Educating Capitol Hill on Why We Need to Save Our SeasWritten and attended by: Becca Alcenius, NAMEPA InternNAMEPA had a wonderful time at a fly-in meeting with Ocean Conservancy on March 5. A Fly-in normally consists of field experts, non-profit…
Every day, Americans use 500,000,000 plastic straws and then throw them away. Arranging these straws end-to-end would create a line of plastic over sixty-two thousand miles long. That is enough to circle the Earth 2.5 times per day! These single-use plastic straws are threatening our health, environment, oceans, and sea life.
Strange to think that a little straw can be threatening. . .
When one goes on a seaside vacation, one looks forward to a relaxing time complete with a stroll on idyllic beaches. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case during a weekend visit to Block Island where an invigorating walk turned into a beach cleanup.
268,940 tons of plastic float through the world’s oceans, spreading, accumulating, and being swallowed or absorbed. A group of researchers led by Markus Eriksen of the Five Gyres Institute in LA made this estimate in 2014. 5.25 trillion plastic particles are sitting in the ocean, they wrote in their paper, which was the first ever estimate for the total amount of plastic in the ocean.