Drowning in plastics

I’m increasingly horrified at how much plastic packaging I bring home. As we learn more about how plastic pervades our environment, I’m thinking I need to do more to reduce my plastic use, but how? It’s hard to imagine buying food without plastic bags, wraps, trays, and containers. In the garden, too, I accumulate an increasing collection of plastic pots and other equipment.

Reusing plastic boxes that held salad greens as mini-greenhouses

    Some recent news stories about plastic are really scary and discouraging. We’ve been hearing for years about floating islands of plastic in the ocean with fish, seabirds, and other creatures taking in plastic waste from the water.

Albatross chick with a belly full of plastic-photo NOAA

This year I was alarmed to learn that the air and soil too are polluted with microplastics—bits smaller than 5 millimeters, most microscopic. Of the increasing mass of plastics we humans are manufacturing—currently more than 300 million tons per year—only nine percent is recycled. The rest breaks down into smaller and smaller bits. These tiny pieces of plastic fall from the sky with rain and snow, and not just in populated areas. A recent study of the Arctic found surprisingly high microplastic concentrations there too, with more released as polar ice melts.
 

Arctic Sea ice in 2011-photo NASA

    Scientists estimate that we’re ingesting tens of thousands of microplastic particles in our food and water every year. Health effects aren’t known yet, but it’s thought that lifelong plastic ingestion can harm the immune system. If you drink your water from plastic bottles, you’re taking in four times more plastic than if you drink tap water. At least that’s easily correctable. Other animals don’t have any way to avoid the plastic we’ve so liberally sprinkled throughout their environment, so they’ll ultimately suffer more.

Water with a side of microplastics

    I don’t know exactly how I’ll kick my plastic habit in the garden, but I’m making it a goal. If you’ve found solutions, I’d love to hear about them. I just watched a helpful video from The Old Farmer’s Almanac about alternatives to plastic in the garden. Some suggestions: wooden seed trays; seedling pots made from natural fiber or recycled paper; trees, shrubs and perennials bought bareroot instead of in plastic pots; homemade soil amendments and potting mix to replace bagged products; and metal or wooden plant supports instead of plastic netting.

Tomato seedlings in newspaper pots

    Many of these measures would involve a loss of convenience. Plastic pots and trays are light and easy to wash and store. Large ceramic containers for summer plantings are prettier but much more cumbersome and expensive than their plastic counterparts. Avoiding plastic pots at the garden center will severely limit plant shopping options. It feels like time to start turning away from plastic, though. If I could buy and use 10 percent less next year, at least that would be a start.

Can I garden with less of this stuff?

    Much of my garden equipment is plastic: wheelbarrow, large pots, barrels. I should use this equipment for as long as possible to amortize the embedded carbon, but I think I’ll stop planting vegetables in those plastic pots. I’d just as soon avoid adding microplastics to our homegrown tomatoes.

The endangered EPA

It’s been a big week for climate change deniers and polluters. First Scott Pruitt, the new leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, opined that carbon dioxide from human activity isn’t causing global warming. Then Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz sponsored a bill to eliminate the EPA altogether. Meanwhile, the Trump administration proposes to cut EPA funding by 25 percent.

    Where would we be if the EPA hadn’t been at work since 1970? Without it, gardens would be in poor shape for so many reasons.

As spring flowers open, I'm grateful to the EPA for protecting the garden environment

    Remember acid rain? Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from Midwest power plants used to drift eastward, damaging northeastern forests. The big oak tree that anchors my garden would likely have succumbed to this toxic mix, along with many of its fellows. Instead, thanks to air pollution standards, New England forests rebounded. 

    Back when America was “great,” lead from gasoline routinely accumulated in garden soil. Our lot is small; no part of it is far from roads and car exhaust. If it weren’t for the EPA’s phase-out of leaded gas, we might not be able to eat vegetables from our own yard without risking brain damage from lead poisoning.

With lead in soil from exhaust, we'd have to skip the home-grown tomatoes

    I can thank the EPA for keeping me in shape to garden. Mental health used to be a smoky job, with many of our patients chain-smoking. EPA insisted on the link between secondhand smoke and cancer, lung and heart disease. Clinical encounters are now smoke-free. If I’d breathed secondhand smoke for 40 years, would I still be able to wield a shovel or a rake?

    The EPA has banned or restricted toxic chemicals we formerly used in our landscapes, starting with DDT. In 1972, many bird populations were dangerously low, poisoned by DDT as it concentrated up the food chain. Now bald eagles are back, and healthy native birds visit my yard.

Bald eagles chicks, safe without DDT

    Businesses chafe at EPA regulations that prevent them from exploiting our natural resources and sticking the rest of us with the externalized costs in money, health, and environmental damage. That seems to be the motivation for Pruitt’s long career of suing the EPA and his current mission to destroy it.

     Now more than ever, we need the government scientists who’ve been supplying the data on climate change that the Trump team plans to ignore or shred. I can only imagine how sad and infuriating it would be to see your life’s work heading for the electronic recycle bin.

Berkeley data hack saving NASA and DOE research--photo by Jamie Lyons

Because of that data and much more from climate scientists around the world, the previous administration forged ahead on regulations like the Clean Power Plan, which restricted carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, directing us toward renewable energy sources. 

     If climate change continues to accelerate, gardeners can expect more extreme weather and increases in flooding and drought. For the sake of our gardens and our life on Earth, I hope we’ll benefit from the EPA’s protection for many years to come.

Big noise

When I commit murder, my crime will be caused by the scream of leaf blowers. 

I'm going to argue a leaf blower defense

Their piercing whine has escalated again this fall. It messes with my psychic equilibrium. It drives my husband out of bed at 7:00 on Saturday mornings. While almost all landscape contractors and many homeowners in my neighborhood use these infernal machines, the blowers don’t actually add value. What they do add is a lot of negative health effects, both physical and psychological.

    My city is now following a trend toward restricting use of leaf blowers. Last fall the aldermen held hearings on the subject, with landscapers contending that they need the blowers to make a living, while many residents complained they were being tormented by noise generated for others’ profit. The city is considering an ordinance to restrict use of leaf blowers to the periods from March 15 to May 1 and October 15 to December 1. 
 
     This change is too modest for my liking. Why should so many of the best gardening weeks of the year be violated by the noise of leaf blowers? I’d like to know I can enjoy peace and quiet when I step out my back door. Many people testified to lost time for work, conversation, and sleep when the blowers are nearby.

    Other than the obvious effects on quality of life, leaf blowers cause other serious problems. Landscape workers suffer some of the worst of them. 

Hearing protection for operators is often neglected

Sustained exposure to noise at up to 100 decibels, such as that generated by the blowers, can cause permanent hearing loss, raise blood pressure, and lead to coronary artery disease. 

     Some people call the machines debris blowers, because they’re used to move anything lying on the ground, not just leaves. In the process they lift dust, animal feces, landscape chemicals, and whatever else is on the ground into the air, where vulnerable people—especially children and elders—breathe them in. The inefficient two-stroke engines of gas leaf blowers also contribute heavily to air pollution. To top it all off, there’s evidence that the high-velocity stream of air actually damages plants.

    It’s not the case that a lush suburban landscape can’t be maintained without leaf blowers. In fact, Beverly Hills and Carmel, California were early adopters of leaf blower bans back in the 1970s. They’ve managed to struggle by.

This Beverly Hills homeowner has managed to cope without leaf blowers

    We don’t have to let marketing and available technology determine our landscape practices. Who says a neat yard is one with no leaves or twigs on the ground? 

 

In my neighborhood, custom demands no leaves on the lawn

Outdoors is not the same as indoors, thank goodness, and a lawn doesn’t have to look like a freshly vacuumed carpet. 

     We’ve been sold a bill of goods on this, and we’re paying for it every time we’re interrupted by the whine of the leaf blowers. If we could accept more natural conditions, where plant debris is allowed to decompose into the soil of garden beds

Decomposing leaves build soil

and—gasp!—even lawns, we’d save ourselves a lot of money and trouble, and we could dispense with obnoxious landscape machines.