Senator Jamie Eldridge Discusses the Pacific Garbage Patch
Filed under: Action,News & Resources,Policy
A project near and dear to naturalist Mark Fraser’s heart is the elimination of single use plastic bags and the Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive gyre of plastic bags, bottles and other litter located in the North Pacific Ocean. The patch is estimated to be about the size of Texas.
(From Discovery News / by Jennifer Viegas) — Birds and other animals that mistakenly consume the human debris often die. The below Laysan albatross chick died after being fed plastics by its parents, who must have thought the colorful, hard objects were food.
Mark’s guest today is Massachusetts State Senator Jamie Eldridge, who created a bill to ban single use plastic bags from supermarkets in any Massachusetts store that grosses over $500,000.
Mark says, “This is such an important first step! Once one state begins to ban plastic bags, all states will certainly follow like dominoes and finally ban these terrible bags. This is exactly what happened with the Clean Water Act being passed in Massachusetts, thanks to Marion Stoddart.”
To learn more about the “Pacific Garbage Patch” Mark invites you to visit his site, http://www.garbagepatchcleaner.org/home.
“Please show your support; it’s so very important!” Mark says. “My dream is to one day have a federal ban on plastic single-use shopping bags in the United States.”
