One big plastic mess

The other day I saw a picture of hundreds of plastic bottles and other plastic scraps floating in the ocean. It was a mass of crap discarded by people no different than you and me.

It got me thinking, why do we use so much plastic?

When I was a kid one of my first jobs was as a bottle boy at Becker's Milk. My main responsibility was to take returned pop bottles (or soda bottles if you prefer) and carry them downstairs putting them in their appropriate crates. Coke products went in the red crates, Pepsi products the yellow crates, Canada Dry in wooden crates and all Becker's Cola bottles in green crates (I can't believe I still remember this!). There were also smaller crates for the 10 ounce bottles that used to be popular with kids. Once a week the Coke rep would pull up in his truck, take all the sorted red crates and drop off crates with full bottles. Ditto for the Pepsi and Canada Dry representatives.

It was an efficient and environmentally responsible system, one which the Beer Store still uses today. Unfortunately the Beer Store is one of the last companies still doing right by the environment. Cola companies today use plastic for practically everything. Glass bottles have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Somewhere along the line somebody figured out that more money could be made by using plastic, not glass. The compromise? Recycling programs such as the blue box. Today the Region of Durham is inundated with pop bottles, yogurt containers, milk containers and the like. One of the most common things found in blue boxes around my neighbourhood is water bottles. Guess who sells most of these? You guessed it, cola companies.

Now if every plastic bottle used made it to the blue box there wouldn't be a problem. But that's not the case. Take a walk anywhere and you're bound to find plastic bottles of all shapes and sizes littering roadways, ditches or schoolyards.

Let's also not forget the plastics that the blue box program doesn't accept. Buy a cooked chicken from the deli counter at any grocery store and the plastic container it's in has to be discarded in the trash. You can't even recycle the paper Tim Hortons coffee cups because apparently they have a microscopic plastic layer in them.

Earlier this summer an outside company inspected Durham Region's trash to see if residents were throwing away the right stuff. Since the green bin program went into effect a few years ago the Region's been monitoring what we throw out to make sure the majority of us are recycling responsibly. The company reported in an Oshawa This Week story (http://www.newsdurhamregion.com/article/156855) that they were shocked by the amount of plastic in our trash. This plastic wasn't the type residents are able to recycle.

Plastic is everywhere and unfortunately it doesn't biodegrade. It's no wonder we find it littering the oceans, our neigbhourhoods and schoolyards.

When I first saw that picture of a big mass of plastic bobbing in the ocean I was surprised. I shouldn't have been. We put it there.