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Post by Dive Bunnie on Mar 28, 2008 4:37:52 GMT
It is not just cyanide that is helping destroy our reefs, but our love of plastic that is threatening all our sealife.
It is soooo depressing when on every dive off Naama Beach I pick up at least one full-sized plastic bag, and numerous bits of plastic tape or bottle tops, etc. It is also a miserable sight, when the water is flat and all you can see dotted about on the surface, are plastic water bottles or cups bobbing along.
It is not just ugly, it is dangerous for the life out here. Turtles mistake plastic bags for squid or jelly fish, smaller fish mistake smaller bits of plastic for their staple diet of even smaller fish. It is not good.
When you next dive, try to make sure you never come up empty-handed, there is almost always at least one bit of recent litter that can be recovered. Just make sure that it is not now being used as a home by someone.
Also, why not invest in one of those green shopping bags? And… once you have your green bag, remember to take it with you when you go shopping!! (easier said than done sometimes). If we all do a little to help, then that can only be a good thing.
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Post by Dive Bunnie on Mar 30, 2008 15:10:30 GMT
And further to all the above, it is just soul destroying when you drive through the Sinai desert, to see it littered with plastic carrier bags. With it being windy today, you can see all the fences in and around Sharm littered with shopping bags that have been blown across from the rubbish tips, really not a nice sight for visitors, and as has already been mentioned, potentially lethal for local nature.
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Post by dippydiver on May 6, 2008 4:08:42 GMT
In the UK now it's all about not using plastic bags. Supermarkets charge now for plastic bags, and most have their own cotton reusable ones that you can buy too. Usually with some kind of 'green' message on them. I just try and get out of the habit of accepting a plastic bag whenever you buy something in a shop, you'll be surprised at how many bags you end up refusing on a weekly basis. Every little counts.
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Post by waterbabe on May 13, 2008 13:47:22 GMT
Yeah it's all about the re-usable shopping bag here in the UK now.
Get yourself a green fabric shopping bag and use that for your weekly shop. Every single bag you don't use, is another bag that doesn't end up in a landfill somewhere. And potentially in a forest or on a reef somewhere else in the future.
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Post by dippiediver on May 20, 2008 5:07:30 GMT
The hard bit is actually remembering to take your canvas shopping bags to the shop in the first place!! How many times have you got to the supermarket only to realise you have left your lovely green shopping bags at home???
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Post by Dive Bunnie on Jun 12, 2008 7:04:09 GMT
Here is a link about plastic bags, why they are such a nuisance and what we can do about it: BBC Green
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Post by bubblemaker on Jun 12, 2008 16:58:56 GMT
It's not jus the plastic bags. It is the rest of it as well, loads of birds get caught up in the little plastic rings around bottle tops. Go back to glass as much as you can. And then recycle it when you're done with it.
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H2Oooohh
Newbie chick
smile n dive girls... smile n dive!
Posts: 8
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Post by H2Oooohh on Jun 20, 2008 5:23:17 GMT
All this is huge in the UK at the mo... I think it was Sainsbury's started it with their designer "I am not a plastic bag" hessian bag. It turned out to be a bit of a must have item... and now lots of stores are doing the same. Its a great idea. Maybe you could start something like this in Sharm.
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Post by Dive Bunnie on May 13, 2009 15:50:31 GMT
So.. we all know plastic is devastating to the underwater world. And here in Sharm we are seeing this more than ever, turtles mistake plastic bags for jelly fish, eat them and then die. The plastic itself gradually breaks up into tiny toxic pieces, never actually fully degrading. The desert here is strewn with dumped rubbish, most of which is plastic... so much so that in the crevasses in the mountains, white gulleys can be seen (looking rather like snow) where piles of plastic bottles and bags have gathered. Whenever there is a windy day here, we see these bags billowing about on the breeze, high up in the air like flocks of birds, and from there if they are not caught on trees and fences, they often end up landing in the sea. It is supposedly illegal to litter the ocean here, yet it happens. As of this year it was also supposedly illegal for shops to use plastic bags, yet every day I visit Sheikh Abdullah's and Twenty Four Seven and both are quite happy to stuff my shopping into yet another plastic bag (even when I tell them I don't want a bag). The only shop that makes a feeble attempt to lead the way, is Metro who now and again will provide brown paper bags, and then ,being ever the intrepid one, will charge you for the favour. Only today, one and a half months into the official ban (it started on Jan 1st and formally came into action on 1st April) I spoke to the managers in my local supermarket in Hadaba, and they had not a clue about the ban. The cashier even tried to say the problem was only with the black bags!! While attitudes remain like this, things will never change, and we will only see more and more plastic ending up in the ocean and less and less turtles and other fish.
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Post by bubblemaker on May 14, 2009 6:14:42 GMT
best way to recycle stuff is to reuse it first... less impact on the environment.
Did you know that fleecie material is made out of plastic bags? Or so I heard the other day. Once you have reused your plakky bags, recycle them to make more fleecies.. theyr'e nice n warm
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