Plastic Poultry -- Off With Its Head
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Yeah, yeah, I’m a spoilsport. So what? I’d rather save real whales than fake ducks.
The big-and-getting-bigger Duck-A-Thon did its bit in Huntington Beach over the weekend, dumping thousands of plastic rubber ducks off the pier -- first ones to the beach winning their sponsors a prize, and the rest going who-knows-where.
It’s for a very good cause -- a community clinic -- but not doing it is a very good cause, too. 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.
We’re a smart country -- if we can stamp out crackers shaped like goldfish, someone can come up with an edible, floating, ocean-friendly food substance and make it look like a duck. Because otherwise, in this case, if it looks like a duck and floats like a duck and quacks like a duck -- it’s deadly.
-- Patt Morrison
Patt Morrison’s column appears Thursdays in The Times.
