Down with duckie dumping
On the same day Anna Cummins wrote about the crazy "huge bowl of dilute plastic soup" in the Pacific, guess what we were doing in SoCal? Dumping thousands of plastic ducks into the ocean.
The thoughtless dumping was actually for a good cause: The 16th Annual Duck-A-Thon, a fundraiser for Community Care Health Centers. But as Patt Morrison writes in L.A. Unleashed: "In our part of the Pacific Ocean, there's six times more plastic than plankton -- six times. Along the North Pacific shores, a hundred thousand sea mammals are killed every year from gobbling plastics that they thought were edible. The plastic poisoning of the oceans isn't getting better, and the once-amusing spectacle of tides full of yellow rubber ducks isn't helping."
Maybe Anna's crew will run into some of these duckies on her Junk trip next month.
What I'm wondering right now is whether or not these duckies contained scary phthalates, as most rubber duckies do. Yes, the "California Toxic Toys Bill" banned phthalates from children's toys sold in California, but that law doesn't go into effect until January 2009. Phthalates are "endocrine disruptors linked to problems of the reproductive system, including decreased sperm motility and concentration in men and genital abnormalities in baby boys," according to the environmental nonprofit Environmental Working Group.
I have a call in to the Duck-A-Thon people to find out more. In the meantime: Don't want plastic duckies unceremoniously dumped into our oceans? Here's Duck-A-Thon's contact info.
Photo from Duck-a-Thon.org
