Environment
Plastic
(not so) Fantastic
From our friends at Sailors
for the Sea:
Imagine
the massive breadth and spread of our great state of Texas. Now imagine
every milli-inch of that piled high with trash: bottle caps, cigarettes,
cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, plastic nets, discarded flip
flops, Frisbees, soda bottles, milk jugs, diapers, six-pack rings, busted
tennis rackets, empty pens, shampoo bottles, empty squeeze bottles of
jam, you name it. Now take that image, double it, and plunk into the
water. That’s what is floating around the eastern corner of a
10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre.
Nicknamed the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” this buoyant stew
of toxic pollution—most of which is plastic—is only one
of five such garbage heaps caught in the swirling high-pressure currents
characteristic of gyres. The others reside in the South Pacific, the
North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. And each year, perhaps
unwittingly, each one of us adds to plastic to the heap. Read
More.
