Today in Winlaw, Chef Auringer showed the class his special recipe for fossil fuels – one warm ocean mixed with a generous amount of plankton, several impermeable layers of sediment carefully sprinkled on top, then apply much pressure and set your timer to, oh, a few hundred million years, and voila! Oil. Chef also created some natural gas, thanks to the high cooking temperatures. How does this relate to plastic? That’s where it all begins, seeing as plastic is made from petroleum mixed with chemicals. Discovered around 150 years ago, it is amazing to see just how plastic is now found almost everywhere, and is in almost everything. It’s hard to imagine life without it. But with all the advantages to this lightweight, multi-use and relatively inexpensive product comes the flip side, the most shocking, perhaps, being all the plastic now found in our oceans. We learned about the North Pacific Gyre, which now is also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch thanks to all the plastic found there.
