Green Daily

Remember reading about that huge floating island of plastic crap out in the middle of the Pacific that's twice the size of the continental United States? How'd it make you feel when you saw that? Proud of humanity's technological ability to dominate the earth completely? Ashamed and depressed as hell? Well, wait til you hear the sequel.

Green Tech Blog reports on Charles Moore, an oceanographer who's just returned from a 5 week cruise in the Pacific who says that the situation is far more dire than even pessimists have imagined. According to Moore, samples taken from the 2.5 million square mile Pacific garbage dump show 6 times more plastic in the water than plankton, a fivefold jump in the decade from 1997 to 2007. He offers the opinion that no technology is going to clear the ocean of plastic, and that if anything it's only likely to get worse.

Why don't we like plastic in the water, besides the fact that it wrecks the view from the beachhouse? Welll, an abbreviated checklist of problems with plastic pollution would include the fact that it kills millons of birds and fish each year, poisons the maritime food chain with PCBs and other toxins, and may even accelerate global warming by making it more difficult for CO2-sucking plankton to grow.

Anyway, Moore says we can't fix it and sadly, he's probably right. However, with a little personal effort, we can at least stop adding to it.