Photo via Flickr: Kevin Krejci
If you haven’t played a prank yet today, here’s a cool one that’s for a good cause: As part of its effort to educate Americans about the problem of plastic pollution, California clean water group Heal the Bay has developed an April Fool’s Day app that allows you to “trash” a friend’s Facebook page (or any other web page, for that matter) with floating images of plastic bags.
To participate, visit the campaign’s website to send an email tease to unsuspecting friends and co-workers. When recipients click on a link embedded in your email message (“Dude, I trashed the front page of your Twitter”), the targeted page quickly and harmlessly fills with images of single-use plastic bags.
Those plastic bags will be gone from your friend’s web page tomorrow, but unfortunately the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a massive floating landfill in the Pacific Ocean comprised of 3.5 million tons of plastic trash — won’t be disappearing anytime soon. (Oh, and there’s one in the Atlantic Ocean, too.) That’s because plastic doesn’t biodegrade, it photodegrades — meaning it breaks up into miniscule little bits that are then ingested by marine life (and in turn ingested by us when we eat those fish).
Fortunately, there’s something we can do to drastically cut down on the amount of plastic pollution that reaches our oceans. It’s called a plastic bag tax. Washington, DC, passed a 5-cent tax in January, and since then the city’s plastic bag usage has dropped from 22 million to 3 million a month.
–Jennifer Grayson
Like this post? Subscribe to The Red, White, and Green RSS feed
Leave a Reply