A bit about 24 Hours On Planet Earth.
24 Hours On Planet Earth is currently an idea.
This website has been created to see if this idea has support. I hope it does
How this all started. My name is Lionel Smith; I'm 40ish, and recently fell headlong into the classic 40-crisis thing. I was lucky enough to be able to quit my job to take a year out. I went travelling in the southern hemisphere for the first time.
It was an amazing and eye opening journey. So, to capture what I was experiencing, like most people, I kept trying to take the 'perfect' holiday photo, but noticed how I constantly had to make sure that discarded plastic and other litter didn't spoil the picture. Deserts, mountains, islands, it didn't matter; there was always a tatty plastic bag somewhere.
I had noticed the problem of environmental plastic seemed to be a lot worse in the more economically deprived areas I visited, especially but not uniquely, in places like Southern Africa and South America where unemployment is high.
It seemed to me that the quickest way the plastic could be removed from the environment would be to pay to have local people collect it, as local knowledge and local pride could be invaluable in that task.
I asked a few questions about such an idea as I travelled and received surprisingly positive answers. For example, I discovered there is even a group of 130 South African ladies who roam the landscape picking up littered plastic bags and then use them, up to 30,000 bags every month, to make woven items. Also, that for a just a few pence per kilo people would be quite prepared to pick up the plastic lying around.
I decided that in this way not only environmental plastic could be collected, but also local family incomes would be given a much-needed boost and the overall environment improved for man and beast.
Great! The next challenge was to think about how to actually finance such an endeavour.
Fortunately, as it turned out, I was travelling with my i-pod and blasting out some of my favourite tunes on my travels. A few of those tunes are more than just favourites; they are very, very special to me. When I was playing one of those tunes at full volume in the pouring rain in the beautiful temperate rainforest of New Zealand, it gave me goose bumps and I became uncharacteristically quite emotional. I also saw a way to raise funds.
I've heard it sung that love can move mountains. I wondered if music could remove plastic?
So I've decided to see if I can raise interest in this idea; the idea of paying local communities to collect plastic litter from the environment for recycling and reuse, and to raise the finance for it by asking people to vote for the most important, soul moving, goose-bump-making music of their life.
The aim is to collate the information and create a four part series of CD's to cover one full day on planet earth. A collection of 24 Hours of the most moving music ever made, and use money generated from CD sales to make a start at cleaning up the mess that we never really intended to make in the first place.
The plan is that monies raised in this way will go towards creating a trust to fund the various projects. So, the more people who take the time to vote, the more accurate and valuable the compilation will be and the more likely this idea will be realised.
So please take the time to vote if you haven't already, and please tell all your friends to vote too.
Why bother?
In some places plastic can be up to 80% of the volume of litter on roads, parks, and beaches and makes up 90%
of floating litter in the ocean.
The problem with plastics is that generally they do not biodegrade. When something biodegrades, naturally occurring organisms break down natural materials into their simple chemical components. For example, when paper breaks down it eventually becomes carbon dioxide and water. Plastic is a synthetic material and almost never biodegrades.
Instead it undergoes a process called 'photodegredation', whereby sunlight breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces over very long periods of time. In some environments the little pieces of plastic can even act as a sort of sponge for concentrating other toxic chemicals.
It has been estimated that a plastic bag takes 400 years to degrade, a plastic water bottle up to 450 years and a disposable nappy 500 years. 20,000 years has been quoted for a completely synthetic carpet - longer than the length of human civilisation on the planet!
This does not mean they will completely disappear, all remain as plastic polymers and eventually yield individual molecules of plastic too tough for any organism to digest, these molecules enter plants and animals, the soil and the seas, and inevitably via the food chain even end up in us. Degrading plastic does not look pretty either!
Something is happening.
Brilliantly, as I write, places around the world such as the town of Modbury in Devon, San Francisco in the USA and other towns, cities, and even countries such as Bangladesh are doing something. They have banned plastic bags, raised awareness and ask for biodegradability and the design of recyclability in plastic products. Ireland has a plastic bag tax, some American states are using deposits on plastic bottles the way we used to have them on glass bottles, and recycling programmes are on the increase around the planet.
The global plastics industry is not unresponsive to the growing clamour for increased recycling options. Thermoset plastics such as melamine were until relatively recently considered non-recyclable. However, with market potential growing, possible legislative changes and changes in public perception, new recycling processes have emerged, especially in Germany where stringent targets are adhered to.
The plastics industry will inevitably be a major player in the future of plastic recycling, essentially planning the full life cycle of plastic. With optimism a term now being used in the industry is 'Cradle to Cradle' instead of 'Cradle to the Grave' where the grave was inevitably landfill.
The world's first electricity generating plant to run on waste and plastic fuel has opened in Tomakomai, Japan. Several similar waste powered plants are to follow and in India, Mumbai-based Asian Electronics (AEL) and Singapore's Enviro-Hub Holdings have teamed up to build four power plants of 8 mega watts each. The plants will be fired by the liquid hydrocarbons produced from plastic waste.
Even China has launched a surprise crackdown on plastic bags, banning production of ultra-thin bags and forbidding its supermarkets and shops from handing out free carriers from June 2008.
With taxes, deposits, bans, legislation, creative reuse and other measures, it certainly seems that there is a will for change, and currently where the economics allow plastic can be collected, removed, reused and recycled in a variety of ways.
This is great news, but it doesn't address the problem of where the economics does not yet deal with the plastic litter that is already out there, in the environment now.
It is my hope that this website could help tackle that problem.
Every person who visits this site can do something to help.
All it takes is 4 votes.
If you haven't already, then please Vote now!
Who knows? You just might make a difference!
My thanks
Lionel Smith February 2008
24 Hours On Planet Earth is currently an idea.
This website has been created to see if this idea has support. I hope it does
How this all started. My name is Lionel Smith; I'm 40ish, and recently fell headlong into the classic 40-crisis thing. I was lucky enough to be able to quit my job to take a year out. I went travelling in the southern hemisphere for the first time.
It was an amazing and eye opening journey. So, to capture what I was experiencing, like most people, I kept trying to take the 'perfect' holiday photo, but noticed how I constantly had to make sure that discarded plastic and other litter didn't spoil the picture. Deserts, mountains, islands, it didn't matter; there was always a tatty plastic bag somewhere.
I had noticed the problem of environmental plastic seemed to be a lot worse in the more economically deprived areas I visited, especially but not uniquely, in places like Southern Africa and South America where unemployment is high.
It seemed to me that the quickest way the plastic could be removed from the environment would be to pay to have local people collect it, as local knowledge and local pride could be invaluable in that task.
I asked a few questions about such an idea as I travelled and received surprisingly positive answers. For example, I discovered there is even a group of 130 South African ladies who roam the landscape picking up littered plastic bags and then use them, up to 30,000 bags every month, to make woven items. Also, that for a just a few pence per kilo people would be quite prepared to pick up the plastic lying around.
I decided that in this way not only environmental plastic could be collected, but also local family incomes would be given a much-needed boost and the overall environment improved for man and beast.
Great! The next challenge was to think about how to actually finance such an endeavour.
Fortunately, as it turned out, I was travelling with my i-pod and blasting out some of my favourite tunes on my travels. A few of those tunes are more than just favourites; they are very, very special to me. When I was playing one of those tunes at full volume in the pouring rain in the beautiful temperate rainforest of New Zealand, it gave me goose bumps and I became uncharacteristically quite emotional. I also saw a way to raise funds.
I've heard it sung that love can move mountains. I wondered if music could remove plastic?
So I've decided to see if I can raise interest in this idea; the idea of paying local communities to collect plastic litter from the environment for recycling and reuse, and to raise the finance for it by asking people to vote for the most important, soul moving, goose-bump-making music of their life.
The aim is to collate the information and create a four part series of CD's to cover one full day on planet earth. A collection of 24 Hours of the most moving music ever made, and use money generated from CD sales to make a start at cleaning up the mess that we never really intended to make in the first place.
The plan is that monies raised in this way will go towards creating a trust to fund the various projects. So, the more people who take the time to vote, the more accurate and valuable the compilation will be and the more likely this idea will be realised.
So please take the time to vote if you haven't already, and please tell all your friends to vote too.
Why bother?
In some places plastic can be up to 80% of the volume of litter on roads, parks, and beaches and makes up 90%
of floating litter in the ocean.The problem with plastics is that generally they do not biodegrade. When something biodegrades, naturally occurring organisms break down natural materials into their simple chemical components. For example, when paper breaks down it eventually becomes carbon dioxide and water. Plastic is a synthetic material and almost never biodegrades.
Instead it undergoes a process called 'photodegredation', whereby sunlight breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces over very long periods of time. In some environments the little pieces of plastic can even act as a sort of sponge for concentrating other toxic chemicals.
It has been estimated that a plastic bag takes 400 years to degrade, a plastic water bottle up to 450 years and a disposable nappy 500 years. 20,000 years has been quoted for a completely synthetic carpet - longer than the length of human civilisation on the planet!
This does not mean they will completely disappear, all remain as plastic polymers and eventually yield individual molecules of plastic too tough for any organism to digest, these molecules enter plants and animals, the soil and the seas, and inevitably via the food chain even end up in us. Degrading plastic does not look pretty either!
Something is happening.Brilliantly, as I write, places around the world such as the town of Modbury in Devon, San Francisco in the USA and other towns, cities, and even countries such as Bangladesh are doing something. They have banned plastic bags, raised awareness and ask for biodegradability and the design of recyclability in plastic products. Ireland has a plastic bag tax, some American states are using deposits on plastic bottles the way we used to have them on glass bottles, and recycling programmes are on the increase around the planet.
The global plastics industry is not unresponsive to the growing clamour for increased recycling options. Thermoset plastics such as melamine were until relatively recently considered non-recyclable. However, with market potential growing, possible legislative changes and changes in public perception, new recycling processes have emerged, especially in Germany where stringent targets are adhered to.
The plastics industry will inevitably be a major player in the future of plastic recycling, essentially planning the full life cycle of plastic. With optimism a term now being used in the industry is 'Cradle to Cradle' instead of 'Cradle to the Grave' where the grave was inevitably landfill.
The world's first electricity generating plant to run on waste and plastic fuel has opened in Tomakomai, Japan. Several similar waste powered plants are to follow and in India, Mumbai-based Asian Electronics (AEL) and Singapore's Enviro-Hub Holdings have teamed up to build four power plants of 8 mega watts each. The plants will be fired by the liquid hydrocarbons produced from plastic waste.
Even China has launched a surprise crackdown on plastic bags, banning production of ultra-thin bags and forbidding its supermarkets and shops from handing out free carriers from June 2008.
With taxes, deposits, bans, legislation, creative reuse and other measures, it certainly seems that there is a will for change, and currently where the economics allow plastic can be collected, removed, reused and recycled in a variety of ways.
This is great news, but it doesn't address the problem of where the economics does not yet deal with the plastic litter that is already out there, in the environment now.
It is my hope that this website could help tackle that problem.
Every person who visits this site can do something to help.
All it takes is 4 votes.
If you haven't already, then please Vote now!
Who knows? You just might make a difference!
My thanks
Lionel Smith February 2008
This site does not mean to argue the case for recycling or provide technical information.
The Links section lists websites that have been useful in constructing
this site. All other information referred to can be found with a brief search on the net.
If you should wish to offer support (and my goodness it is needed) or send a postal vote, please use the contact details shown on the Contact Page
If you should wish to offer support (and my goodness it is needed) or send a postal vote, please use the contact details shown on the Contact Page
