Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Our legacy - a garbage patch

One of the most disturbing results of our ever mindless consumption is the growing garbage patch in the Pacific. Doubling twice in size each decade, this slur of bottlecaps, lighters, toothbrushes, plastic bags and small pieces of broken junk is now estimated to be twice the size of Texas.

Sea creatures and birds die a painful death digesting our debris. Chris Jordan, who has done some outstanding work described in an earlier post, has documented some of this in a new story. Check out how our junk makes it half around the world to kill innocent life.



Keep this in mind with every throw away item you use. Every piece of packaging or containment that is only useful to us for a very short time is ending up as a massive long term problem elsewhere, no matter how much we recycle.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

A recent NYT article about zero waste:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/science/earth/20trash.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Unknown said...

My kids and I made a pact to aim for low-waste lunches this year. This mostly means using containers instead of plastic bags in which to store food or not buying idnividual servings of things like applesauce. So far, we've used only one zip-loc bag, and that was because some carrot sticks were already in it. (Not a good choice from the beginning; I blame my husband.)

At the risk of sounding preachy, it's way easier than you might think. Our dishwasher is a little more full, but our landfills and oceans are a tiny bit less full.