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Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Cancer of the Ocean
“Around 100 million tons of plastics are produced each year, about 10 million tons of which ends up in the sea” -Greenpeace
The ocean’s a big place. Problem is, it’s almost too big. Hard to notice when something’s wrong, and when we’re the cause of it. Because you see, the ocean has a terrible cancer growing in a place known as the North Pacific Gyre. Because of the immense scale and, therefore, expense of studying this problem, scientists are inconclusive of the exact present dangers, but threats to the entire ecosystem could become very serious very quickly if this Great Pacific Garbage Patch continues on its current path.
Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
In oceanography, a gyre is a large vortex created by vast rotating ocean currents. The North Pacific Gyre in particular is formed by the North Pacific Current, the California Current, the North Equatorial Current, and the Kuroshio Current. What’s unique about this particular gyre is that, in conjunction with other currents, it becomes the final destination for runoff trash from nearly all of Asia and the west coast of the Americas. It can take up to 5 years for the currents to float this trash here, but it all eventually makes it; and this heap of plastic has been growing for over 50 years.
First thing that needs to be cleared up, is that while The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be twice the size of Texas, it isn’t a physical plastic floating island that you could jump off your boat and run around on. It is instead classified as an area with embarrassingly high levels of plastic bits suspended near the surface of the water. But this is nowhere near something to give a sigh of relief to. Because, unfortunately, given the entire spectrum of sizes and depths of this suspended waste, plastics are being mistaken for lunch by animals all up and down the food chain, introducing toxins to multiple levels of the ecosystem.
To me, the issue that stands out more so than any other is of course the plastic’s relation to the ocean’s plankton. ‘Cause if we can all think back to grade school for a minute, we can remember how plankton is the backbone to the entire food chain: zooplankton being the initial prey for nearly all fish larvae. Mess with the plankton: everything and everyone feels the effects; and in the first paper documented in his 1999 study of the Garbage Patch, Captain Charles Moore found 6 times more plastic fragments by weight than the associated zooplankton. Not good. Now, while the plankton reservoirs are denser to the north of the Pacific Gyre, this is still very frightening news, and shows the potential for the tumor that is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch could go virus-esque lytic on us in a moment’s notice.
Things To Remember:
- Every square kilometer of ocean hosts roughly 120,000 pieces of floating plastic – UN
- The world produced 300 billion pounds of plastic each year, about 10% ends up in the ocean – Greenpeace
- Plastic constitutes 90 percent of all trash floating in the world’s oceans – LA Times 2 Aug 06
- It is estimated that over a million sea-birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement. – Greenpeace
So what sort of stuff can we do to help fix this? Well, it really all comes down to the little things that we all can chip in on, such as:
- Get a reusable grocery/shopping bag or two. These things are as ubiquitous as crazy hats in an Alabama church on Easter Sunday, so get some and remember to use them!
- The obvious one: recycle, recycle, recycle. Any plastic that doesn’t make it in the “blue bin”, or at least the trash can, gets into our waterways and eventually the ocean. Every time.
- For heaven’s sake, stop buying plastic bottled water. Get a reusable stainless steel bottle and save the oceans and some money in the long run!
- We’ve all got travel mugs, so let’s keep them with us as much as we can, and stop buying disposable cups at Starbucks and 7-11 (and don’t forget the discounts they offer for bringing your own mug!)
- No more disposable dish-ware and utensils. Fellow bachelors, I know it’s way easier to use plastic stuff, and doing dishes is no fun, but let’s grow up and ditch the plastic forks, plates, and cups.
Because no one wants to end up like this guy
Cheers,
-Andrew
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Of Late
What our competitors do with their money.
Let’s be completely honest – giving large portions of money to charity doesn’t exactly leave much breathing room in the ol’ budget, and it’s easy to see something like WeDrink as coming off as scam-y, or just plain impossible.
Trust us, we understand that. That’s why we’ve spent almost a year now working on the behind-the-scenes structuring of WeDrink to ensure that you get an affordable WeDrink bottle – in fact, almost equal in price to many of our competitors’ bottles – while still managing to give to charity. And not just a dollar here or there – 4 out of 6 of our bottles, as well as our ceramic mugs and koozies, give 50% of the sale price to water-relief charities.
50% of sale price – not of our profits, like, well, just about everyone else.
What about the other two bottles? They’re about half the cost of our other bottles, and let you decide how much you give – our WeDrink Choice line. We take care of the microdonation – you get a legit bottle and the satisfaction of knowing your purchase – your money – your bottle – is working to save lives.
But yeah, how do we manage this insanity? We may as well sell our wallets on fire, right?
Not so much. We accomplish this in a few ways, none of which are particularly nefarious, but today there’s one in particular I want to note: we’re not dumping money into marketing campaigns.
Back when WeDrink first started, we experimented with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and various other means of paying for traffic. Then we became a sponsor to DailyBurn’s CEO Fitness Challenge, we sponsored the All Good Music Festival in the summer of 2009, and we found ourselves reaching more people than ads or expensive marketing campaigns ever could. Word of mouth is a tremendous force, and we’re thankful for every nudge and “hey, check this out” people send each other.
In light of this, we cut the ads, released the WeDrink Choice bottles, and decided that getting the word out about WeDrink should depend on someone we know we can rely on.
You.
Doing all we can,
Daniel
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Good Faith Business Practices: WeDrink Bottles for America’s Economic Health
by Andrew
In 2005, Americans spent $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation analysis.
That’s right, I’m gonna go ahead and use the CNN/NBC/FOX tactic to let the weight of big numbers really fall by reiterating that this is 9,800 Million dollars we are wasting on a product that isn’t even any better than tap water.
Yeah I said it, Tap Water! It costs $0.002 per gallon (up to 10,000 times less than bottled water), and has stricter safety and health standards than bottled water!
If there’s anything that’s gonna pull America out of the economic rut we’ve found ourselves in, it’s by thinking of ourselves as one big family unit, with money coming in and out amongst other countries. And the more we can trim from our family budget, the better off we’ll all be.
This is one of the main reasons that Dan and I founded WeDrink. We didn’t want to start a business that would ultimately just move money around between folks, creating little net value.I’ll spare you all the rant full of econ jargon by keeping it short and sweet: We wanted to build a business that would also have an immense positive net impact on the economic health of a great many Americans.
By choosing to boycott the waste of plastic bottled water, and instead drinking tap water and taking it to go in a reusable stainless steel water bottle, you could be saving $1,000 to $2,000 per year on bottled water costs for a family of four.
And that’s just the beginning. We have yet to discuss the environmental impact of choosing stainless steel bottles over plastic (see: The Great Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch), or let alone the immense charitable benefits of WeDrink (the sole characteristic that lets us stand out from all the other stainless steel bottle companies).
But those are all stories for another day. For now, let’s just think about all the money we could be saving.
Best,
-Andrew -
Haiti Relief
Occasionally, something truly shocking occurs in the world, something that surpasses the petty politicking and celebrity feuds over millions of dollars that dominate our evening news.
Unfortunately, these occasional events pale in comparison to the reality of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
The International Red Cross estimates that about three million people were affected by this 7.0 earthquake from 25 km outside of Port-au-Prince, the capital and largest city in Haiti. 300,000 were injured, and up to another 3-400,000 didn’t make it through the event. An event of such magnitude hasn’t been seen since the Indonesian tsunami killed over 200,000 people in 2004.
In light of such tragedy, we here at WeDrink are committing all of our charitable contributions, normally given to our water relief charities, to the relief efforts being conducted by the International Red Cross in Haiti.
Giving all we can.
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Adventures of WeDrink at All Good 2009, Day Four: At This Point We’re Sleep-Deprived Zombies
Well, this was to be it. The last day, the last chance to spread the word of our charitable stainless steel bottles.
Saturday Night we saw Green-Man running around, so we just had to give him a free Green WeDrink Bottle.
I had gone to sleep somewhere between 4 and 4:30AM after the Umphrey’s McGee concert, it having been the first time I’d left the booth since Wednesday. Woken up one final time by the heat and bright morning sun after just two hours of sleep, it was time get things cranking.
Sunday was to be huge. Primarily because it was the last day, and people didn’t have to play the stretch-your-budget game anymore. Read the rest of this entry »
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Adventures of WeDrink at All Good 2009, Day Three: Why You Shouldn’t Fear the Weatherman
I had been trying to not think about Saturday as it approached. All weather reports pointed to Saturday being a downpour. And not only that, apparently when it rains at Marvin’s Mountaintop, it really rains. I’m talking complete ground saturation and instant mud sinking halfway up to your knees.
“Yeah man, last year was terrible. The rain was brutal for about four hours, but the wind man, the wind…people’s tents were blowing around, getting picked up into the trees. We had pretty much been hit by a tsunami.” Read the rest of this entry »
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Adventures of WeDrink at All Good 2009, Day Two: Why You Should Always Take Extra Pictures
6:45. Woken up by the heat and morning light. My air mattress also had a pretty legit leak, and by the morning I was practically laying on the rock-hard dirt.
I didn’t even want to get out of my tent.You know when you wake up in the middle of the night from a scary dream, afraid to return to it in your sleep? Friday morning was a mirror image of that. I couldn’t bring myself to face another 20 hour day of slow tormenting failure. ‘Cause you see, Thursday, we had sold less than 30 WeDrink bottles… Read the rest of this entry »
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Adventures of WeDrink at All Good 2009, Day One: On the Importance of The Ground-Score
by Andrew
Ground-Score - verb - finding useful/badass items on the ground discarded by others, usually at a large festival. ex: “Dude, check out these wet glow-sticks I just ground-scored.”
Of course, many would say that ground-scoring is just a euphemism for stealing, but in most instances the ground-score is entirely legitimate, and it usually evens out to a zero-sum game for everyone. But more on that later…
So here goes. All Good Festival 2009. Four days of music and camping. WeDrink’s big push into the open, our first major face-to-face exposure with these charitable stainless-steel bottles. I’d been preparing for this weekend for over two months… Read the rest of this entry »
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Good Faith Business Practices: Intro, and Clean Pricing
by Andrew
If there’s a single underlying principle in running WeDrink, it’s to always follow Good Faith Business Practices. Simply put: always having the best interest of others in mind. We offer this promise to our patrons and supporters, other businesses we work with, and to each other within WeDrink.
For a while now society has idolized not exactly the best of idols, be it the most lavish athletes, musicians, actors, or other celebrities. At the same time we have repeatedly praised the un-praiseworthy in the business world, where cutthroat and deceptive tactics brought them everything; everything we saw and wanted for ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
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WeDrink Summer Wet Tour 2009: The Beginning
by Andrew
wet - adjective - indescribably awesome or breath-takingAs you all know, WeDrink isn’t exactly a high-budget operation. It’s run by a few guys in our 20’s, and from whatever sales we do end up making, we give tons to charity. Doesn’t really leave us with much discretionary spending. So of course, huge ad campaigns, corporate partnerships, and marketing blitzkriegs aren’t really in the cards… Read the rest of this entry »
