For all you conservation-minded folk out there, we've got wind of some exciting news from San Francisco! The city has unanimously voted to ban the sale of any and all styrofoam (aka polystyrene) products by 2017. But why is this such a big deal, you ask? It's a HUGE deal! Styrofoam causes all sorts of environmental problems, and if we can prevent it from even being produced, we'd be taking another step towards the health of our beautiful planet. Styrofoam is a petroleum-based plastic foam that's used in a variety of products that we sometimes don't even think about using - think take-away coffee and hot drink cups, all sorts of packaging products, foam dock floatings, mooring buoys, and a whole host of other disposable items. San Francisco has now placed the largest ban on this material that exists in the U.S. to date - it's awesome to hear that the city is taking initiative.
The stats say that over 25 billion polystyrene products are chucked out by U.S. citizens each year. This becomes problematic because this soft materials takes a long time to break down in a landfill, so it pretty much just hangs out there, leaking harmful chemicals into the soil for ages. And when it ends up in the ocean, which is inevitable and happens to about 86% of disposable platic that isn't recycled, it breaks down too rapidly and turns into microplastic particles that can be easily ingested by our beloved marine organisms. Think food chain - if the lowest organisms on the totem pole eat these plastic bits, it's going to contaminate and poison any organism up the chain. This can eventually work it's way up to the apex predators of the ocean, including the killer whales that we admire so much.
So we're pretty excited that San Francisco is saying "bye Felicia" to this harmful waste product. Hopefully other cities will follow suit, because the cleaner we can keep our oceans, the healthier the organisms that call it home. Even if you live in a city that still uses styrofoam and polysytrene products, you can take a stand against it by bringing your own reusable coffee mugs wherever you go, and bringing your own take-away containers if you go out to eat and know that you won't finish your meal. It's the little things that make a big difference.
Let's keep our oceans blue and our Earth green - keep on keepin' on, my eco-friends!