ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS
The club has changed the schedule for our community grants awards this year. We will delay the grant awards until fall of 2019 so that we can determine the exact amount of funds we have to distribute. Watch this site for more information.
Rachel Kippen was our speaker today. She is the newly appointed director for O’Neill Sea Odyssey and she spoke on the importance of diversity in environmental issues and plastic pollution in the ocean, especially focusing on Monterey Bay. She has worked as a marine science educator for some years in various sites around California but is originally from Hawaii.
At O’Neill Sea Odyssey students are provided a hands on ocean experience (for 4th thru 6th graders) in Santa Cruz San Benito Monterey and Santa Clara counties They have three classrooms in the old wetsuit shop space. Then they go out onto the ocean to collect their data and then bring it back to the classroom to do things like count the sea otters.
Rachel went on to speak about how plastic doesn’t biodegrade and then gets ingested by marine life and it causes all kinds of problems. 269,000 tons of this stuff seems to be in the ocean at this time. The cause of this is mismanaged waste from many countries.
Europe is one area that has been handling this problem well. They are putting the responsibility on companies that produce single use plastic. China stopped accepting our plastic recyclables which led to chaos.
She suggested four solutions for us. (1) participate in a beach clean up especially on coastal clean-up day . Our local area is second only to San Diego in the amount of trash collected She mentioned that Ocean clean up project where boats go out and do the clean-up is a problem with huge nets because they end up with ‘by catch’ or catching endangered species (2) Ban Styrofoam, straws, plastic bags and bottles by law as well as other single use plastics These are called Trash Ammendments and have developed as a result of the coastal clean up data . the goal for Californian is to get rid of trash in our waterways by 2030 (3) Alternative packaging such as carboard and plastic free living such as opportunities to buy bulk and in glass containers (4) Learn act and educate and advocate . \
For more information got to oneillseaodyssey.org