Trash Vortex of the Pacific Ocean
In Pacific Ocean, between the Islands of Hawaii and the Coast of California there is an area as large as the state of Texas (some researchers say it stretches from 500 miles off the California coast to Japan) filled with an accumulation of plastic waste. Due to wind and current conditions, trash seems to accumulate in this area called the North Pacific Gyre. Much of the plastic has been reduced to partials, but there are also large chunks as well.
The particles resemble Zooplankon, which is being consumed by Jellyfish, and thus become part of the food chain. Larger debris such as monofilament line can entrap sea life.
Ocean researcher Charles Moore estimates there are 100 million tons of flotsam in the North Pacific Gyre. You can read the reach paper here http://www.algalita.org/pdf/Density%20of%20Particles%20spellchkd11-05.pdf .
It is difficult to imagine 100 million tons of plastic particles so let’s compare it to something we can visualize. How about comparing it to a Blue Whale the largest animal to have ever lived on the Earth? The Blue Whale average weight ranges from 90 to 150 Tons and 70 to 80 feet. The record length is 106 feet. For example, we will use a 100-Ton Blue Whale.
Dividing 100 tons into the 100 million tons of trash in the Trash Vortex, we get the incredible number of 1 million Blue Whales. Imagine 1 million Whales 80 feet in length and 100 tons in weight. That’s how much trash, mostly plastic, is in the North Pacific Gyre.
There is one problem! We have hunted the Blue Whale so that there are an estimated 1300 to 2000 left on this Earth.
What Ever Happened To Alternative Fuels?
I know everyone talks about oil, and you know this is a big problem. There are, however, some interesting facts that scare me. How about you?
First is that the world supply of crude oil is 84.59 million gallons per day. The world consumption is 85.38 million gallons. Ummm, at the school at went to that meant we are using more oil them we have available. Why is this happening? Well, we are running out of oil, but at this time, it is mainly the control of the supply by oil producing countries. They get together (OPEC controls about 1/3 of all oil production) and decide to supply more or less based on their whim. In the USA, price fixing is against the law! Why don’t we do anything about it?
Well the fact is that in the USA, the demand for oil is 20.7 million gallons a day (yes about 25% of world demand) and we only produce 8.48 million gallons. So, OPEC and other oil producing countries have us by the gonads and it is our own fault.
We are the country that put a man on the moon in less then a 10 year period, but could not invent an alternative fuel (promised back in the 1970s) that would get us out of this strangle hold. We can spend a 1/2 a trillion dollars on the Iraq war, but virtually nothing on research for alternative fuels.
The 2008 budget for the Solar America Initiative is $148 million. The Biofuels Initiative budget is $179 million. The More Efficient Vehicles budget is $81 million to accelerate research on advanced hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles. The Hydrogen Fuel Initiative Budget provides $309 million to complete the President’s five-year, $1.2 billion commitment to support development by 2020 of commercially viable hydrogen infrastructure technologies and fuel cell vehicles that produce no air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. So that’s less then $1 billon in 2008.
The population of the USA is around 300 million people. Therefore, we spend about $3.33 cents per person. The War cost us $120 Billion a year so for one year each man, women and child in the US pays $400. Ummmmm $3.33 dollars for alternative fuels that would take us out of the stranglehold of oil producing countries, and $400 to fight a war that supposedly protects us. Maybe if we reverse that spending we would not have to be in a war.
Governments main job is to protect it’s citizens. So how about spending some REAL money on finding clean alternatives to oil!
Animals Used in Research
According to the USDA it is estimated that over 25 million vertebrate animals are used annually in research, testing, and education in the United States. Unfortunately, no accurate and comprehensive figures are available on exactly how many animals are used—or for what purposes—in the United States or worldwide. In Europe Great Britain uses over 12 million animals for testing and research. Many of these animals are used for testing cosmetics and not for medical research. Moreover, many researchers feel there are alternative methods that can be used to do much of this research.
We do know that primates, cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs and rats make up the majority, but wild animals and farm animals such as cows and horses are also used. These numbers are hard to comprehend so let’s do a little exercise:
There is no way to measure the pain, terror or death these animal experience, but we can guess how much blood they shed each year. It is estimated that an animal’s blood volume is 10% of its weight. We will guess the aggregated average weight of the various types of animals is 15 pounds. So we also know that a gallon of blood weighs 8 pounds. So if we:
25,000,000 animals
X 15 pounds average weight
= 375,000,000 Pound
X .10 Percent
= 37,500,000
/ 8 Pounds
= 4,687,500 gallons of blood
The Erickson Aircrane Firefighter carries 2,650 gallons of fluid. It would take 1768 Aircranes to carry the blood shed by animals used in research in the US every year.
Pissing Away Water
It takes about 6 gallons of water to flash a normal toilet. It is suggested that a person uses the toilet on the average of 8 times a day. So the average person uses 48 gallons of water per day or 17520 gallons a year to flush the toilet.
There are 300,000,000 people in the US so the annual amount of water used to flush toilets is 5.256 trillion gallons. Let’s put that into perspective.
Niagara Falls flows more than 168,000 cubic m (6 million cubic ft) of water go over the crestline of the falls every minute during peak daytime tourist hours. That is equivalent to 44,883,116 gallons a minute. So if we divide this into the amount of water we use in the US to flush toilets we get 117,104 minutes. That is roughly 81 days. 81 days!
By the way, the new water saving toilets use about 2-3 gallons of water per flush. If we all had them, it could save 40-50 days of Niagara flow a year. We could use that water right now is the Southeast. Well anyway it is food (or should I say water) for thought.
Now I can be wrong, so do the caculations and let me know.
Choking On Our Own Trash
According to the Clean Air Council, the average American discards 4.39 pounds of trash per day. The population of the United States is approximately 300 million. That is 1,317,000,000 pounds or 658,500 Tons of trash each year. Based on these figures during the next ten years we will throw away 658 Million tons of trash.
Think about it this way. The typical eighteen-wheeler frieght truck can carry 80,000 pounds or 40 tons of cargo. So for one year it would take 16,462 eighteen-wheelers to move the trash we discard. For ten years of trash that would be 164,625 eighteen-wheelers. The average length of an eighteen-wheeler is 75 feet. For just 10 years of trash we in the US accumulate, it would take a line of eighteen-wheelers 2375 miles long. That’s almost the distance from NYC to Las Vegas (2522 miles).
Imagine the positive effect we would have if we just could reduce our trash to 3.9 pounds a day. Cutting back on packages food and buying larger packages of food instead of the individually wrap servings could do the trick.
I could be wrong so please do the math and prove me wrong.
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