Here's an article with photos from a guy whose been tracking a huge patch of mostly plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean:
Best Life Magazine: Travel & Leisure: Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?
It will add a new (and awful) word to your vocabulary (nurdles) and explain how our consumer choices are coming back to bite us (hard). The turtle and bird photos are must-sees.
Some quotes:
"As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body."
"Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists."
"The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table"
'The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”'
'“If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up.'
"None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin"
"awareness of just how hard we’ve bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing"
Plastic: Worse Than We Thought
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