Vacuum Cleaners Made Of Recycled Sea Garbage Unveiled

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Electrolux has unveiled five vacuum cleaners made from plastic waste collected from the world's oceans. The launch of the unique vacuums marks the next chapter and continuation of the "Vac from the Sea" initiative that aims to raise awareness around ocean plastic waste and inspire consumers and industry to more recycling.

"I would like to thank everyone that has brought attention to the issue and express my deepest gratitude to our partners, for providing us with knowledge and working with us in gathering plastic from the world's oceans," said Hans Stråberg, CEO and president, Electrolux.

"Our intention is to bring awareness to the situation and the need for better plastic karma. So far, over 60 million people have been reached and we are continuing the initiative following the great response," added Cecilia Nord, vice-president of floor care sustainability and environmental Affairs, Electrolux.

Each of the vacuum cleaner demos represents the ocean from which the plastic originates. The vacuums embody the plastic paradox: oceans are full of plastic waste, yet on land there is a shortage of recycled plastic for producing sustainable vacs. Today, Electrolux offers Green Range vacuum cleaners with up to 70% post consumer recycled plastic. The ambition is to reach 100%.
Electrolux is looking into auctioning off one vacuum, with the revenues going back into research. At the moment, the quality and the logistics needed for cleaning and sorting ocean plastic makes it difficult to use in mass production.

" Right now, only post consumer plastic on land meets our commercial safety and quality standards. However, as part of our commitment to researching new materials, we should explore how the ocean plastic might be used in the future, and one such step is to make a single concept vac that we can auction out," says Cecilia Nord.

More information on the 'Vacuum of the Sea" can be found at www.electrolux.com/vacfromthesea

The Vacs from the Sea
All the models have been built using the same core structure (chassis, engine, and bag compartment) as the UltraOne Green-model. All are fully functional.

Vac from the Sea – Pacific Edition

Collection site: Hawaii, USA Method: Beach cleanup Partner: B.E.A.C.H.
The Pacific Edition concept vacuum cleaner is made up of the drifting plastic grain that fills our oceans. The plastic has been bleached by the sun and corroded by salt water. This plastic grain is dangerous because it can easily be swallowed by fish and continues through the whole food chain to both animals and humans.

Red/dark objects often attract birds, fish and other sea animals since they believe the plastic is food. The plastic that is left in the sea and that washes up on beaches is usually blue, green or white. Some of the found objects were covered with barnacles and annelid worms. Other objects had traces of bite marks from sharks.

The plastic gravel has been poured onto fiberglass moulds and covers the entire hood and the hub caps. By studying how small these plastic particles are one understands how hard it is to remove the plastic once it is in the oceans. It is a wake-up call and a reminder of one of the most important environmental issues today.

Vac from the Sea – North Sea Edition

Collection site: Skagerrak, Sweden Method: Coastal cleanup Partner: Sotenäs Municipality
The plastic that was collected on the Bohuslän beaches in western Sweden consists largely of various rinse aid and detergent bottles, cans, plastic buckets, and all kinds of plastic packaging. The plastic has not been bleached in the same way as in the great oceans. It is still loud and strong in color. A lot of the found plastic was also drenched in spill oil.

The plastic was washed clean and cut in pieces. The bright colored pieces were then punched into circular tokens. The tokens were then applied onto a fiberglass weave, molded after the shape of the vacuum cleaner.

Vac from the Sea – Mediterranean Edition

Collection site: St Cyr-sur-Mer, France Method: Beach cleanup Partner: Surfrider Foundation
Most of the plastic collection from St Cyr-sur-Mer is composed of plastic objects thrown or washed out to sea from the great beaches. PET-bottles, food containers, beverage cans and beach toys are some such objects. Tourism litters the Mediterranean Sea with tons of plastic on a daily basis. Most of it remains in the sea forever because of slow plastic degradation.

The plastics were cut into heart shaped pieces and then attached to a thin shell of industrially recycled plastic. In order to form the plastic close to the vacuum cleaner the designers used hot air.

Vac from the Sea – Indian Ocean Edition

Collection site: Phi Phi Islands, Thailand Method: Coral reef diving Partner: Blue View Divers
The plastic from Thailand is collected from beaches, corals and the underwater seabed. It consists largely of fishing gear such as nets and plastic ropes. The divers had to cut the nets and plastic bags loose from the staghorn coral reef. There were also large chunks of styrofoam drifting in the waters and large amounts of household garbage, plastic bags, buckets, drink bottles and detergent containers.

The collected plastics were split in a shredder into thin strips. The white and colored plastic strips were then mounted in a pattern that covers the entire top and the hub caps on the vacuum cleaner.

Vac from the Sea – Baltic Edition

Collection site: Sandhamn, Sweden. Gdansk, Poland. Ragaciems, Klapkalnciems, Latvia Method: Coastal cleanups with locals. Partners: Islanders, Sandhamn, Sweden. The Hel Marine Station, Poland. Pedas, Latvia.

For the Baltic Sea Edition concept vacuum cleaner, plastic was collected from three different sites in Poland, Sweden and Latvia. In Sweden, special Vac from the Sea-envelopes were distributed to people in the small harbor of Sandhamn in the Stockholm archipelago. The envelopes were filled with litter and sent to Electrolux.

In Poland, the collection was organized in cooperation with the Hel Marine Station, a field station part of the Institute of Oceanography at the University of Gdańsk. Beach cleaning is part of its educational program and a group of school children from a Słupsk elementary school helped to collect plastic on the Hel peninsula beaches.

In Latvia, there was an organized beach cleanup at Ragaciems, Klapkalnciems, about 40 kilometers west of Riga, with NGO Pedas.

The plastic litter from the three countries covers the vacuum cleaner. Different objects range from ice cream packaging to plastic bottles to flipflops to numerous bottle caps and beach toys. The found objects were mounted on a hood made of industrially recycled plastic and then heated up with hot air – to follow the sleek contour of the Ultra One machine.

Source: http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=02108713465

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About Oceanic Defense
We are an international non-profit organization with members in over 60 countries, spanning 6 continents with 1 mission; healthy aquatic ecosystems free from human abuse and neglect. Oceanic Defense teaches people to protect our oceans by acting responsibly as consumers and by making smart decisions in our daily lives. Whether we are buying groceries, commuting to work, planning a vacation or advocating within our own communities; each action we take or decision we make either helps or hurts our oceans. We empower people to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem and work together to protect our blue planet.

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Plastic Bags Used in DC Drops From 22 Million to 3 Million a Month

The Most Effective Tax Ever?
Washington DC's 5 cent tax on plastic bags, instated just this past January, has already proven to have a phenomenal impact: the number of plastic bags handed out by supermarkets and other establishments dropped from the 2009 monthly average of 22.5 million to just 3 million in January. While significantly reducing plastic waste, the tax simultaneously generated $150,000 in revenue, which will be used to clean up the Anacostia River.

The Washington Post reports:
Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), sponsor of the bag tax bill, said the new figures show that city residents are adapting to the law far more quickly than he or other city officials had expected.

The tax, one of the first of its kind in the nation, is designed to change consumer behavior and limit pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Under regulations created by the D.C. Department of the Environment, bakeries, delicatessens, grocery stores, drugstores, convenience stores, department stores and any other "business that sells food items" must charge the tax on paper or plastic bags.

I love this--I really do. A simple 5 cent tax--with revenues going towards an environmental cause voters rallied around--and consumer behavior is changed for the better in a truly big way. I love that 5 cents, which makes up a tiny percentage of total cost of your purchase even if you were just buying a bag of chips and a beverage, was enough to make consumers reconsider taking a plastic bag.

We're going to have to wait to see if this trend continues, of course, but the results are nothing short of stunning so far--there are 19 million less plastic bags in a landfill because of this tax.

Let's hope other municipalities--and dare I suggest, states?--are paying attention.

Source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/03/plastic-bag-use-dc-drops-22-million-3-million.php?campaign=th_weekly_nl

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About Oceanic Defense
We are an international non-profit organization with members in over 60 countries, spanning 6 continents with 1 mission; healthy aquatic ecosystems free from human abuse and neglect. Oceanic Defense teaches people to protect our oceans by acting responsibly as consumers and by making smart decisions in our daily lives. Whether we are buying groceries, commuting to work, planning a vacation or advocating within our own communities; each action we take or decision we make either helps or hurts our oceans. We empower people to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem and work together to protect our blue planet.

Join us on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/OceanicDefense
Visit our official website:
www.oceanicdefense.org
Follow us on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/OceanicDefense

Ocean Garbage Causing $1 Billion in Damage

The damage caused by marine rubbish and debris is costing the Asia-Pacific region more than a billion dollars each year, a new report has found.

The report, commissioned by the Marine Resource Conservation working group of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), found debris is increasing in the region's oceans, despite measures to control it.

Study author Alistair McIlgorm of the National Marine Science Center in Coffs Harbor said 6.4 million tons of debris reaches the world's oceans each year.

WATCH VIDEO: Visiting the trash vortex in the Pacific Ocean.

Of that, 80 percent is thought to come from land based sources, he said.

More than half of the rubbish is believed to be plastic, but McIlgrom said rubber, wood and sanitary products also add to the problem.

"Poor landfill practices are big contributors to marine debris, especially in Asia," said McIlgrom.

The report also tallied the economic costs of damage caused to the fishing and boat industries by marine rubbish in the Asia-Pacific region.

"Whether they have to untangle plastic from a ship propellers or totally replace an outboard - it's costing industries a lot," he said.

The report used a Japanese economic model, which estimates the damage caused by marine debris costs governments close to 0.3 percent of their GDP every year.

"That came to a total of $1.265 billion across the 21 APEC economies," said McIlgrom. In Australia, clean up of marine rubbish is costing close to $6.5 million each year.

But these figures are very conservative he said, and don't encompass the total impact of marine rubbish.

"There are lots of other costs, costs to wildlife, loss of tourism and lost capital development opportunities, like building a hotel or resort."

And the report doesn't include the clean-up bill, said McIlgrom.

"If you added the clean-up bill of all of APEC it would be a lot more."

He said what's really worrying is that the amount of marine debris in oceans is growing with the world's population.

"If you took the levels [of rubbish] in 1980 it was much less than it is today, basically we've got lazy with our use of plastics."

McIlgrom insists marine debris is an avoidable cost.

The report recommends that governments focus more on preventing rubbish entering our waterways, instead of trying to control it once it gets there.

"For every 100 units of rubbish that enter the ocean, 15 percent float on the surface, 15 percent collect in the water column near the shore and the rest sinks to the bottom of the deep ocean," said McIlgrom.

With most rubbish originating from land based sources, he said it makes more economic sense for governments to introduce preventative measures.

"Once debris enters the water and becomes diluted, it becomes much more expensive per unit of rubbish to pick up."

McIlgrom said governments should implement proper landfill practices, which would go a long way to reducing the amount of rubbish that ends up in our water ways.

He said recycling, especially of plastic "really needs attention and thought."

McIlgrom said, good strategy is to reimburse people who recycle plastic bottles, like in South Australia.

The report also recommends building nets at the end of estuaries, where rivers or streams meet the ocean, to catch any debris before it makes its way into open water.

Source: http://news.discovery.com/earth/garbage-patch-ocean-cost.html

Debate Over Plastic Bags Heats Up In Seattle

Heather Trim, a volunteer for the Seattle Green Bag Campaign, carries around a sample of polluted Pacific Ocean water. She says the ocean's "great garbage patch" of non-biodegradable plastic fragments is the reason for her opposition to disposable plastic bags.The plastics industry is spending more than $1 million to fight a surcharge on grocery bags in Seattle.

NPR - In an effort to reduce plastic and paper waste, the City Council imposed the 20-cent-per-bag charge last year. But the American Chemistry Council helped fund a petition drive that forced the issue to a citywide ballot. That vote is coming up on Aug. 18, and the ACC has contributed approximately $1.4 million for an ad campaign against the surcharge.

Seattle is not the first city to try to discourage the use of plastic bags. San Francisco imposed a partial ban, and Palo Alto and the Seattle suburb of Edmonds have banned the bags outright. But Seattle is the biggest city in the U.S. that has tried to put this kind of fee on bags.

'Great Garbage Patch'

The campaign against the plastic bags comes out of environmentalists' concerns over "the great garbage patch," a huge slick of microscopic bits of non-biodegradable plastic that is circulating in the Pacific Ocean.

Heather Trim, a volunteer with the Seattle Green Bag Campaign, carries a vial of cloudy seawater in her purse as a visual aid. Our plastics are accumulating out there," Trim says.

An estimated 20 to 30 percent of Seattle shoppers bring reusable bags to the store — far higher than in most of the country — but environmentalists here want that number to grow. Trim says the surcharge, which she calls a "fee," is the best way to do this.

Opponents call it a 20-cent "tax."

"I carry recyclable bags in my car every day — always with me," says Jane Petrich, outside a QFC grocery store near the University of Washington. "And 80 percent of the time I forget to take them in with me. But they're in my car!"

If the bags cost 20 cents apiece, she says, she would remember to bring her own bags for sure. Nevertheless, she doesn't like the idea. She says the "tax," as she sees it, would fall hardest on poor shoppers.

That's the message of the plastic-bag makers. Ads on local radio — paid for with money from the ACC — dramatize a husband and wife, lamenting the dawn of a new tax. "A tax on grocery bags is not what we need in this economy," says the announcer.

Business groups have also criticized the proposed ordinance as poorly written, saying it would create a new city bureaucracy to oversee the bag surcharge.

Plastic bags represent only a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the city's garbage, they say, and many of those bags are actually being reused to hold the garbage itself. (Paper bags are also subject to the surcharge, but the paper industry has largely stayed out of the debate. The city ordinance includes paper bags primarily to make sure stores don't just shift from plastic to paper to get around the surcharge.)

Steve Russell, the managing director of the American Chemistry Council's Plastics Division, calls the vote in Seattle "an important battle."

"There are ways to achieve what we all agree is the goal of more recycled material that doesn't punish people on fixed incomes or people less able to pay those kinds of fees," he says.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111662657&sc=fb&cc=fp

Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months

article submitted by Aquatic Army member Michael DiLuzio
TheRecord.com - Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

"Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," he said. "One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags."

The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic -- not an easy task because they don't exist in high numbers in nature.

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

That wasn't good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.

Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce.

Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas.

A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.

Next, Burd tested his strains' effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow.

At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks.

The plastic he fished out then was visibly clearer and more brittle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn't tried that yet.

To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too.

Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. "All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags."

The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide -- each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.

"This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We're using nature to solve a man-made problem."

Burd would like to take his project further and see it be used. He plans to study science at university, but in the meantime he's busy with things such as student council, sports and music.

"Dan is definitely a talented student all around and is poised to be a leading scientist in our community," said Menhennet, who led the school's science fair team but says he only helped Burd with paperwork.

Other local students also did well at the national science fair.

Devin Howard of St. John's Kilmarnock School won a gold medal in life science and several scholarships.

Mackenzie Carter of St. John's Kilmarnock won bronze medals in the automotive and engineering categories.

Engineers Without Borders awarded Jeff Graansma of Forest Heights Collegiate a free trip to their national conference in January.

Zach Elgood of Courtland Avenue Public School got honourable mention in earth and environmental science.

Search for downed plane highlights ocean trash problem

(CNN) -- The massive amount of garbage in the ocean likely complicates the search for the remains of an Air France flight that went missing Monday near Brazil, oceanographers who spoke with CNN said.

Earlier this week, investigators said they had located pieces of the plane in the southern Atlantic Ocean, which might have given them clues to the origin of Air France Flight 447's crash.

But on Thursday, Brazilian officials said what they had found was nothing more than run-of-the-mill ocean trash.

This highlights a little-seen environmental problem: Scientists say the world's oceans are increasingly filled with junk -- everything from large items like refrigerators and abandoned yachts to small stuff like plastic bottles.

Much of the ocean trash is plastic, which means it won't go away for hundreds of years, if ever. And the problem has gotten so bad that soupy "garbage patches" have developed in several locations, called gyres, where ocean currents swirl.

One of them is estimated to be the size of Texas

There are about five or six major trash-collecting gyres in the world's oceans, with the most famous located in the Pacific Ocean about midway between North America and Asia, experts said. Trash collects at these locations, where ocean currents swirl, and forms a gunk of small plastic pieces. See a map of Pacific Ocean debris

There is not a major "trash island" near the site of the Air France plane crash in the south Atlantic, oceanographers said, but splitting currents do create a smaller area for trash to congregate.

"That area [of the crash site] has got lots of debris that's just out there, coming from Europe heading over the Americas," said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a oceanographer and author of a book called "Flatsometrics and the Floating World." "And it's notoriously difficult to spot debris from the air."

The south Atlantic near Brazil is driven by two currents, one that pushes debris to the north, along the coast of Florida, and one that would push it to the south, perhaps all the way to the tip of South America, he said. So the plane's wreckage could span that massive area, he said.

Most debris from the crash of Air France Flight 447 would head toward Brazil and arrive within a couple of months; but wherever the remnants land, the plane debris would be difficult to distinguish from the mountains of trash that wash up on beaches every day, Ebbesmeyer said.

"The trouble is that there is so much debris on eastern Florida that's from South America. Anywhere, it's very unlikely that anyone will recover [the plane debris]," he said. "It's very likely that debris that would provide closure for loved ones would go in the Dumpster because [beachgoers] don't know what it is."

The search for signs of the Air France flight highlights what environmentalists say is a pressing issue for the world today: We produce a lot of trash that biodegrades slowly, and too much of it ends up in the ocean. Out at sea, plastics suffocate sea turtles and choke birds, which look at the bits of floating gunk as food.

Endangered sea turtles become entangled in discarded fishing line and also ingest plastic bags, like those from grocery stores, said Bamford.

"They love to eat jellyfish, and when they see a plastic bag it looks exactly like a jellyfish, basically," she said.

Still, scientists say they know relatively little about the scope of the problem and the effects that trash has on ocean life.

Finding answers to those unknowns is among the current initiatives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Holly Bamford, director of the U.S. agency's marine debris program.

Enough is known about ocean trash to know that it's time to act, she said.

"It's a global problem. You can go do a collection almost anywhere and you'll probably come up with a piece of debris in your sample. The question is what all is out there and what is it doing," she said. "It's something that needs to be addressed."

About 80 percent of the trash that ends up in the ocean starts on land and is swept out to sea either from beaches or through waterways and sewer systems, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The garbage can make its way to the ocean via rivers from the very heart of a continent, Bamford said.

Once it hits the sea, ocean currents -- and to a lesser extent, wind -- determine where the trash goes. Since the mid-1900s, people have been making plastic, which decomposes much more slowly than other materials.

International treaties ban ship captains from dumping their trash into the sea, scientists said, but the rules are not well-enforced.

Education is the key to preventing trash from ending up in the ocean in the first place, said Peter Niiler, an oceanographer and distinguished researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Niiler said too little is known about the oceans, and there are gross misconceptions about their size.

"I think the [idea of an] ocean being an infinitely large thing comes from the fact that you've never been there or you don't have data from there. You don't know what's there. So you're just living on the coast and you can't hardly imagine going from North America to China," he said.

He added: "The ocean is just like land. It's part of our whole ecosystem of the whole earth. We know a great deal about land but we know very little about the oceans."
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While they aren't likely to help with the plane search, volunteer groups seek to collect trash before it hits the ocean and is swept away to a garbage patch. The Ocean Conservancy says it organizes the largest of these efforts. Last year, 400,000 volunteers from 100 countries collected trash off of the beaches, preventing it from harming the ocean, said Tom McCann, a spokesman for the group.

"It's entirely preventable," he said of the problem of trash in the ocean. "It's something we can solve ourselves."

Source: CNN

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch