Effective January 2011, Maui County will ban all plastic shopping bags. These convenient yet ultimately environmentally disastrous grocery carriers kill fish, birds, and turtles by the thousand. I went to the Central Maui Landfill today and these series of shots were taken in literally 5-6 minutes among our usual howling afternoon tradewinds.
Note the extremely large hill in the background. That is the landfill mound - the final destination of the wooden umbrella that was in your Mai Tai last night. What's horrendous about these plastic bags is the fact that they act like little sails and catch the wind very well. So well in fact that they take flight. You can see the metal fences erected atop the hill to try and prevent the bags from leaving the area. They're incredibly ineffective. The photo below shows about two dozen various plastic bags on a one-way flight to the ocean.
What can you do about this situation until the January 2011 ban? You can tie a knot in your plastic bag before throwing it away as to prevent it from taking flight. Of course using reusable shopping bags help greatly.
Maui County Plastic Bag Reduction
Don't Add to the Garbage Patch - the giant floating mass of garbage (mostly plastic) twice the size of Texas located in the Pacific Ocean between Northern California and Hawaii.
See an updated post from May 4 here.
Ohh, I didn't see this Maui's face. I'm shocked.
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