as usual, very dangerous for animals.  Lollipop sticks from Chupa Chups and the like.  And do you recognise the little red plastic lid?  Every eaten take-away sushi?

Here's the bag of trash - too windy, and the pieces too small to photograph on the day...

...but here is the whole haul.  How many lollipop sticks can you count (see bottom of pic), and how many sushi fish tops can you count (see left of pic).  There is even a whole plastic fish - kind of ironic.

Plastic Trash on Wyrrabalong Beach

Barely scratched the surface - I had nothing to carry it all in.

Plastic Trash on Newport Beach

Three steps to help reverse "shocking decline seen in oceans"

International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) recommendations for immediate action include:

• stopping exploitative fishing now, with special emphasis on the high seas where currently there is little effective regulation
• mapping and then reducing the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilisers and human waste
• making sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, with mass extinction of marine species looming, according to a panel of scientists.
BBC article on shocking decline of oceans

International Program on the State of the Ocean

Dead Turtles & Beach Litter

So you get no posts in this blog for ages, and then two turn up at once - it's just like waiting for a bus.

I read this article the other day on the excellent ABC iPhone app:

To read the full story on your mobile please use this link
http://m.abc.net.au/browse?page=11144%26articleid=3237485%26cat=Top Stories

To read the full story on a PC or Mac please use this link
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/07/3237485.htm

Hm, does the excellent ABC ever remove these stories from their site?  Dunno, but if they did it would make this post a little redundant and pointless, therefore I will provide a small extract to give you the gist of it.  I hope the excellent ABC don't mind:

"Earthwatch researcher Dr Kathy Townsend dissected and examined the guts of more than 120 dead turtles from the eastern areas of Moreton Bay in Queensland.

She says soft plastic items were found more often than hard plastic, and 30 per cent of the dead turtles she examined had ingested rubbish.

"We went out and looked at what we were finding in the guts of the turtle and then compared that to what we were finding on the beaches in which the turtles had washed up," she said.

"Surprisingly what we ended up finding is that the turtles seem to be selecting or targeting soft plastics with the idea that perhaps these animals are targeting that because they look like jellyfish."

Dr Townsend says ingesting rubbish is particularly dangerous for turtles because of their anatomy.

She says swallowing rubbish means turtles become dehydrated and starve to death in a process that can drag out for months.

"Sea turtles, because of their anatomy, cannot vomit, so if it can't go out the back end, it ends up getting stuck," she said.

"This debris then causes the gut to enter a type of paralysis state and all of the debris and organics that are mixed in with that debris just start to decompose.

"The decomposition process causes gas and the animals then become positively buoyant and that's not good if you're a marine animal because that means you can no longer dive to feed, you can't dive to get out of the way of predators or boats and things as well."

The research found that another 6 per cent of turtles had died after becoming entangled in rubbish."

I found that really upsetting.  I remember being on a tourist cruise near Greece, or Spain or some such and the crew of the small boat stopped because they had spotted a turtle in trouble.  They pulled it on board, carefully pulled the plastic netting off the turtle, and then released it thinking that it didn't seem too fatigued.  Good on them.

But not good on all the folk who threw this stuff away.  Or failed to pick it up if they dropped it.  Why have I included this story in this reduce, reduce, reduce blog?  Well, I reckon you should make every effort not to buy the stuff in the first place, and if you do buy it then at least have the decency to recycle, or bin it, rather than toss it into the sea.

Here's a pic of stuff I picked up off a beach just south of Norah Head, NSW around October 2010.  If anyone recognises any of this, then, grrr, shame on you:

I hope the excellent ABC don't mind me copying their pic of a turtle (it's all in a good cause), just in case you've never seen a turtle and don't know how tragic it would be for one of these creatures to die because they can't vomit up a bottle top, or other piece of plastic rubbish.

Goodbye - Wine Selectors

I once made a mistake during a dull wait at an airport.  I got sucked into the Wine Selectors wine tasting, and then signed up.  Ok, there were a number of reasons this turned out to be a bad idea, not all the fault of Wine Selectors.  But they did neglect to tell me that there was going to be an annual fee of $22 or so for me to be a member.

Anyways, I bailed out.  However, I got a piece of spam snail mail from them this week.  To be honest, I think I've had spam mail from them before, and done nothing about it.  That's very lazy of me.  And if you compare the date on this post with the date of the last post you will see that I've been very lazy with this blog - which is fairly reflective of how lazy I've been with reducing, reducing, reducing.

Oh, well. If you fall off the wagon, get back on.  I got onto the Wine Selectors website today and asked them not to send me any more spam.  I hope they take heed.  It will mean less paper, less ink, less energy.  Minuscule amounts of each, I know, but if everyone did it...Just follow my lead.

I felt way better about asking these guys not to spam than I did about asking Amnesty.