Drowning in plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France

[Barrett808]

There are now 46000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans killing a million seabirds and 100000 marine mammals each year. Worse still there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?

Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris. ...

'There's no such thing as a pristine sandy beach any more,' Charles Moore says. 'The ones that look pristine are usually groomed, and if you look closely you can always find plastic particles. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until you dig a foot down. On Pagan Island they have what they call the "shopping beach". If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of all the plastic trash that's washed up there from thousands of miles away.'

(more)

http://desdemonadespair.blogspot.com/2009/04/drowning-in-plastic-great-pacific.html

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Plastic bottles are in the category of a plague...a man made plague.

[panader0]

2. Some smart company will sieze the opportunity

to harvest all this free plastic, not only making a buck, but helping the environment.

[Systematic Chaos]

4. Problem is, a great deal of this plastic isn't in the form of large objects.

Rather, it is in the form of "nurdles", or teeny-tiny plastic building blocks. Those would be very hard to retrieve from the ocean, I'm afraid. :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurdle

[ellenfl]

3. get those floating fish harvesters to go

to the pacific and scoop up all that sh*t. i don't see why that cannot be accomplished.

ellen fl

[ChairmanAgnostic]

5. I suspect that it already is developing its own ecosystem

but we are too slow to realize it. It may even spawn a whole new form of life, one that uses this island as a breeding ground, a place to capture fresh water, even become semi-solid. Life is tenacious, and can do surprising things.

Disclaimer: I am not happy about this island, but I am convinced that it will surprise us.

[phantom power]

6. Maybe we should just hoist the white flag and call it a new biome?