Since the beginning of
Industrial era we’ve been buying products packaged in their own marketing,
using the product and throwing away its pack.
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Leia este artigo em Português
We pay for the product and also for
it’s advertising made by the industries interested in differentiating
themselves from other manufacturers.
This pack, as we know, becomes garbage at
the end of the consume process.
With the increase of
world population, this Marketing-packaging-waste model should be changed
immediately.
The Great Pacific
Garbage Patch, discovered in late 1990 is certainly the proof that, unlike any
other animal on this planet, we, human-beings, are not able to deal with our
own garbage.
Located in the central
North Pacific Ocean, roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N, an
excessive area where ocean currents gathered marine pollution together over the
years. It contains all kinds of trash from sinks to plastic bags.
The Great Pacific
Garbage Patch has now about 1,760,000 square kilometers; the area is three
times bigger than Spain and Portugal peninsula.
It is not only in the
pacific, we could find big island of garbage in oceans all over the planet in
five main spots, also called the 5 gyres (see http://5gyres.org/
).
Just for the record, it
takes around 20 years for a plastic bag to decompose, while a plastic bottle
can take 500 years.
The question we should
ask is - Who is responsible for this garbage collection? The logic answers this
question by saying “the waste should be picked up by its maker” - the American
biologist, Barry Commoner once proposed as his fourth law of ecology, “There is
no such thing as a free lunch.” Everything we produce and consume has both an
economic cost and a cost to the environment.
What goes down our
drains and into our landfills will eventually place a burden somewhere on
someone, or on some part of nature.
Unfortunately, our throw away culture often forgets this fact. As a result, the communities who end up
paying the costs of our garbage are often far removed in space and time from
those who produced it.
In order to try to
solve this problem the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment
launched a consultation on a Canada-wide Action Plan on Extended Producer
Responsibility – EPR. It may include the costs of reducing pollution that stems
from the manufacturing process, but also the expenses of dealing with the
garbage that results after the consumer has finished with the product.
EPR can be used to
shift the responsibility of paying for recycling and garbage programs away from
municipalities and onto the companies that produce the waste.
One result of this is
that it provides an incentive for the producers of waste to develop more
environmentally friendly designs.
For example, since the introduction of EPR laws in Japan and Europe,
many electronic manufacturers have shifted to lower use of plastics for many
appliances, to reduce the difficulties in recycling.
Fortunately many
countries have introduced plastic bag bans: Belgium, Italy, Australia,
Bangladesh, Thailand, South Africa.
A project named as Project
Kaisei ("ocean planet" in Japanese) was launched on 19 March 2009,
with plans for an initial phase of scientific study of the plastic debris in
the North Pacific Gyre and feasibility study of the recovery and recycling
technologies. The goal is to bring about a global collaboration of science,
technology and solutions, to help remove some of the floating waste.
How can the world
afford this cleaning effort? - Blemya believes in a simple but not easy
solution; the names printed on the plastic packs should pay the bill
proportionally to the amount of found material.
In order to prevent
new plastic garbage islands on the oceans a New Algae Plastic is become the
base for the new packaging industry.
At the SPE’s Global
Plastics Environmental Conference (www.sperecycling.org) in Atlanta in October
2011, two brand new recycling operations were introduced along with a new algae
bioplastic. The new recycling processes are sophisticated closed-loops for
complex post-consumer materials.
To make sure that our efforts
at cleaning the oceans, along with the new discoveries made by the
bio-engineering plastic/algae materials, Blemya traveled ahead in time and
brought us some articles about the beneficial effects of our present actions:
- The advantages of
this new material was obvious, once discarded it is easily reintegrated into
nature, and if it accidentally ends up in sea waters, it will be deemed as fish
food, with a calculated small ecological impact.
 |
| Fishes would be able to eat the package |
- Unfortunately, the
taste of some products changed a little bit once it entered in contact with the
new material, but simple solutions such as a separate the aliment from the
surface of the pack by a thin layer of paraffin solved the problem.
- It was extremely
well accepted by ecological institutions, NGOs, and most important, the
consumer.
- The use of
bioengineered materials made possible to create a whole line of packs, designed
and programmed directly using genetic codes, the result was amazing.
Some milk brands have
chosen to use a pack made out of the genes of the Portuguese Man o' War
(Physalia physalis), of course the nematocysts and the tentacles have been
suppressed, and, strangest as it may seen, it become a huge market success,
consumers pay even 30% more just to have the new pack on the table for the
breakfast.
