Bagging a Win

Last night, the Santa Monica City Council took statewide leadership on the single-use bag issue by opting to fund an EIR that needs to be completed if the city is to adopt its long-awaited ordinance to ban plastic bags and charge a fee for paper bags at retail outlets.
The measure has been stalled by a [...]

Holy Trash

Israel is more like LA than I possibly imagined.
Both areas definitely suffer from the scourge of plastic pollution. From the iconic Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem to the shores of Lake Kinneret, one can follow the histories of three great religions through trash. Important Muslim, Christian [...]

Contagious Cleanups

Last Saturday, Heal the Bay held its monthly “Nothin’ But Sand” beach cleanup.  We’ve been running these regularly scheduled cleanups for a few years now, but they’ve really swelled in the last year.
An amazing 820 folks escaped March Madness to come out on a blustery morning to remove debris at Dockweiler Beach near Imperial Highway, [...]

Plastic Turtles

More than a third of all leatherback turtles examined in a recent widespread study contained plastic marine debris in their stomachs and guts. The depressing findings about the world’s largest sea turtles can be found in The Marine Pollution Bulletin, which recently published a paper from the Canadian researchers, N. Mrosovsky, G. Ryan and M. [...]

Tapped Out

The Los Angeles Times recently profiled a new bottled water business in New York called Tap’d NY.  The company is just getting going, having sold about 50,000 bottles of water at a $1.50 a pop. The twist? The water comes from the tap, pumped directly from a New York City main.
Given that the water costs [...]

Rethinking Our Future

Last Sunday on the Santa Monica Promenade, the students from Santa Monica High School’s Team Marine unveiled their opus to the global marine debris crisis: REthink.  The 7′ x 21′ art installation contains 34,727 bottle caps and includes a wide variety of marine life species made of the plastic tops. Think of a Rose Parade [...]

And You Thought S.M. Bay Was Bad

Winter is upon us.  Cold temperatures.  Rain. Mudslides.  The first snow of the year.  Bad driving.  And the holiday tradition of an ungodly amount of trash flushed into local bays and ending up on our beaches.  Trash is what you can see.  The fecal bacteria counts explode to levels that microbiology labs have trouble measuring [...]

Now the Hard Work Begins

The Ocean Protection Council, created by the governor to coordinate state efforts to protect our seas in response to Fred Keely legislation, on Thursday unanimously passed its comprehensive marine debris action plan.  This means that a bipartisan California government body has adopted the blueprint for abating California’s contribution to the marine debris crisis. While it [...]

Worth the Wait…

On Thursday morning, the California Ocean Protection Council will hopefully approve its long-awaited marine debris action plan. The plan was drafted by Drew Bohan, OPC’s executive director and dedicated ocean activist, and state staff in response to the OPC’s far-reaching marine debris resolution nearly two years ago.
Despite the long wait, the plan is pretty good. It [...]

Land of Smoke

The Aswan Dam in southern Egypt is enormous. On one side sits the 300-mile long Lake Nasser. The lake is teeming with crocodiles and Nile perch, but the Sahara comes right up to its shores. The dam itself is over two miles long and provides hydroelectric power for about 40% of the nation. North of [...]