scruzin said..Sectorsteve said..
looks like a magic spot. great read , thank you and good stuff for collecting the samples. this micro pastic thing is a worry. i dont think anything can be done about it. its too late. i wish they would immediately stop making plastic. In nz we used to have paper bags called cleansaks for rubbish. i tried to find something similar for our weekly rubbish. google " paper rubbish bags" and all you get is plastic ones. we had to settle for using a re usable sack.
Single-use/disposable plastic is a big part of the problem, and that (at least) is a problem we can/should solve. FYI, there is an NZ company doing something about it.
http://www.globelet.com/why/ Thats great about the NZ company but Countries in Europe have been doing this for decades. Most of the festivals give out amazing cups with your beer that you want to own. Theres an extra charge on this cup so you hang onto it for the night. In 2014 i was in Szantod Hungary on lake balaton(Sir G's hometown i hear!) at a festival. When you buy a beer they gave you their beer in these beautiful plastic cups with handles and pictures of "Rock" guitarists, the festival name and date. I got em all on the boat now. In Vienna theres a club called the flex i used to go to that had great live music. Every beer you buy comes in these cups. You have the choice to give it back and get a deposit back or take it home. Ive still got them from 1998. We are soooo far behind here with this stuff. This has all been going on for years in other places. Of course not all of Europe is like this. Greece? When i was working there in the 90's on Kos, i loved to get away to a beach that wasnt filled with tourists. You quickly learn that the locals when they clean up the place for tourist season dump all the crap on these "Non tourist" beaches. So i got my solitude, but with all that trash all around me. The guy i worked for on a yacht, used to just throw everything in the water. plastic, the works. he was a seaman too , but totally ignorant.
a good thing is that lately theres been mainstream awareness with tv shows & alot on the internet. I lived in europe for 10 years from 96 and back then if you wanted bags you bought em. Everyone took bags, bottles, jars etc to the supermarket. the bags to re use the bottles , jars and cartons etc to recycle in the machines that give you a docket that you can redeem for cash or take $ off your groceries. Seems like a simple solution to me and it NEVER caught on here. Since most of the rubbish was worth money, people in need take it as a job to collect it. Some of the bottles give a lot of money back. 25 euro cents for a water bottle.
Please excuse the rant here folks. I just cant see the will of the people being heard on this planet. It always comes back to big biz doing whatever they please at the expense of our wildlife. They do not care.
Found this from the Irish Times about microplastics. actually it wont let me copy and paste a link. google irish times " No one thought this through"
