Jackson Browne: I Blame bottled water for the oil spill!

I was struck the other day by a comparison made on 5 Gyres, the blog site of scientists and activists who are working to draw attention to the growing concentration of plastic pollution in the world's oceans.



According to the scientists' and activists' estimate, the amount of oil used to produce plastic every day is the same amount as the oil that is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every day from the damaged Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.



And they point out that the plastic ends up in the same place – the ocean. So that means that we are the spill, or a spill of similar proportion to the uncontainable, disastrous spill in the Gulf of Mexico.



Earth song: Jackson Browne is passionate about protecting the planet

Last year my touring production company decided to eliminate plastic water bottles from the list of things we are provided in the venues we perform in. Now we carry two five-gallon coolers, and each of the band and crew carries a stainless-steel water bottle.



On our buses we use Brita filters. My production manager estimates we save between 200 and 250 bottles each show, and up to 96 bottles every day on the buses. We are one of several tours that we know of who are making these kinds of changes.



There are also some venues and festivals that are eliminating single-use plastics. Living in Los Angeles, I had long believed that having one's own sealed water bottle was safer than trusting the municipal water supply.



My children grew up drinking from plastic water bottles. But not long ago I heard a radio programme that dispelled that myth, and a few others, including the viability of recycling all the plastic bottles produced every year.

Most of the bottled water sold as spring water in America is, in fact, tap water. There don't seem to be any legal barriers to selling what comes out of a pipe in New Jersey or Los Angeles as spring water, or mountain water, or Arctic water, at least not in the United States.



There is far more quality control of American water supplies by municipalities than is exercised by the companies that bottle tap water and sell it to us for as much 200 times its value.



As for the designer water that is shipped from Fiji or France or Sweden all over the world, using jet or diesel fuel – this only adds to the amount of oil that is used by the plastic bottled water industry.



It takes one third of a bottle of petroleum to manufacture a single plastic bottle. Add to that the cost in petro-miles of shipping it around the world and you have what is still accepted as a legitimate business expense, though it may eventually be seen as a crime.



The amount of oil used to produce plastic is the same amount as the oil that is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged Deepwater Horizon drilling rig

Getting people to accept the premise that only the water from pristine and exotic locations is truly clean may be a marketing triumph, but it is a human health disaster.



The health issue with plastic bottles is that they are made with Bisphenol A or BPA, a known 'endocrine disruptor', which can mimic the body's hormones and can have side effects.



BPA is used to make the plastic hard and clear, and it was developed originally as a sex hormone drug until that use was discontinued for reasons of human health and safety.



BPA leaches out of the bottles into the liquids they contain, in amounts that are claimed to be safe by the plastics industry. But last year experts from five universities – London, Plymouth, Reading, Stirling and Ulster – urged the British Government to review BPA.



In a letter to the then Health Secretary Andy Burnham, they wrote: 'The major body of research and evidence presented over the last decade strengthens the growing consensus that low-level exposure to BPA has a significant impact on increasing the risks of developing conditions such as cancer, diabetes, impaired brain function, and behavioral problems in mammalian laboratory animals.'



Britain has not enacted any changes yet, but Japan has limited levels of BPA in tins and has removed it from plastic containers used by children.



Canada has listed BPA as a toxic chemical and banned it from baby bottles, and there are efforts in America, France and Australia to restrict or ban the use of BPA from children's bottles, cups and plates.



But let's go back to what is happening to the word's oceans. Most of us have heard by now that there is a 'floating island of rubbish in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas', or some variation of that.



But it's not an island, and it's not something that can be cleaned up or somehow recycled. In fact, what is happening in the Pacific is happening in all five of the planet's ocean gyres – as the systems of currents are called.

And it's not really rubbish. It is plastic. It is breaking down into ever smaller pieces, but it can never biodegrade. In parts of the Pacific this plastic outweighs plankton seven to one.



Fish mistake it for food and eat it. And we eat the fish. We are poisoning ourselves, and destroying the ocean. This is done in the name of free enterprise, unregulated markets, the right to do business and the right to make a profit – and in the name of convenience, evidently the most precious freedom we have.

The plastics industry insists that all we have to do is recycle. But why should we bear the cost and responsibility of recycling it? Why should we buy the stuff and then pay to dispose of it? In the case of the oceans, we will never be able to clean them up faster than the rate plastic is going in.

The answer is to stop producing it, to stop buying it. A few years ago I was on a remote beach in Spain and spent the day cleaning it up with another guy there, a German. It was mostly plastic. He muttered that the locals didn't appreciate the natural beauty of the place.



Both of us assumed it had been thrown away there carelessly, perhaps dumped there. But now I don't think so. I can see now that it had all washed up there. Humans are slobs.



There's no way around it. We are slobs. I know surfers who travel the world and ride the planet's most remote waves. They say there are plastic bottles washing up in Antarctica, in Patagonia, and all of the most distant and pristine beaches in the world.



What are we doing? There are laws against defiling the public places in our cities. Where are the laws that protect our public planet, our commonly held wilderness, our oceans?



Our oceans without which we certainly will perish? I had occasion to remark at my show at the Royal Albert Hall in London that we are the oil spill, and it is up to us to provide a solution to the problem. And that the more I have become used to carrying a metal bottle, the easier it is to just fill my own bottle and take it with me.



On a night when I was singing my most personal reflections on life, I wanted to bring up the life of the planet. I wanted to ask us all to try to remember to do all we can in the face of all these disasters, and to continue doing things that make a difference.



One thing we can do is to exercise our power as consumers, and to make choices that serve the interests of our families and of future generations, and the health of the planet.



Please read the websites of 5 Gyres (5gyres.org), and Plastic Pollution Coalition (plasticpollutioncoalition.org), and go online and read Martin Hickman's brilliant article Bad Chemistry: The Poison In The Plastic That Surrounds Us. And oppose single-use plastic!



