Transition Island Blog

Pets are happy & healthy… right?

Let’s say, just for the sake of example, that you were a dog. Or a cat, if you prefer (although I can’t imagine why you would). You’d spend your days lazing about, taking naps, playing outside, and eating treats. Humans would pat your head and tell you how cute you looked.

Sounds like a pretty neat life, right? Lighthearted, carefree, simple. . . I bet you’re a little jealous.

Well, I thought it was pretty neat too, until I found out that pets are full of toxic chemicals.

Read more about the Environmental Working Group research.

Action:
Start planning organic food and natural cleaning products to protect your pets.

The UK’s thirst for bottled water appears to be drying up.

New figures show that sales are falling for the first time in years.

Shop sales of bottled water fell by 9 per cent to £284m in the year to March, according to independent retail analysts. Also, water cooler sales have also fallen, although not as dramatically.

environmental costs

Green groups said they hoped the figures suggested the public was turning away from bottled water because of the environmental costs of packaging and transportation. Some of it travels to the UK from the Fijian islands in the Pacific!

Production of a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.

(more…)

Plastic litter on Britain’s beaches has reached record levels, endangering whales, dolphins and seabirds.

The Marine Conservation Society, which campaigns for cleaner beaches and seas, said plastic litter has increased by 126 percent since its first survey in 1994.

Scores of marine wildlife species, including seals and turtles, have died after eating plastic or drowning after getting tangled in debris or old fishing nets, it said.

“The results are truly shocking,” said Emma Snowden, the society’s litter projects coordinator. “Plastics are of particular concern as they could persist in the marine environment for centuries with fatal consequences for marine wildlife.”

In the last decade, the amount of plastic drinks bottles has risen by 67 percent, plastic bags by 54 percent and cigarette butts by 44 percent.

(more…)

Driving less miles, converting to smaller cars, and using more public transport - they are going in the right direction!

Having delayed on the Kyoto Agreement for so many years, the USA is now driving in a different direction.

Less miles

Americans cut back on their driving for the first time in more than 20 years, according to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration. Total travel fell 0.4 percent to 3.00 trillion miles from 3.01 trillion miles in 2006.

That might not seem much, but subway and public bus use is at the highest level in more than 50 years.

(more…)

Environmental concerns can be triggers to technical improvements.

In 1957, the first aluminium cans were used for drinks. Originally, they were punctured at the top to create an opening to pour the drink out.

Then in 1962, the pull-ring tab first marketed by the Pittsburgh Brewing Company. This was a great innovation that helped canned drinks take over from bottled, and massively increased the market in America and then throughout the world.

Pull-tabs became a common form of litter.

They wound up on beaches, where children cut their feet on them. They littered roadsides and damaged garbage disposals.

Douglas Adams put a picture of the ring-pull on the front of “Life, the Universe and Everything” to show (his opinion) of the worst pollutant in the Universe.

They also caused injuries to lips, cheeks, noses and throats (when accidentally swallowed).

Pets and wildlife died from swallowing them.

And gossip has it that “more than a few people” also died, having dropped them into a can of beer and then accidentally choked on them.

The stay-on tab invented in 1974 and all these problems went away.

opinion
            We CAN do it!

Pesticides continue to be linked to serious illness.

The Pesticide Action Network points out:

‘They are the only manufactured chemicals specifically designed to be toxic.’

‘They are also the only group of toxic chemicals routinely intentionally dispersed in the environment.’

So why are we encouraging our children to eat more?

(more…)

Plastic waste dumped in the oceans could be a devastating long-term pollution threat to the food chain.

Studies suggest billions of microscopic plastic fragments drifting underwater are concentrating toxins like DDT.

Marine biologist at Plymouth University have investigated how plastic degrades in the water and how tiny marine organisms, such as barnacles and sand-hoppers, respond.

concentrated toxins 

Dr Richard Thompson said “We know that plastics in the marine environment will accumulate and concentrate toxic chemicals from the surrounding seawater and you can get concentrations several thousand times greater than in the surrounding water on the surface of the plastic.

“Now there’s the potential for those chemicals to be released to those marine organisms if they then eat the plastic.”

Research on stretches of shoreline has shown that, at the microscopic level, plastic pollution is far worse than feared.

(more…)

New Scientist, a very proper magazine reporting professionally on scientific matters, got emotional about plastic bags.

happy birthday?

They  noted the birthday of the discovery of plastic back in 1933. Technically they reported it was discovered by “Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson at ICI in Northwich, England when they put a mixture of ethylene and benzaldehyde under very high pressure.”

Plastics have since been improved, as any new invention would be.

not celebrating!

“The reason we’re not celebrating their birthday is the ethylene - it comes from crude oil.

Another reason is the very reason they’ve become so popular: plastics take 1000 years to rot.”

So science doesn’t always produce ‘good stuff’.