Choking the Ocean with Plastic

By Charles J. Moore -New York Times, August 25, 2014 Plastics have awashed our world. Almost every product that we used contains them. We wrap food with plastic, bring our groceries home with plastic, and our furniture in our home is made from plastic. They have become important things in our lives and a key lubricant of globalization, however, choking our future and most of us are barely aware of that. A team of scientists have conducted six weeks research in the Great pacific Garbage Patch, which is one of the five major garbage patches drifting in the oceans north and south of the equator. They found the quantity of waste plastic has increased dramatically since the last trip in 2009. Various kinds of plastics were seen, from toothbrushes, tires, unidentifiable fragments to plastic buoys for oyster aquaculture. Plastics are now known as one of the most common pollutants of ocean waters worldwide. They are blown and pushed by winds, tides and waves; come to sea from other parts of the world. Ocean waters have become accumulation zones. Millions of sea creatures have been entangled and slowly killed by plastic debris, thinking plastic as their natural food. As a result, liver and stomach abnormalities cause starvation in fish and birds. A comprehensive way of recycling the plastic trash that covers our land and washes down to the sea has not been established. It is very hard to clean, melts at a low temperature, and so impurities are not vaporized. One of the ways to reduce the impact is changing the way we produce and consume plastics. Degradable plastic can reduce the time to degradation. (GP)