Two separate studies conducted by ocean research groups found that millions of micro-particles of plastic are floating in the waters between Bermuda and Portugal’s mid-Atlantic Azores islands, threatening fish, ocean mammals and, potentially, the sea life humans farm for food.

The studies describe a soup of micro-particles similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a phenomenon discovered a decade ago between Hawaii and California that researchers say is likely to exist in other places around the globe.

“I think a lot of people have this idea that there’s a plastic garbage island out there in the sea, and that’s not really what we see out there,” Lead investigator Kara Lavender Law said. “If you’re not looking for anything, you wouldn’t see these plastic particles, but we know that there are clearly millions of them out there.”

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We recently stumbled upon an excellent resource in the battle to reduce single use plastic bag use—a recently published report from the Florida DEP on retail bag use and ways to curb it. While its data is skewed towards the authoring state, it’s chock-full of interesting and useful information to anyone—worldwide—contemplating a reusable bag program. Many of the interesting tidbits are things we at Bulletin Bag [.com] have covered in other blogs (The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, getting by without plastic bags, etc.), but we wanted to discuss one thing we haven’t touched on in any of our other writings: biodegradable bags.

While biodegradable and compostable bags aren’t new to market, there has been a relatively new push towards their use as alternative to traditional plastic bags. Even though bags that don’t persist in the environment sound like a positive step, there are serious drawbacks.

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