How to solve the Plastic problem

 From BBC Ideas.

The Big Plastic Count

This starts tomorrow. 

Sign up and get your survey recording form to stick by the bin.

It's the counting that counts.

Plastic recycling investigation

A good story from Reuters which focusses on another project where GPS tags have been used to identify the truth about the movements of items. This time round it was trainers.

The Trash Isles

One of my holiday reads is Alastair Bonnett's 'The Age of Islands'. He mentions the Trash Islands campaign which tried to get them recognised as a country by the United Nations.

This was part of a campaign back in 2018 to raise awareness of the issue of ocean plastics and the accumulation in gyres.

Wasteminster - Plastic Pollution

There has been plenty in the news at the moment about the issue of plastic pollution and the way that the UK exports its plastic overseas, ostensibly to be recycled, but where it is a possibility that it will be dumped or burned instead.

Greenpeace UK have created this video to visualise the scale of the problem.

Recycled Plastic in Malaysia

This is another link with our work on the geographies of our stuff, and the globalised nature of the world. We are connected in many ways.

The Mirror has a piece today on Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's latest campaign. He is exploring the places that our recycled plastic goes. It turns out, shock horror, that some of it isn't actually recycled, just sent to a poorer part of the world. Remember the e-waste we explored that wasn't supposed to be exported but was...
There is a forthcoming programme with Hugh and Anita Rani on this issue in early June.

And some countries are preparing to send the waste back... "Return to Sender"
It's not just the UK doing this of course, remember that too.
And finally, we even have connections between our parts of the curriculum...

Look at this tweet here:

Plastic collected throughout the region will be used to create a dance arena in the Shangri-La area at this year's Glastonbury Festival in a collaboration between Orca Sound Project, Shangri-La and Keep Britain Tidy, who are aiming to collect 10 tonnes of waste.

— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) May 31, 2019

Ducks in the Oceans

Reducing Plastic Use in school

We are doing some work in the area of reducing plastic waste in school, such as Single Use plastics in particular.
There has even been a plastic bag found 'at the bottom of' the Mariana Trench.

We used Boyan Slat's TEDx Talk from 2012, which is now turning into a project with funding and a pilot project about to launch in the Pacific.
We found out more about it doing some research, and exploring what he is planning.

The June issue of National Geographical is an essential tool for this work to. with an illustration by Jorge Gamboa, and some essential articles.

There is also a good article on Ocean Plastics in the latest Weapons of Reason.

Plastic in the Oceans

A useful film which has some errors in the animations if you want to be picky, but is designed for a school audience and tells its story engagingly...

Boyan Slat TedX talk on ocean plastic reduction

Showed this today to Year 8 to inspire their thinking....

Plasticide

Year 8, I hope that you saw this story in the news over the Easter break: Greenpeace placing a statue, which had been on display outside the National Theatre, outside the offices of Coca Cola, a company which produces billions of plastic bottles each year from plastic which has mostly never been recycled, and is then used just once.

Plastic microbeads

They are apparently going to be banned... We will explore these in Year 8.

Ocean plastics

A tweet from today...

#2minutebeachclean at Chesil Beach Dorset today #DWTMarine pic.twitter.com/fg0aORFyWv

— Julie Hatcher (@Jazeyfantazy) May 9, 2015

Chris Jordan: Message from the Gyre

We explored the issue of ocean plastics as a by product of the 'stuff' that we buy, and then dispose of. There are many millions of pieces of plastic in the oceans, and we have all put something there if we have ever used products like toothpaste, cleansing scrubs and other similar products.

We explored the work of Chris Jordan. He is an artist who explores ideas of consumption and their scale.
His Message from the Gyre images are shocking, and show the accumulation of plastics in the stomachs of birds who live thousands of miles from the nearest continent.


MIDWAY a Message from the Gyre : a short film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

Summer post 3: Ocean plastics map from the National Geographic

One of the things I did when working as a freelance geographer before joining King's was work on some things for National Geographic. My friend Dan is one of their explorers, and we worked on some ideas for exploring places based on our Mission:Explore work that you'll remember from the Big Outdoors Day and Humphries Challenge.

The National Geographic's Education site is a great place to visit to find out about the world and some of the good news (and bad news) stories that are happening.
One story this week was about the state of the world's oceans and in particular the amount of plastic that is floating around in them.

It shows the areas where plastic accumulates in large areas called gyres...

What could we do to improve this situation ?

Summer post 2: It's a plastic World

The Geography of our Stuff.... how much of it is made of plastic or packaged in plastic... ?


It's a plastic world - English from It's a plastic world on Vimeo.