Landscape, Nature And Travel Photography

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The past few months I’ve been making efforts to minimize my waste footprint by choosing products that utilize less packaging particularly those using various forms of plastic. If products I or my wife use contain plastic we’re now more aggressively checking to see if it can be recycled. My wife has begun a loose phone campaign to inform manufacturers and resellers of “organic” products, as we learn their products are not in recyclable containers, that we’re concerned about their choice of shipping material/product packaging. We tend to get frustrated with the responses we hear back, but it’s got to start somewhere. Additional things we’ve done to control excess waste have been to cut down on plastic wrap, foil, plastic bags (of all sorts), etc. We surprised ourselves in learning how much excess material we had been using.

Anyhow I do my best not to be preachy regarding environmental issues on my blog, but I read and watched something over the past couple of weeks that really impacted me. It really emphasized the importance of what we’ve been doing in cutting down our plastic use. What I read was in the September/October edition of  Sierra (the magazine of the Sierra Club) and what I watched was in the August 2nd podcast episode of National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles.

In both the magazine and podcast the same subject was highlighted, the death of a juvenile Albatross near an observation station in the northwestern most islands of Hawaii. The cause of death was the consumption of 1/2 pound of floating plastic debris picked up by its parents and fed to it via regurgitation while being nurtured.

Viewing this is not for everyone so consider yourself warned.
Whether you choose to click the links below or not, to see what I’m referring to, I hope you’ll take it upon yourself to re-evaluate what you use thats plastic and why.

Sierra – Last Words: Ocean-borne trash plagues the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands
***A higher resolution photo from my copy of Sierra magazine***

National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles: Archipelago Birds (mp4)