TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch Conference

Image via WikipediaThe TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch conference takes place Saturday, Nov 6 from 8:30am to 6pm Pacific Time. Watch as Fake Plastic Fish joins with other fantastic names in a conference about the plastic that has invaded our oceans and our lives.  See the video after the jump (and on Saturday, the 6th, or thereafter - of course).

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Organics and Plastic - a personal gripe

Image by Kate Blackport via Flickr

Every morning as I pack my lunch I am repeatedly reminded of how much plastic has invaded our lives, and I just have to wonder why. I'd actually like to pose this as a question to the community at large to see if anyone knows why this is:

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McDonalds to CSPI: Buzz Off

Image via Wikipedia

Guest blogger Doug Powers writes today on MicheleMalkin.com about the McDonalds CEO's response to CSPI's recent lawsuit threats. In a nutshell, McDonalds officially tells CSPI to buzz off.

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What's so "smart" about the TetraPak Brik?

Image by barely_legal via Flickr

Recently while discussing which kind of milk is good for you - a discussion that actually comes up a lot with me - I wandered off subject while looking for research and my thoughts came to the Tetra Brik, by TetraPak. Why I didn't see it before this, I'm not sure, but... these are essentially plastic bottles that are masquerading themselves as paper. The company specifically claims that the packaging is "consisting mainly of paper made from wood" yet inside and out, there are multiple layers of plastic and aluminum in addition to that paper.

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Plastic wrapped NOTHING

Not unlike the Photoshopped toy box for The Invisible Man that depicted an empty plastic container for an action figure that you couldn't see, T-Mobile is selling empty cases in their brick-and-mortar stores of cell phone shells that you design online.

Although it might be hard to tell from the picture, what you're seeing is literally an empty case around a cardboard cutout which tells you that you can build your own protective case online and have it shipped to you. Hopefully this is never actually purchased by the customer, since it would make sense not to create hundreds of thousands of empty plastic cases, but who knows? In a world that creates "All Natural" plastic pick-up sticks, anything is possible.

There were four of these empty boxes on the hangar, so at best there were probably only several thousand of these wastes of space created. Way to think about the environment, T-Mobile.

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Plastic-wrapped STRAW

Welcome to America, where we sell miniature, plastic-wrapped bales of straw to people who want to pretend that they've been hard at work harvesting the crops.

These tiny bales cost a whopping $20.00. They're really only about as big as a medium-sized dog, so the consumer is obviously going to have to buy more than one - probably at least three - if they intend to have any kind of realistic, faux display of the harvest season. On top of all that, they've wrapped these tiny bales completely in plastic simply for the sake of convenience. God forbid if straw gets scattered about the shipping trucks or the store while these miniscule bales packaged theft get shipped about and stacked for display.

At least this is a step up from the giant, plastic, inflated Santa Clauses that were soon to be seeing. This doesn't waste energy when you plop it out on your lawn and it promotes the economy since you'll need to buy more next year.

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"All Natural" Plastic Pick-up sticks

We took a walk over the lunch-hour today and stopped in a local toy store. It's a nice store, the Red Giraffe of Woodbury, MN, as they have a lot of wooden toys. But, like most toy stores or sections of a department store, they stock some junk as well.

I was too shocked to pass this one up... a plastic tube of plastic sticks made to look like wood. The worst thing about it is that it's labeled "All Natural" which of course only lends credence to the fact that the word Natural means absolutely nothing at all in any kind of manufacturing or production sense.

I've seen worse toys, but this is just ... an insult to children and parents. To the children for their legacy. Someone in this world thinks so little of them that they would make plastic replicas of STICKS to be played with, bent and thrown away, or just lost. For the parents, this is yet-another cheaply-produced toy comprised of, again, easily-lost pieces that the parents would spend forever cleaning up.

Made in China.

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