A few days ago, I received a shocking email from my dear friend Burning Man campmate, art teacher Ann Clark. You may remember Annie from the Plastic Footprint Project that she organized with her students to bring awareness to the problems of plastic pollution through art. After retiring from teaching, Annie made several trips to […]
13-year-old Cambria Bartlett contacted me last year to do a phone interview about living plastic-free.  She and a group of other homeschoolers, calling themselves Heirs to Our Oceans, were creating a video about caring for our oceans, and Cambria’s personal focus was on plastic. Since then, I’ve met Cambria in person and learned what exceptional […]
I’ve been away from blogging and social media for a few months, needing time to recuperate from the onslaught of attention-grabbing, anxiety-inducing posts that had hijacked my “news” feeds. Taking a break to be in silence for a while helps. So do walks along the red dirt trails or the rocky coastline of Moloka’i, Hawaii. […]
A month ago, a reader named Ida left the following comment in the “100 Steps” section of this website: For your Clothes section you never mention that the plastic clothes we have release high levels of plastic microfibers in every wash! This is pretty new knowledge, but hugely important as we cannot as of today […]
This post might be controversial, but sometimes you have to admit when you might have been a little bit… wrong?  Anyway, five years ago, I wrote a pretty depressing blog post about why we cannot solve the problem of ocean plastic pollution by focusing on cleanup schemes. 2010- 2013: My Doubts My point was that as […]
Photo Restaurante Praia Arrifana © Michelle Cassar is a long-time reader of this blog and committed anti-plastic activist, although I’m not sure she would actually call herself an activist, nor anti plastic.  She’s also a surfer, photographer, and world traveller who has been living in Portugal for quite a while.  Back in 2011, she sent […]
I’ve seen this picture of Kamilo Beach on the Big Island of Hawaii a million times in the past six years. It’s shocking. But not as shocking as seeing a plastic-covered beach up close live and in person like I did yesterday during Kokua Hawai’i Foundation’s Coastal Cleanup Day event at James Campbell National Wildlife […]
Six years ago, I posted a rant about the fact that many commercial facial scrubs contain tiny plastic (polyethylene) beads meant to exfoliate the skin. Â These beads are too small for water treatment plants to filter out, so they end up in our waterways and eventually the ocean. Â In the ocean, tiny plastic pieces mix […]
Dr. Marcus Eriksen of 5 Gyres, an organization dedicated to researching ocean plastic pollution, has said, “If you want to clean the gyre, clean your beach.” He meant it literally, since “if we stop adding more plastic to the ocean, in time the gyres will kick out the plastic pollution they currently hold.” Â But I […]
Hey, remember my rant last spring about the plastic Turtleback cup holder meant to be used at the beach? And how I thought it was so ironic to name a product for a sea animal that is routinely harmed by ocean plastic pollution? A bunch of green bloggers created quite a stir on Turtleback’s Facebook […]