Wildlife-Friendly Trash Disposal: Plastic Bags

A study published this month in the Journal of Arid Environments found that garbage patches aren't restricted to oceans — they pollute deserts, too. Winds can waft trash to distant habitats, where they can harm or even kill animals. This, we'll explain how to discard your trash to minimize its harm to wildlife.

Tip #1: Tie plastic bags into a knot before tossing them. Better yet, repurpose them, or avoid using them altogether.

Worldwide, shoppers use more than 500 billion plastic bags per year — or one million bags per minute. American shoppers use 380 billion plastic bags annually.  That’s about 60,000 plastic bags every five seconds.

Much of those plastic bags end up in landfills, but they also find their way to natural habitats. According to the Ocean Conservancy, plastic bags rank among the top trash items collected during coastal cleanups.

Plastic bags devastate wildlife. Marine animals can suffocate or choke on a translucent, floating bag mistaken for a jellyfish. If swallowed, a bag could block the animal’s intestines, causing it to starve. And because plastic bags take hundreds, or possibly thousands, of years to decompose, a single plastic bag could harm several animals. 
 
The surest way to prevent plastic bags from endangering wildlife? Avoid using them, and opt for reusable alternatives. But if that’s not possible, tie plastic bags into a large, dense knot before tossing them to lower chances that the wind blows them from a garbage truck into wild habitat. Rinse off any food residue to avoid enticing animals.  Better yet, repurpose plastic bags into kitschy, yet practical items—such as a wallet, laptop case, or lamp.

Garbage Patches--in the Desert?

Garbage patches foul not only oceans, but deserts, too, according to study published this month in the Journal of Arid Environments. Study author Erin Zylstra found more windblown plastic bags and latex balloons than desert tortoises and western diamondback rattlesnakes in Saguaro National Park in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Like marine trash, desert debris could threaten wildlife and ecosystems.

Zylstra originally went to the desert to conduct fieldwork on desert tortoises. At the same time, she and her colleagues spotted not just tortoises, but litter — lots of it. “We just started to notice that there were a lot of these balloons and plastic bags around,” said Zylstra, a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona.”  That’s when the researchers figured that while surveying tortoises, they might as well survey the trash, too.

So for two summers, Zylstra and colleagues surveyed selected tracts of desert from two study areas on opposite sides of Tucson. They used a technique called distance sampling, which allowed them to closely estimate the density of trash in each tract, even if they missed a few pieces. They recovered refuse ranging from fully intact bags and balloons to dried-up fragments. Most balloons turned up as deflated bouquets tied with string, some so disintegrated they looked like lichens growing on rock. 

Contrary to what she expected, Zylstra didn't find more trash alongside roads than she did further away. Her results suggested that wind could carry plastic bags and balloons more than two kilometers into remote wilderness. She also observed that dispersal of the trash followed seasonal winds.

The Gentle Gardener: Furry and Feathered Pests

This week on the Green Life, pro gardener George Gibbs is sharing a few practical tips for organic gardeners. Yesterday we discussed small pests. Today, we're pondering bigger critters. 

Tip #2: To deter bigger pests, irritate them.

"I always try to encourage people to not kill animals," he said. "We're all inter-related. I think we all have a purpose."

Still, you gotta guard your garden. For the furry and feathered, Gibbs tries to repel them through the art of vexation.

4 Unexpected Products Made from Poop

Most people are familiar with the practice of recycling animal excrement into manure. But some not-so-squeamish souls have gone a step further, devising sustainable solutions to prevent the putrid piles from going to waste.

1. Civet coffee (kopi luwak): Can you imagine paying hundreds of dollars for coffee made from poop? Civet coffee is a rarefied brew made from the droppings of a nocturnal, catlike animal called the Asian palm civet. The lithe, long-tailed creature eats a diet of coffee berries, digesting the fruit’s fleshy pulp and passing the tough pit through its gastrointestinal tract whole (although enzymes break down the bean’s proteins). After the civet defecates the undigested coffee beans, they are then harvested, husked, washed, and roasted.

Opinions of the civet coffee’s flavor vary, described by some as “earthy” and “smooth” and others as “unremarkable” and “thin.” Many would agree, though, that the coffee isn’t bitter — which makes sense, since the civet’s digestive enzymes degrade the proteins that help give coffee its bitterness.

DIY Natural Soap: Stank Dog Soap

Heidi Corley Barto began to experiment with soap-making when her younger daughter started to experience skin issues. The Natural Soap Chef is the product of those experiments. Homemade soap allows you to control what goes into your soap, so that you can get clean while keeping nasty chemicals out of the environment and away from your skin. This recipe from The Natural Soap Chef is perfect for pet lovers.

Soap Recipe: Stank Dog Soap

This bar will deodorize anyone, canine or human! The idea for the soap came from my Vizsla dog, Penelope. Vizslas are known as Velcro dogs—they like to stick with their humans all the time. Penelope has been known to hop in while a family member is showering. Having a soap that serves double duty—what a brilliant idea!

Ingredients:

App Obsession: DIY.org

In an ever-growing tech society, it can be hard to pull the kids away from their video games, iPhones or favorite TV shows and get them in touch with their own creativity. Crafting pulls out that creativity and allows kids to explore what it is that interests them in a fun, hands-on way, but it's not always easy to come up with something that the kids will think is cool. That's why parents and kids alike will love this app from DIY.org.

Why kids love it:

Not only is it an awesome way to keep track of all the crafty projects that they create, it's a way for the kids to show off their talents to other kids and share ideas on future projects. Much like Instagram, the kids can post pictures of what they've made, but they can also post video. DIY.org also created a Skills section that rewards kids with badges for having completed projects under different categories. For example, if the kids are thinking about building a fort, the fort badge challenges them to build it out of three different materials before obtaining the badge. These badges seem like a great way to get excited about making something rather than watching it on TV and it gets the creative juices flowing by making them complete various tasks before becoming a Maker. 

Why parents love it:

Citizen Science: The Case of the Lost Ladybugs

Can you solve the mystery of the nine-spotted ladybug? Citizen scientists, here's your next challenge:

The Lost Ladybug Project

Sometimes, the "right" thing to do isn't clear. If you want to avoid pesticides, you should find alternatives. Ladybugs are popular, since they eat crop-sucking aphids by the dozen. But what happens when the ladybugs you use are an Asian ladybug species imported from Japan? And then, mysteriously, the native ladybugs start disappearing....

Citizen Science: Project FeederWatch

Bird lovers, this citizen science project is for you.

Project FeederWatch

How are our feathered friends? The Cornell Lab of Ornithology organizes a network of volunteers to monitor the numbers of birds that visit backyard feeders. For a small annual fee, volunteers get bird identification guides and data sheets, though they must provide their own feeders.

The data from Project FeederWatch is used in many scientific journals, tracking the populations and ranges of the most commonly seen backyard birds. The study runs each year from November to April, so get feeding and start watching!

To practice, can you identify the birds in the photos below?

 

 

Citizen Science: How You Can Help Bees

Want to help bees? Citizen scientists, we have a job for you. 

The Great Sunflower Project

For those with a fondness for the small and buzzy, the recent decline in honeybee populations is not breaking news. But a dearth of pollinators is everybody's beeswax, since about 1/3 of our food comes from bee-pollinated crops. Honeybees live both in commercial nests and in the wild, where they join hundreds of species of native bees in keeping wild and cultivated plants alive. With no bees, we'd be living in a much less colorful world.

To help track bee populations in urban, suburban, and rural areas, the Great Sunflower Project runs a Backyard Bee Count. They recommend bee-attracting flowers (such as sunflowers), offer bee identification guides, and provide instruction on how to observe and count the bees (both native and introduced) that visit during the blooming season. This provides a nation-wide count on how bees are faring in different environments, so we can learn how to better protect them.

How sweet is that?

Look below to see some of the plants that the Great Sunflower Project recommends for attracting bees.

How To Be a Citizen Scientist: Nature's Notebook

Have you ever read a news story about scientists working to save the planet and wished that you could join them? Well, now you can, and you don't even need a Ph.D. Anyone can be a citizen scientist, helping researchers collect data for real studies all across the world. This week, we'll highlight four national citizen science projects. 

Project 1: Nature's Notebook

Phenology? What's that?

Phenology is the study of the timing of animal and plant life cycles. So for example, you expect geese to migrate in fall and cherry trees to bloom in spring. And today, when climate change is causing the cycles of many species to shift and change, phenology becomes important both as a sign of climate change and as a consequence.

Nature's Notebook is part of the National Phenology Network, a group that tracks the life cycles of many plants and animals throughout the country. Participants choose a site outdoors, mark plants, and look for animals and plants showing "phenophases," which are season-specific behaviors or developments (like laying eggs, dropping leaves, or flowering). The site provides a comprehensive list of plants and animals to observe, and printable and online data sheets.

So join up, if you have a spot you can observe in, and add to the store of knowledge that helps us figure out how climate change is affecting ecosystems.

To see which phenophases were happening this time last year, read the list below.