Green Daily

From this weekend's New York Times Magazine comes an in-depth article that looks at the plastic content of our oceans.

Donovan Hohn looks particularly at cleanup efforts at Gore Point, Alaska, by a group called Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK. Hohn does an admirable job of explaining all of the different risks posed by this and all plastic pollution, from strangled seabirds to "poison pills," created when plastic polymers absorb dangerous chemicals called persistent organic pollutants--things like Dioxin and DDT. Those pollutants could then enter the food chain more easily--a chain that we sit on top of.

While getting to polluted Gore Point for debris removal is dangerous and difficult, you can find plastic trash washing up on just about any beach. I recently visited Tybee Island, Georgia, which has its own store of plastic and other human trash floating around the marsh and the open water where tourists go to swim and surf. What should we do about this? It will take more than a cleanup effort. At some point, we'll have to stop using the things that show up in these floating trash dumps: water bottles, plastic shopping bags, and just about a million other plastic products.