Walking into the building that contains Environment Massachusetts, it's hard not to feel intimidated. I'm a policy intern with Anika James as my supervisor; talk about intimidating, this woman is about as cool as Jeanette Barbieri. Within the first 15 minutes of me being in the building, she informed me that I was going to be working mostly on the organization's campaign for a state-wide ban on plastic bags with a secondary focus on fracking. The hope is that by 2016, Massachusetts will join Hawaii in leading the nation on a ban on plastic bags.
If you're like me, you'll initially wonder, "plastic bags? Seriously? You're devoting HOW much time to something THIS simple?" But I'm slowly learning that plastic bags, and items made from this petroleum derivative, are dangerous not only to marine and terrestrial environments but to humans themselves. 267 species have knowing been affected from plastic bags. And they last forever- one bag lasts for 1000 years on land and 450 years in water. They're porous as well; they will collect toxins like PCP as they slowly photo-degrade (the sun basically just wears them down into smaller and smaller pieces). If they are in the ocean, many marine animals are tempted to eat these bags. Because plastic is not a source of nutrients, these creatures slowly die of starvation with a full stomach.
But I'm a Humanist. I grew up on a farm designed to slaughter cattle, I eat all the animals. A lot of people take that line of thought too. Why should I care about these far off creatures? Population control. Survival of the fittest. But what a lot of humans don't consider is that the animals they eat have probably ingested a bit of plastic bag with toxins in it. The plastic bags that make our lives so convenient wind their way back up the food chain, and are affecting our health as well. Since Massachusetts alone has a $5billion a year fishing industry, a lot of people from the Bay State are becoming unknowing victims of these plastic bags.
Today, I mostly researched plastic bags, from bans to counter-arguments to lengths that other areas have gone to control these bags. Since every area of my academic study seems to revolve around Ireland, I spent a lot of my time reading about the bag tax they placed in 2002. I'll have an entire entry about that later, because of course, I think it's really interesting. =]
If you're like me, you'll initially wonder, "plastic bags? Seriously? You're devoting HOW much time to something THIS simple?" But I'm slowly learning that plastic bags, and items made from this petroleum derivative, are dangerous not only to marine and terrestrial environments but to humans themselves. 267 species have knowing been affected from plastic bags. And they last forever- one bag lasts for 1000 years on land and 450 years in water. They're porous as well; they will collect toxins like PCP as they slowly photo-degrade (the sun basically just wears them down into smaller and smaller pieces). If they are in the ocean, many marine animals are tempted to eat these bags. Because plastic is not a source of nutrients, these creatures slowly die of starvation with a full stomach.
But I'm a Humanist. I grew up on a farm designed to slaughter cattle, I eat all the animals. A lot of people take that line of thought too. Why should I care about these far off creatures? Population control. Survival of the fittest. But what a lot of humans don't consider is that the animals they eat have probably ingested a bit of plastic bag with toxins in it. The plastic bags that make our lives so convenient wind their way back up the food chain, and are affecting our health as well. Since Massachusetts alone has a $5billion a year fishing industry, a lot of people from the Bay State are becoming unknowing victims of these plastic bags.
Today, I mostly researched plastic bags, from bans to counter-arguments to lengths that other areas have gone to control these bags. Since every area of my academic study seems to revolve around Ireland, I spent a lot of my time reading about the bag tax they placed in 2002. I'll have an entire entry about that later, because of course, I think it's really interesting. =]
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