Maggie's Farm

In yesterday's Texas primary, Donald Trump got more votes - as the incumbent Republican candidate - than Joe, Bernie, Bloomberg and Pocahontas, combined. Of course it was an Open Primary, so one gets either a Republican or Democrat ballot to cast the votes for one's candidates, and we have a number of local and state seats up for grabs (this is probably why most Republicans turned out to vote) but.....still I find it an interesting tidbit.

As motivated as Democrats might be to pick a Presidential Candidate, Republicans are also engaged. There were seven other Republican Candidates on the ballot (including "Uncommitted") and they collectively garnered about 6% of the vote.

I am told the Pacific Plastic Patch is not really distinguishable when one is sailing through it, as the plastic doesn't really appear to be any worse there - it just is noticeable as a statistical finding. Not sure how true that might be, but I do find the discovery of wholesale ingestion of micro-pellets into the food chain to be disturbing and disappointing.

In my work in the Caribbean, we would often organize company beach cleanups on some of the smaller islands, uninhabited ones. There you'd encounter plastic on the beaches at the storm tide line that was sometimes 3 ft deep. A lot of it was fishing waste: nets, buoys, lines, that sort of thing, and every plastic jug imaginable. You can fill up a good sized boat pretty quickly.

They say nearly all the plastic waste comes from three major rivers located in China and Africa. I don't doubt it. My Caribbean island had a typical land fill, next to a typical swamp, that flooded with every tropical rain storm and carried off a stream of un-compacted waste to, you guessed it - the surrounding ocean. It's easy to see how the Third World contributes.

I'm surprised that with all the advances in plastic technology that have transpired over the years, we have still not figured out how to innovate cost-effective incineration of plastic for powergen or better chemical formulations that would facilitate cost-effective recycling. As consumers we need to keep insisting that the petrochemical giants keep focused on improving this.