Plastic Island

One of my biggest grips about humanity is our 'out of sight, out of mind’ mentality, once something is put in the garbage and taken away by the garbage man (or woman no discrimination here!) it’s gone forever. We hear statistics on how much waste is accumulated annually but our cities our so clean and we never see any of it so how bad can it be?
The answer is it’s bad, and a lot of it ends up in our water.

Greenpeace estimates that 10% of ALL plastic ends up in the ocean. Just think of how much plastic you go through in a week, from packaging on a chocolate bar to empty pens to old toys to appliances to WHATEVER. 10% ends up in the water (or approximately 10 million tons annually).

Well we don’t see that much plastic at the beach so where is it? The answer is Plastic Island or the Plastic Vortex and the reason we don’t see photos of it everywhere is because it’s all underwater. But it’s there in the Pacific Ocean and it’s said to between the size of Texas and the size of the U.S.A.

I think that the detrimental effects of this are obvious (highly toxic pollutants in our water from the plastic which ends up concentrated in the fish that most people eat, destroying wild life and ecosystems….etc) , but for those who need a visual:
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Sea-Plastic-LN-PG5oct05a.jpg

Essentially after garbage and debris make their way into our beaches (from wind, litter, or from ships) it is picked up by the current and the ocean’s vortexes until it gets stuck in the ones between North America and Asia. I’ve heard people ask “Why don’t we remove it?”. Well, again it’s under water, it’s the size of Texas, and where do we put it? And like all issues, governments usually don’t tackle these things on their own until a huge public outcry (even then they drag their feet).

So what do we do? I usually don’t recommend solutions on this blog because for the most part I think these solutions are usually pretty obvious but aren’t used because they are considered inconvenient: Banning plastic bags are a good step but I think we shold ban plastic, examine our outlandish consumption, habits, and force ourselves to really be responsible for our garbage which is more than just putting it in the garbage can.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with why plastic is public enemy #1, that will be tomorrow’s topic.