! cocoabee: ecofriendly

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one of 5 major ocean regions devastated by enormous amounts of trash and is believed to be the world’s largest landfill estimated at 2 times the size of Texas. It consists of two vortexes of garbage collected by ocean currents. This gigantic accumulation of plastic was discovered by Charles Moore 13 years ago in 1997 when he was returning from a yacht race and decided to sale through the North Pacific Gyre.

“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean. I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.”
- Charles Moore

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The North Pacific Gyre is the largest ecosystem on earth and has been immensely effected by this garbage patch.

What's it made out of?

Disposable plastic is the culprit.

Single use, toss away, one-time plastic is fulfilling 5 minutes of purpose before becoming useless and incredibly harmful garbage for hundreds of years. Disposable plastic makes up 90% of the garbage in the oceans. This includes plastic bags, bottle caps, disposable water bottles, and styrofoam. Plastic never biodegrades into another substance. Plastic will always, always be plastic. Instead it photodegrades, it breaks down to smaller fragments in the presence of sunlight. It takes about 500-1000 years for plastic to photodegrade.

The Great Pacific garbage patch isn't visible from satellites because it consists of tiny pieces of plastic that have photo degenerated. Most of this plastic has become so small that it is invisible to the human eye. A great deal of it has become a similar size as to phytoplankton, which is the foundation of the marine food chain. Filter feeders from small fish to whales are mistaking the plastic for plankton and eating it. Larger fish who eat many of the smaller fish are getting all of the plastic from the smaller fish because their bodies cannot process plastic out. This leads to bioaccumulation of plastic and increasingly toxic animals as you move up the food chain (this is called biomagnification). As a result of biomagnification some whales and dolphins are even labeled as toxic waste.

80% off all garbage in the ocean has come from land.
Because sea level is lower then land elevation; wind, rain and other types of weather can easily take lightweight plastic into bodies of water that’ll carry them into the ocean.

Effect on wild life

Plastic is being consumed by animals who mistaken it for food

Bottle caps and lighters for birds and plastic bags and balloons for turtles (who eat jellyfish, which plastic bags and balloons look like in the water) are the most commonly ingested items.

“A turtle found dead in Hawaii had over a thousand pieces of plastic in its stomach and intestines. It has been estimated that over a million sea birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement."
- Greenpeace

Effect on Us

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is just one of many examples of how we are abusing our resources and destroying our planet. Since plastic and toxic chemicals from plastic are finding their way into the ocean’s food chain, we’re finding them on our dinner plates and in our bodies. Our body processes these plastics the same way it processes fat. Plastic is stored on the body as energy and when we loose fat the concentration of plastic increases because the concentration of fat decreased. Scientist are constantly discovering how toxins from plastics are disrupting the natural functioning of our bodies and the heath risks that are a product of it. Mothers producing milk, which is essentially fat, are transferring the toxins from her body to her child’s through her milk.

Plastic toxicity is also said to be linked with obesity, birth defects, cancers, immune system suppression and developmental problems in the young.

The ocean also has a huge effect on our weather, temperature and overall climate and these effects could turn violently negative if we continue to consume and discarded at the rate we are now. Cleaning up the ocean manually is out of financial reach and could cause unpredictable damage to wildlife.

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Together the 5 garbage patches cover 40% of our oceans

If you don’t think our lifestyle is having an impact on our planet, your denial won’t save you from the consequences. Think of all the inorganic waste you produce, every day, every week, every month, every year, All of that waste is still right here on earth. We need to stop the build up and start the clean up by changing our unsustainable practises in our everyday life. Small changes in our day-to-day routine build up, just as bioaccumulation and bio-magnification build up and make a massive difference.

sources: national geographic / wikipedia / greenpeace / newint.org / factmonster.com / savemyoceans.com / ecology.com / sciencedaily.com

earth day

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

- Native American Proverb

April 22 is the one official day of the year for celebrating our planet and to recognize our role in the environment of our home. Everything we take, create, use, consume and throw out stays right here on earth. We use so much we don’t need, so much of what we happily could have gone without, so much of what takes us no where and it all doesn’t go anywhere else. All our garbage, our air pollution, stays right on and in the atmosphere of our planet. Plastic takes thousands or even millions of years to disintegrate, the garbage trucks just take it somewhere else for it to stay for the next millenniums. Everyone only needs to use a little for it to add up to being a lot.

A plastic milk jug takes 1 million years to decompose.
Today, Americans generate 10.5 million tons of plastic waste a year but recycle only 1 or 2 % of it. - greenfeet.net

It can be hard to believe but there are 7 billion people living on earth, people who need to eat, breath, space, and resources. People who will have children who will need the same. People who will need the earth just as much as we do. We have been using too much of what has been doing too little for us. How much do you throw away? Do you know where it goes? Do you know how long it will be there? Do you know how much more there is for you to take? With constant awareness and we can make this common knowledge and being green a habit to save our habitat. Here's what you can do, lets make it right, lets do it now.

stop buying bottled water
29 billion plastic disposable water bottles are produced a year using up 17 million barrels of oil annually.
Tap water is actually safer than bottled water, regardless of what the corporations have been telling you, because it more closely regulated. Spring water or bottled water actually isn't always inspected. Attach a filter to your tap if your not convinced instead of buying water, the plastic can be recycled but it also takes a lot of energy to recycle it, just as it takes a lot of energy to produce it.

Don't buy CDs/DVDs, instead rent or download
Over 1200000 CDs and DVDs end up in landfills every year. DVDs and CDs are both unrecyclable.

Read Newspapers, Magazines, etc. online
10 million tons of unrecycled newspaper are thrown away every year, if half of that was recycled 75 million tress would be saved. Every 20 seconds a tree is cut down and each year important rainforests like the tropic rainforest in Brazil are dramatically reduced in size. Forests are so important, the diversity of animals and plants living there should not be touched, the cure to cancer may be hidden in a forest and if we keep destroying forests we may loose.

use a laptop instead of a desktop computer
laptops use up to 70% less energy than a desktop computer,
plus their smaller size means they take less material to make and will take up less room in your compartments

Buy a used car
Used vehicles are even more efficient than purchasing a hybrid vehicle because of the electricity and materials it takes to make the vehicle.

Go vintage
Wearing pre-worn clothes helps the earth more than buying clothes made out of organic fibres or thread. Again, it takes a lot of energy to manufacture items.

Eat less meat
Cattle farming is the #1 cause to deforestation. Most of which is to raise beef for fast food restaurants. Try to have a meat free day once a week or as much as possible!

Protect the earth.

thrifting

After seeing annie's (whatanniewears.com) post about thrift store shopping and seeing that she got an incredible looking blazer from a thrift store I have been itching to go to one. I didn't get to do any vintage shopping while I was in New York! There just wasn't any time. Today I discovered that thrift stores in Vancouver aren't too bad…in fact I really like vintage/thrift shopping now!

The last time I went to a thrift store was back in elementary school where the teachers took us there as a "field trip" to find costumes for our "Music Through the Ages" musical. These two necklaces were the only things I bought that day, I think my total was around $6? We were too busy being a ruckus for the teachers but a friend of mine did get some cool stuff.

vv4

Today, less than $8 bought me a hoodie that would have cost me over $85 last year at Aritzia. I really wanted this sweater last year and I got it today for about 90%off! Other than some pilling it seems to be in great condition. I haven’t found any stains yet.

What I’ve Learned About Thrift Stores

It isn’t that hard to find things. Everything is organized into categories, then into size and it looked like the shirts were organized by color too. Basically there are a few sections that would suit you so you don’t have to search the whole store but its a good idea to poke around the other areas too. Clothes could have shrunk or stretched or a designer might have had a different idea of what “size small” or “size large” was. Basically its just the same as Winners or Marshalls, only the things have been worn and they’re cheaper. (btw – The changing rooms similar too!)
Not everything is old. Today I bought an Aritzia Parklife 2010 Vancouver Olympics Whistler Hoodie (shown in photos). They do have a lot of stuff that looks like its been there since the 60s but there’s recently made items too. You might even find something with the tags still on it, you never know!
Yes they do have expensive brands. Just about everything is branded, a lot of them in the Old Navy - American Eagle price range but there’s also True Religion, Topshop and Diesel, you just have to hunt for it.
Yes most of the clothes have a worn feel to it. The fibres in the fabric aren't as in tact as new ones are and some of the clothes have stains/pilling. Most of the clothes I saw though were in good condition.

On the right is Annie in the blazer that she bought from a thrift store. Amazing right?

Best thing is… Designer jean hunting!

Your not supposed to take pictures in the store, I snapped these before the manager came to give me a chat (embarrassing but worth it to get some photos) but I’m practically advertizing them so I think they’ll forgive me. Today I spotted William Rast and Diesel, the Diesel jeans looked pretty new and they had a gorgeous wash but they weren’t my size. The William Rast jeans were a bit faded and also too big for me. If you want them they might still be there... This was the Victoria drive Value Village location in Vancouver.

earth day!

today was the fourth annual earth day and being ecologically friendly is very important to me. whenever i hear about people trying to deny global warming and our impact on the environment i get a roar of anger and annoyance. Do they really think our lifestyle, with all the factories and everything able consumerism, how we've changed the whole way the world works, has not affected the earth's condition? that everything is perfectly fine?

we are nothing without mother nature. it is the ground that holds us up, it is the material in which we have built everything we have out of, it is what has taken care of us and what we need to take care of now.

Every ton of recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of oil.

Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually -- consuming more than 850 million trees.

Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually -- consuming more than 850 million trees.

The cost of one nuclear weapons test alone could finance the installation of eighty thousand hand pumps, giving third world villages access to clean water.

For every one of the 6 billion people on earth, nearly four tons of carbon dioxide is spewed into the air annually.

World wide, rainforests are dissapearing at a rate of one and a half football fields per second. Each spring the forests beathe in oxygen and the earth breathes out again the following autumn, but like a heavy smokers lungs the earth is loosing its ability to breathe at all. Just a few centuries ago, earths equator was girdled by a green belt of 15 million sq. miles of rain forest, an area about 5-times that of contiguous US. Now the equiv. of 3 USA's worth of Forest are GONE! there is only 6.2 million sq. miles left
sources: thinkquest envirowarrior