Chemical Industry Rewrites Environmental Textbooks

[marmar]

via truthdig:



Chemical Industry Rewrites Environmental Textbooks
Posted on Aug 26, 2011


Evidence shows that California school officials yielded to complaints made by a trade group representing U.S. chemical companies and altered environmental textbooks to include industry-supplied messages promoting plastic bags.

After reviewing the state’s new curriculum, in 2009 corporate representatives argued for educational balance, objecting to the fact that the benefits of plastic bags were not discussed alongside descriptions of their destructive environmental effects. Subsequently, text stating that “Plastic shopping bags are very convenient to use. They take less energy to manufacture than paper bags, cost less to transport and can be reused,” was added.

Marine researchers and state Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Santa Monica) were appalled by the industry’s behavior. “The American Chemistry Council obviously got engaged to protect their bottom line,” Pavley said. Although the council, which pushed for the edit, did not finance the curriculum’s development, state documents reveal the group has spent $9 million lobbying government agencies since 2003. —ARK

California Watch:

Under pressure from the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group for the plastics industry, schools officials in California edited a new environmental curriculum to include positive messages about plastic shopping bags, interviews and documents show.

The rewritten textbooks and teachers’ guides coincided with a public relations and lobbying effort by the chemistry council to fight proposed plastic bag bans throughout the country. But despite the positive message, activists say there is no debate: Plastic bags kill marine animals, leech toxic chemicals and take an estimated 1,000 years to decompose in landfills.

In 2009, a private consultant hired by California school officials added a new section to the 11th-grade teachers’ edition textbook called “The Advantages of Plastic Shopping Bags.” The title and some of the textbook language were inserted almost verbatim from letters written by the chemistry council.

Read more

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/chemical_industry_rewrites_environmental_textbooks_20110826/

[WCGreen]

1. Oh Jumping Jesus Christ...

is nothing sacred...

[LARED]

2. I have no problem with this at all

“Plastic shopping bags are very convenient to use. They take less energy to manufacture than paper bags, cost less to transport and can be reused,”

Is absolutely true.

If a textbook touts correctly the destructive environmental effects of plastic bags, then students should also know the benefits. They can then decide for themselves the value of each option. Teaching children to think is why they go to school.

[Tesha]

3. What may be missing, of course, is the obvious follow-on: Reusable bags have all of these benefits..

...at a lower material feedstock cost.

Tesha

[ananda]

4. Recycle.

We recycle plastic here, thank goodness. That should be done everywhere.

The city here is also going to ban the use of plastic bags in stores.

[Igel]

5. Sorry.

That cotton bag took a lot of water to grow, energy to cultivate and harvest; it took fertilizers and pesticides. Energy was used to move it to processing, then it was woven; the cloth was taken to a factory for cutting and stitching; then it went to the store. Now I have to wash it every few uses to get grunge off of it that I don't want.

The amount of energy used to produce that bag is equivalent to many hundreds of plastic bags. Pitch in the energy and water for cleaning the thing, it would take a lot more round trips for the bag to justify its price. I'm not sure my bags will last that long, even.

The stuff I use plastic bags for I'd probably buy plastic bags for, so from my perspective the plastic grocery bags are essentially free.

The only real come-back on this level is that wood and cotton are renewable resources while oil isn't--even if where the cotton grows for the cloth bag water *isn't* really a renewable resource. That gets to considerations of peak oil.

After that it's environmental concerns, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that. There's wildlife and view, then there's aquifers and already-plowed desert (if the cotton's from AZ) or alternative uses for the land used to grow the cotton. Trying to deal with that involves assumptions as to whether their presence in defiling nature is a conquence purely of their existence or of human behavior, and whether the latter should be blamed or not; or what priority to place on growing food vs cotton.

[progressoid]

6. We have two bags that are some sort of synthetic that we have been using for over 6 years.

They are European. I put a LOT of stuff in them and have not worried about breakage or wear. I expect they have replaced hundreds, if not thousands of plastic bags.

We, as consumers, have been making excuses for why we don't want to give up our addiction to disposable plastic bags for too long. It's killing us.

Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent in the U.S. -- and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that's not always the case. "They're so aerodynamic that even when they're properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter," says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It's as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we're not talking about your everyday eyesore.

Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees, billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there's now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that's twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There's six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. "It's an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look," says Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of education and research for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which studies plastics in the marine environment. "Fifty or 60 years ago, there was no plastic out there."

...

The only salient answer to paper or plastic is neither. Bring a reusable canvas bag, says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. However, if you have to make a choice between the two, she recommends taking whichever bag you're more likely to reuse the most times, since, like many products, the production of plastic or paper bags has the biggest environmental impact, not the disposal of them. "Reusing is a better option because it avoids the purchase of another product."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/10/plastic_bags

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. Here is the other side (graphic)

Why I use as much as I can my trusty cotton bags.

[Tesha]

8. Did I mention a cotton bag? (NT)