One of the great things about BambooSK8 is that it really is just a better environmental choice than a typical maple deck. I spend a lot of time thinking about the environment and how we interact with it, and decided that it might be nice to share some of the problems I think about.
This first one is an easy one: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s a giant area (anywhere between the size of Texas and the size of the US) in the Pacific Ocean filled with garbage: specifically, tiny pieces of non-degradable pieces of plastic. Because of how currents move in the ocean, most of these plastics are concentrated into one area (the size of Texas) and create a giant glump of garbage in the middle of the ocean. (That’s a bad thing)
Where does the plastic come from? Well, anywhere really. Most plastic doesn’t decompose. When we’re finished with something plastic (a grocery bag, a coffee cup, a telephone, whatever) usually one of four things happen to it: 1. It gets thrown away and sent to a garbage dump where it will wait for a couple of hundred years to break down 2. It will be recycled 3. It gets littered somewhere (more or less the same as the first) or 4. It ends up in Water.
#4 is a lot more common than you’d expect (or at least I expected). A lot of plastic litter ends up in waterways as litter that got swept to sea by rain or wind. A lot of it is gets dumped there deliberately (because its easy to dump in the ocean).
What’s nice about this environmental disaster, is that there’s a lot an ordinary person can do really easily to help: and that’s just trying to avoid plastic as much as possible: bring bag when you go shopping, pick products with less packaging, etc. And what’s great is that a lot of people are already doing all this.
Anyways, I highly recommend watching Vice Magazine’s Garbage Island documentary from 2007. They do a really good job of showing what’s going on without being high-minded assholes (though they are sort of just regular assholes). Enjoy!
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