Asheville Greenworks Home
Asheville Bag Monster
Tired of plastic pollution? Would you like to educate the public about the impact they’re having on the world’s environment?
Welcome to the Asheville Bag Monster.
According to Earth911.org a shocking 87% of one use plastic bags never make it to the recycling bin. Most end up in the landfill or worse in our waterways then the oceans. Most plastics are made from petroleum products and unfortunately for us, they don’t biodegrade. Simply burying our plastic in the landfill is a tremendous waste of resources. Consider this, the average American Shopper uses 500 plastic baggies each year.
We perform litter cleanups every week of the year and we ALWAYS find plastic shopping bags in the debris.
This is usually how we find the bags.
If you’re ready to wear the hottest outfit in town, sign up to Volunteer as a “Monster”. It’s easy, we will educate you on all of the latest recycling statistics and suit you up for some fun activism. Our main objective is to educate the next generation as they’re the ones responsible for cleaning up our mess. Contact Eric Bradford for more information.
Ph (828) 254-1776
So what’s the big deal about using too much plastic? We need plastic, so why all of the fuss? The majority of the litter found in our oceans today is plastic. We’ve all heard of the North Pacific Garbage Patch, but it’s not exactly what you think it might be. It’s not a huge swirl of floating trash that we can simply scoop out, it’s far more frightening than that.
*Quoted from the NOAA / Marine Debris site
“What’s in a name? – The name “garbage patch” is a misnomer. There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean nor a blanket of trash that can be seen with satellite or aerial photographs. This is likely because much of the debris found here is small bits of floating plastic not easily seen from a boat.” http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html
*Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of plastic.
Once plastic items make their way out to the oceans, they begin the photodegradation process, whereby the plastic item begins to break into smaller and smaller pieces that will sink into the water channel. These small bits of plastic are then mistaken as food by the sea life. The sea life then fills their tiny stomachs with petrochemical products that will either poison the creature to a slow death or be absorbed into the animal and then passed along to the next creature in the food-chain.
Question: Who is the largest consumer of seafood in the world? That’s right.. us.
For more information about plastic pollution in our Oceans, check out http://5gyres.org.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch from Project GreenBag on Vimeo.
