KOR ONE Hydration Vessels

The hottest eco friendly water bottles to hit the market have just landed on Maku EcoShop. KOR ONE Hydration vessels are not only cool but eco friendly and motivational at the same time.

Made of Eastman Tritan™ copolyester, the KOR ONE is completely BPA free and offers beautiful glasslike clarity with excellent impact resistance

Customize your vessel by inserting an inspirational KOR Stone™ message into the top; KOR Stone messages are visible when the cap is flipped open

KOR donates 1% of all sales to a select group of non-profits that focus on water-related issues and we do to so that is 2% of sales on this bottle going to help make the world a better place!

Available in 4 cool colors all with their own Non Profit



- Orchid Pink sales benefit Blue Planet Run, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing the global community together to provide safe drinking water to people in need around the world

- Sunrise Orange (my favorite!) sales benefit The Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit that studies and promotes policies and programs to increase recovery and recycling of plastics

- Sawgrass Green sales benefit The Wetlands Initiative, a nonprofit working to sustainably restore wetlands in order to improve water quality and increase wildlife habitat

- Ice Blue sales benefit one of our favorites the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a nonprofit focused on the protection of the marine environment through research, education and restoration, in particular studies of the North Pacific Gyre / Blob of Floating Trash...

A day without a bag

Got this email today from the crew at the Surfrider Foundation. What a great idea, especially during the holidays with all the shopping going on!

A Day Without a Bag is an education and grassroots event started by Heal the Bay in LA that involves businesses and individuals throughout Southern California and beyond. On this day we ask holiday shoppers and retailers to forgo single-use, plastic shopping bags in favor of reusable bags. In addition, Surfrider will be handing out reusable bags in conjunction with the Cities of Encinitas and Oceanside.

DID YOU KNOW:
- Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute.
- Californians throw away 294,000,000 pounds of plastic bags every year, or 147,000 tons.
- 600 plastic bags are thrown away every second in California.
- Most of the bags we use are NOT recycled! They are littering our oceans, beaches, landfills and killing animals & birds.

On Thursday December 17th, please tell your friends and family to forget the single-use bag at the store and get hip with a reusable bag. Here are a few tips on remembering your reusable bags for the next trip....

Keep your bags in your car, Write "REMEMBER BAGS" at the top of your grocery list each week, Hang a bag on the door knob to your garage or someplace near by, Keep a reusable bag or two in your purse or backpack, Ask the kids to remind you to bring your bags as part of earning their allowance.

By the way, we will be adding these to the Maku Ecoshop in the next couple of days

More Plastic than Plankton...

So I was reading the latest issue of my favorite surf mag that features an interview with Surfrider Foundation Executive Director Jim Moriarty and an interesting fact popped out at me within the first few paragraphs of the interview.

I have talked a lot about the North Pacific gyre and the swirling pool / blob of trash and plastic that is now estimated to be as large as the USA but what I never realized was that it is now estimated to be more photo-degraded plastic in the oceans than plankton.

This is a very disheartening and sad state of our oceans and the ramifications within the food chain may now be irreversible. Plastic is not bio-degradeble in any means, it is photo-degradeable which means that it will continue to break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where it can't be seen by the naked eye.

Fish, birds, whales, and many other sea creatures that in one way or another end up on the plates of millions of diners tables around the world have potentially mistaken this plastic for plankton...

The only answer, reduce, reuse, recycle and most importantly EDUCATE!

Plastic in the Pacific

As you have read before on my Blog, I have talked numerous times about the North Pacific Gyre and the HUGE blob of trash floating in the pacific ocean.

I found this article is in Today's Wall Street Journal, page A14. It is nice to see more broad based media outlets covering this potential disaster in the Pacific Ocean.
---------

WSJ
MARCH 25, 2009.

How Big Is That Widening Gyre of Floating Plastic?

In the Pacific, Ocean Flows Sweep Litter Into a Flotilla That Could Be the Size of Quebec or Maybe the U.S. -- No One Knows

By CARL BIALIK

A soup of plastic debris floats off the coast of California, a testament to humanity's reliance on plastic and the failure to dispose of it properly.

Just how big is this oceanic zone? Some say it is about the size of Quebec, or 600,000 square miles -- also described as twice the size of Texas. Others say this expanse of junk swept together by currents is the size of the U.S. -- 3.8 million square miles. Or, it could be twice that size.

The debris floating in a large area of the Pacific Ocean usually isn't visible on the surface.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it has been called, has become a symbol of what some say is a looming crisis over trash. But this floating mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean is hard to measure, and few agree on how big it is or how much plastic it holds. That makes it difficult to determine what to do about it.

That hasn't stopped activists and the media from using only the biggest estimates of the patch's size to warn of an environmental catastrophe.

"We've found it really captures the public's imagination and its focus," says Eben Schwartz, marine-debris program manager for the California Coastal Commission, a state agency. However, "as hard as [environmental advocates] try to characterize it accurately, it is prone to mischaracterization."

The plastic-rich portion of the ocean is a product of swirling currents, known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, that gather and concentrate debris. It captured public attention thanks to the efforts of Charles Moore, a woodworker-turned-sea captain who sailed through the zone in 1997 and was stunned to find plastic debris hundreds of miles from land. "That set off alarm bells and made me want to monitor it, made me want to quantify it, made me want to get a better handle on it," says Capt. Moore, a licensed merchant-marine officer. He dedicated the Algalita Marine Research Foundation that he had founded to studying this region of the ocean and publicizing its plastic problem.

The Numbers Guy BlogTaking the Measure of Plastic Soup.
Researchers at the foundation have attempted to quantify the gyre by sailing deep into the Pacific and trawling for plastic and zooplankton using a contraption that resembles a manta ray. Sifting through the entire gyre for plastic would be impossible, so researchers survey a small sample.

But it is difficult to know how to extrapolate their findings to the entire region, or even what that region is. The borders of the gyre shift between seasons, and some scientists, such as Holly Bamford, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's marine-debris program, argue that the high-plastic area is confined to a relatively small part of the gyre.

"I admire Charles," says David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii. But Capt. Moore's estimate of the size of the plastic patch -- up to twice the size of the U.S. -- strikes Prof. Karl as guesswork. "He doesn't know the edge" of the area.

Capt. Moore has relied on models of ocean currents from a retired NOAA scientist to help estimate the scope of the concentrated-plastic zone, with debris lurking, often in tiny, barely perceptible pieces, at or just below the surface. "I just did a very crude estimate, by getting a globe and placing my hand over the area defined by this current, and placing my hand over the continent of Africa" to see how the two compared, he says. "The condensed-soup part may be considerably less than the whole," he concedes, but he is frustrated by critics who play down the scope of the problem without doing any fieldwork.

Even as the debate over the plastic patch's size continues, some of the foundation's estimates have been reported as scientific certainty. For instance, a decade ago, researchers found that the ratio of plastic to zooplankton by mass was six to one. A more-recent visit turned up an increase in this ratio, to 46 to one, according to the foundation's Web site. But that is an average of the ratio at each testing site, which included some very high ratios, probably anomalies. A more comparable figure is eight to one, representing a more modest increase when results are aggregated across all testing sites.

In addition, comparing plastic and plankton weight might not be an ideal way to measure the problem, according to Angelicque White, a biological oceanographer at the University of Oregon who accompanied Prof. Karl on a recent voyage to the gyre. Dr. White points out that many plankton are too small for the nets, and might not have been included in the count. What's more, while the heaviest bits of plastic inflate the measure of the debris patch, those pieces pose less of an environmental threat, because they are too large for marine creatures to mistake for food.

Capt. Moore said that his scientific papers have made these distinctions clear. But news articles generally haven't. Dr. Bamford says inconsistent units of measurement of the plastic problem have impeded research. "We're trying to develop a standardized method," she says of NOAA, "so we can really get a handle on how this compares to various locations around the world." It's possible that consistent measurement will reveal that other parts of the ocean without a catchy name are just as plastic-rich, or more so.

Some misinformation comes from other environmental groups exaggerating the alarming research. Environmental advocate David Suzuki has written of a "massive, expanding island of plastic debris 30 meters [98 feet] deep and bigger than the province of Quebec." Asked whether the high-plastic region could really be called an island, Bill Wareham, senior marine conservation specialist with the David Suzuki Foundation, says, "It's not going to look like island in the context of, 'Gee, I can walk across that.' But it is a very high density of plastic." He adds, "David speaks in a way where he's framing the issue in a way people can understand it."

Other advocates object to such terminology. "The problem with superlative statements that this is somehow a huge floating mass of plastic is that they inevitably lead to desensitizing people when they learn the truth of it," says David Santillo, a senior scientist with Greenpeace.

Even if scientists and advocates could agree on numbers for the size and plastic concentration of the gyre, it is unclear what they would do with the information. Plastics can harm ocean birds and mammals who eat it, because they carry toxins, can pierce internal organs and can trick animals into thinking they are full. But hard numbers are tough to come by. "It's so hard to say a bird died due to plastic in its stomach," says Dr. Bamford. "We have seen birds mature and live out their whole life, and necropsies show plastic in their stomach."

Though no one thinks any possible benefits of plastic outweigh risks, Prof. Karl did find some positive aspects of the patch -- a high concentration of microorganisms clinging to the debris. "The microorganisms are good for the ocean, because it turns out they're making oxygen," Prof. Karl says. "If plastics were otherwise neutral to the environment, then they'd be helping by harvesting more solar energy." Dr. Bamford says it is possible that a cleanup, even if it were feasible, would do more harm than good, by removing these organisms.

Capt. Moore says quantifying the plastic could provide a starting point for measuring the effectiveness of land-based efforts to choke the flow of plastic to ocean waters. "I would love to have a government agency form a concerted program to quantify the debris," he says. "It's a tragedy of the commons: Nobody owns the problem."

Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A14

Plastiki

From JUNK to PLASTIKI, the voyages of these courageous captains in an effort to raise awareness on plastic in our oceans is nothing short of spectacular!

I've made a few posts in the past about JUNK's travels across the pacific from So.Cal to Hawaii. Now David de Rothschild is going to sail a boat made entirely of plastic bottles with a P.E.T. outer shell 12000 nautical miles from San Francisco all the way to Australia! The voyage is taking inspiration from Thor Heyerdal's 1947 expedition - Kontiki.

PLASTIKI is set to sail in April of this year!

Rise Above Plastics

Check it out, Rise Above Plastics is a site all about the awareness of the effects plastic has on our lives. Since Rise Above Plastics luanched thier website over 11 BILLION plastic bottles have ended up in landfills... YIKES!

You've probably read here in the past about the North Pacific Gyre and the Blob of plastic floating in the Pacific that is 2 times bigger than Texas.

Rise Above Plastics is supported by everybody from the Surfrider Foundation and Jack Johnson (who we really dig!) to the Algalita Foundation, Heal the Bay, Junkraft, and a whole bunch of other really cool people.

How are you going to reduce your plastic usage? A couple of easy ways are to get your own reusable bags for those trips to the grocer and a cool Sigg Water bottle!

Junk

I came across this blog a couple of weeks back and have been meaning to post it for all to see. http://junkraft.blogspot.com/

This is the trials and tribulations of 2 guys whom are "Sailing" from So.Cal to Hawaii on a boat made entirely of JUNK! More specifically -

"Sailing to Hawaii on 15,000 plastic bottles and a Cessna 310, to raise awareness about plastic fouling our oceans."

They are currently 180 miles from Hilo HI and have transversed the North Pacific Gyre a couple of times along the way. As you may have read in the past, The North Pacific Gyre is essentially a huge blob of floating plastic in the middle of the pacific where 2 currents terminate and millions of tons of plastic congregate and photo degrade. The environmental impacts of this pollution are affecting everything in the area and making it's way back to us through the food chain.

Here is a link to more info about the crew behind this amazing voyage!

West Coast Salmon run all but gone...

Being tied closely to the ocean, I see macro and micro changes in our eco system all the time. Both good and bad.

Fortunately here in North County San Diego the kelp beds have made a comeback! They were all but gone a few years ago and then an agressive kelp reforestation program brought it back. Not only does the kelp offer a home to many species of oceanic life but it also creates some nice glassy surfing conditions inside the kelp when the wind is blowing on the outside.

What does kelp in North County San Diego and Salmon have to do with each other. Well, much like the kelp forests a few years ago the west coast salmon have now all but disappeared. As recently as 2002, 750,000 adult salmon were counted in the run up the Sacramento river. It is estimated that less than 90,000 Chinook ran last fall and that number is projected to plummet to as little as 58,000 this fall. Less than 10% of the salmon that ran in 2002 an over 90% decrease!!

While certainly I feel that some of this can be attributed to climate change and perhaps cyclical nature, there is no doubt in my mind that most of the decline in the west coast salmon run is attributed to man. More runoff / pollution / sediment build up in the Sacramento river basin from increased building, farming, and pretty much people not caring about our impact on our eco system.

There are solutions to these problems, I always talk about the easy ones such as recycling. It's not that hard to put your plastics, papers, bottles and cans in a separate container for the garbage man to pick up. Remember the North pacific gyre and the blob of plastic the size of Texas floating in the ocean...?

Eating organic foods that don't use synthetic pesticides which runoff into the river and oceans creating algae / plankton blooms and sucking the oxygen out of the water.

Conserving energy and turning off lights or electronics when you are not in the room.

When are we as an entire society going to start seeing the impacts firsthand and change the way we live to help mother earth heal from all this damage? It appears that we are willing to pay $4 for a gallon of gas and looks like we will be paying $30+ for a pound of wild Salmon in the near future. At some point society has to take a stands and say enough is enough look at what we are doing to our environment. I think that time is nearing.

Act locally and think globally. I know that's kind of a played out saying but it's true and we can each make a difference together if we take a stand and do what is right.

Green Beer, Green Living, Green Furniture, and my great grandma

Wow, the quad whammy on St Paddy's day.

First a very happy Bday wish to my great grandma who was born on this day in 1898. She's be gone about 10 years now but every St Paddy's day I tip one in honor of her!

Green Beer - You've probably heard us mention New Belgium Brewing from Colorado and Full Sail Brewing from Oregon. Not only are these guys some serious brew masters but they really exemplify the "Green Business" From utilizing the winds of the gorge at the Full Sail Brewery to brewing the Organic Mothership Wit at New Belguim these companies IMHO are setting the standards what eco friendly business should be all about.

Green Living - While we are never ones to turn down a good beer, the Green of St. Paddy's day should be more than just understanding the heritage of the Irish and partaking in the culture. It should be a day where we all look at our impacts on the eco system and what we can do to lessen that impact. We really like to talk about recycling because it is one of the easiest things you can do. As we have written in the past about the viscous blob of plastics floating in the North Pacific gyre, it is a no brainer to recycle your plastics - bags, containers, bottles, etc. Even using a camping bottle for your water everyday is better than drinking from 5 different plastic bottles each day...

But lets not forget about recycling things such as paper too. Recycling paper uses 60% less energy than manufacturing paper from virgin timber. So not only are you saving a tree but also reducing your carbon consumption footprint by using products that take less energy to manufacture.

Green Furniture - Well thats an easy one because that is what we are all about. To all of us at Maku Furniture, "green" is more a way of life than a "marketing story". From supporting and wearing eco friendly clothing brands such as Mission Playground, participating in beach cleanups, recycling paper, plastics, and cans, to eating organic foods and of course partaking in some of the great beers of Full Sail and New Belgium Brewing companies. Especially on this great day of March 17th!

So I leave you with one last thought an old Irish limerick

There was a young lady one fall
Who wore a newspaper dress to a ball.
The dress caught fire
And burned her entire
Front page, sporting section and all.

Trash Blob 2X's the size of Texas

So I talked about this trash blob in the December Newsletter to our awesome retail partners and to update everybody on what's new with Maku.

While eating breakfast this morning, I happened to flip past the "Fair and Balanced" news channel as they were doing a story on this issue which you can check out here. It's good to see the mainstream media starting to take notice to things like this!! And here is a report that the ever progressive (insert sarcasm here) CBS news did on this issue almost 4 years ago. You can also check out up to date info on this by clicking on Capitan Charles Moore's website The Algalita Foundation

Long story short, there is this blob of viscous trash floating in the North Pacific gyre where all the currents meet and the trash collects. It's twice the size of Texas and floating just beneath the surface. Made mostly of decaying plastics, it's pretty knarly. The thing is plastic does not Bio-degrade, it Photo Degrades meaning it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces yet never totally diminishes. Despite this area being a veritable oceanic desert the few Fish, sharks, birds, whales, and dolphins basically all parts of the food chain in this area of the North Pacific have been affected by this mess. Birds mistaking the small pieces of plastic as bait fish, bigger fish eating smaller fish, sharks eating bigger fish you get the picture and it's ugly! How long until this affects the dinner that end up on your table? Truth be told it probably already is...

The solution to keep this blob from growing is simple RECYCLE. The solution of how to clean up this blob is not so simple.

For more ideas on easy eco living check out our buddy Josh Dorfman's book "The Lazy Environmentalist" and his website Vivavi.com for some excellent sustainable products including Maku!