sometimes i wonder

[aspartaimee]

do we live in End Times?

because some dude discovered a continent of floating garbage in the pacific 10 YEARS AGO and no one has done anything about it. WTF?*

someone call hayden pantierette. get her on this.

*and the sidebar stories are all salacious celebrity gossip. the juxtaposition makes me brain hurt.

Comments

[bostorus]

I haven't been watching enough Heroes lately - what can invulnerability do about this?

The problem is almost all plastics, which are extremely harmful to marine life. We stopped dumping trash at sea years and years ago. Nowadays, the problem mostly comes from trash from coastal areas blowing / draining into the ocean, and then the ocean currents moving it all together.

It is the plastic refuse that really causes the problems. The large pieces get tangled up with the marine life. Eventually, they break down into small pieces -- individual polymers, which poison whatever ingests them.

Anyway, lots of people have done lots of things about this, but more needs to be done. Every time you recycle plastics on the Pacific coast instead of throwing them away, there is one less piece of plastic that might find its way into the ocean. San Francisco has banned the use of plastic shopping bags altogether; there has been a lot of talk about extending the plastic bag ban statewide, but the plastic bag manufacturers don't like that very much. There is also an annual coastal cleanup day that I did last September, but that is really a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem.

As a sidenote, this article discusses scientists using the movement of accidentally dumped rubber ducks to study the currents.