10/03/08 Greenpeace - Pungile din plastic, intrebari si raspunsuri (en)

Plastic bags

Are plastic bags responsible for the majority of deaths by entanglement andchoking of seals, dolphins, turtles and seabirds? No, they are not.

Does this mean we should not ’ban the bag’. No, it does not.

Plastic bags are nonetheless an environmental nuisance, a significant contributor to marine pollution, and an example of society’s wasteful use of resources and a problem well worth addressing.

The two things are not exclusive, despite what some in the media would have us believe. Plastic bags do cause problems for waste management, contribute significantly to plastic litter on land and at sea and can harm and kill wildlife. By addressing them, we not only begin to tackle some of those problems on a local and regional scale, but also draw attention to our careless and wasteful use of plastics more generally and, with hope, begin to change what has become a deep-seated, throw-away culture.

There have been some misunderstandings of the science, not least because the figures referred to for deaths of marine mammals, turtles and seabirds refer to plastic debris in general (including discarded fishing gear), not specifically to plastic bags, which undoubtedly account for only a small proportion of those deaths. However, to exploit this misunderstanding to imply that efforts to tackle plastic bags are somehow a waste of time is disingenuous.

As long as we don’t assume that phasing-out plastic bags will alone solve the problems of marine litter, then such schemes are entirely justified and worthy of support. They are a small step, but a step in the right direction. Greenpeace not only actively works in some parts of the world for an end to the use of plastic bags, it works globally to address the issues of the degradation of our oceans, from opposing destructive industrial fishing methods to working for effective solution to growing greenhouse gas emissions which place entire ocean eco-systems and populations under threat.

Greenpeace is actively opposing bottom trawling, drift netting, long line fishing and a host of other fishing techniques which result in a massive by-catch. It has been estimated that a staggering 100 million sharks and
rays are caught and discarded each year. Tuna fisheries, which in the past had high dolphin by-catch levels, are still responsible for the death of many sharks. An estimated 300,000 cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) also die as by-catch each year, because they are unable to escape when caught in nets.

Fundamental changes need to be made in the way our oceans are managed. This means that we must act to make sure that human activities are sustainable, in other words that they meet human needs of current and future generations without causing harm to the environment. Accordingly, governments must set
aside 40 percent of our oceans as marine reserves. Marine reserves can be defined as areas of the ocean in which the exploitation of all living resources is prevented, together with the exploitation of non-living
resources such as sand and gravel and other minerals.