Turning trees into plastic sounds backward

The University of Alaska research farm on Trunk Road recently changed its name and, to some degree, its way of doing business. The farm will now be known as the Palmer Center for Sustainable Living.

While agriculture will remain its primary mission, officials said, there will be more work toward ecology, clean energy, green construction and other applications that can make the future a little better.

One statement in Friday’s Frontiersman story, though, rattles the mind.

“Researchers are working with wood products as a renewable source for hydrocarbons. One application could be to use wood to create plastics instead of petroleum.”

OK, we’re all for reducing the need for petroleum in our everyday lives. It is, after all, a finite resource.

But the idea of using trees to make plastic seems to be in conflict. Why would one decide to take a renewable, biodegradable resource and turn it into a non-biodegradable product?

Earlier this week, there was a news story all over the papers and the Internet about a couple of ships filled with scientists leaving California en route to what is called a trash pile the size of Texas swirling around in the Pacific.

“The bobbing debris field, where currents swirl items like discarded fishing line and plastic bottles into a soupy mess, is about 1,000 miles west of California,” reported the San Jose Mercury News.

While the vortex of trash is out of sight, it certainly shouldn’t be out of our minds when we go to the local store and buy another bottle of water in a plastic bottle. Why not use the empty bottle you bought yesterday and fill it with fine Alaska water out of the tap?

Tap water, after all, is what filled most of those bottles with fancy names that are now degrading into tiny pieces that seabirds eat, and then with their bellies full of trash, starve to death.

Yes, we need plastics in our lives for a number of reasons, but creating more plastic because we’re lousy consumers and lazy about trash is no excuse to turn trees into more trash.

The new sustainable living center people would much better improve the earth’s future by, say, turning those trees into small, degradable bags that could replace the plastic bags we have to put our produce in at the grocery store. It’s disappointing to buy a few reusable cloth bags for shopping only to have to put a pound of peppers in a plastic bag in them anyway.

Finally, scientists have said there is an average of 46,000 pieces of litter over every square mile of ocean. If you have an acre lot, that’s 72 pieces of litter in your yard.