By John DeFore

Eco-minded fishing enthusiasts may be aware, and appalled, that the traditional monofilament fishing line they probably use isn’t only made of petroleum but, should a stretch of it break off and get lost in the deep, it will hang around for centuries, quite likely obstructing fish habitat and definitely junking up our already too polluted waters.

One solution: Bioline biofilament, which when dropped into a lake, according to the manufacturer, “will be gone in five years versus six hundred.”

Sold online by the outdoor goods retailer Go Fast and Light — where you can find a trout bait that’s also 90% biodegradable, with the remainder made of sand — the line comes in 210-yard spools ranging from 4- to 12-pound test weights. (It’s sold in a sealed pouch that has a five-year shelf life when sealed; once opened and put to use, the line should retain 100% of its strength for 10 to 12 months.)

A spinoff of the technology that led to medical sutures that dissolve into the human body, Bioline’s product claims to comply with ASTM’s “Standard Specifications for Compostable Plastics” and, according to Go Fast’s Patrick Dotterweich, is “in the final month of lab testing (which simulates a five year span in six months in a lab) that will certify their claim to [be] 100% biodegradable by a 3rd party test.”

Dotterweich adds, “The five year claim is conservative,” and that “under ideal ‘composting type’ conditions they expect it to be gone in less time.”

Giving the world the first fishing line that got away.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

By John DeFore

Announced this week is news of another way in which warming climates may produce natural phenomena that accelerate warming by adding more carbon to the atmosphere. A letter published online by the journal Nature Geoscience offers an abstract of research into carbon release by peat moss.

The work, led by Takeshi Ise of Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, was a simulation using data from both shallow and deep peat areas in Manitoba, Canada.

“Historically, northern peatlands have functioned as a carbon sink, sequestering large amounts of soil organic carbon,” the letter explains, noting that low temperatures in soggy soil lead to slow decomposition (thus retaining carbon) and also cause water-table levels to rise, growing more peat and storing more carbon.

In the team’s simulation, though, they envisioned the effect of a temperature rise of four degrees Celsius. What they project in such a scenario is “a 40% loss of soil organic carbon from the shallow peat and 86% from the deep peat.”

As temperature rises, not only does the top layer of peat dry and rot, but that drying lets the water table drop, contributing to further drying — all of which releases carbon into the atmosphere, adding to warming that continues the cycle.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

By Barbara Kessler

Remember the global food crisis of earlier this year? Unfortunately, the intervening mortgage, energy and banking crises have not solved it.

The next food shortages are headed our way in waves - from the oceans, where overfishing has led to the steep decline of shark populations worldwide, the closing of West Coast salmon fisheries and now, the potential slide of the Alaskan Pollock.

This latest fish-in-trouble was once so prolific that it became the world’s most omnipresent, affordable everyman’s seafood, sliced into faux crab, minced and pressed into fish sticks and filleted into fast food McFishwiches. [Read more →]