The Trash Vortex

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The “Eastern Garbage Patch”

"The North Pacific sub-tropical gyre covers a large area of the Pacific in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Winds are light. The currents tend to force any floating material into the low energy central area of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach. So it stays there in the gyre, in astounding quantities estimated at six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton. The equivalent of an area the size of Texas swirling slowly around like a clock. This gyre has also been dubbed “the Asian Trash Trail” the “Trash Vortex” or the “Eastern Garbage Patch".

http://oceans.greenpeace.org/en/our-oceans/pollution/trash-vortex

Six Kilos of plastic for every kilo of plankton......adrift in the same ocean as landlocked Kyoto..

Peace

Pilgrim

X

Horrible.

I remember once years ago, while working in a different flower shop,
someone came in to order flowers for a burial at sea.
They wanted flowers poked into a styrofoam (a product which will be here long after you and I have shaken off this mortal coil, btw) wreath, and it takes wires and pins to do this whole project. I politely suggested other tributes for their dearly departed, but they were insistent.

So was I. There was no fookin' way I was going to make something with styro, wires, pins, possibly toxic flowers and have them toss it into the ocean, just so the shop owner could make a few bucks. She was livid.

I was fired!

Ha!

http://oceans.greenpeace.org/en/our-oceans/pollution/trash-vortex

Six Kilos of plastic for every kilo of plankton......adrift in the same ocean as landlocked Kyoto..

That makes me so angry... grrrrrr! Thanks for posting that Pilgrim. Now i'm definitely happier knowing that i am doing some sort of cleaning "in a miniscule way" when i pick up the rubbish on Oxwich.

XX

There's so much pointless plastic packaging on products that defenately do'nt need it; was going to buy a multitool pocketknife the other day but it was impossible to find one that did'nt come in thick burglarproof plastic!

Unfortunately that doesn't surprise me in the least. It seems whenever I'm near the sea, wherever in the world that may be, there are more plastic bottles than pebbles!

I remember being on the Isle of Skye once on a really remote beach a fair old way from any settlements (well let's face it there aren't that many people living on the Isle of Skye where there ARE settlements!) and there was crap of every description EVERYWHERE! It looked as if every person living on that island had gone out of their way to get down to that beach to dump their rubbish, which was highly unlikely given that the beach was a fair old slap away from any roads. Of course most of that rubbish had probably just been washed up there. It was just so sad. The smell was dreadful and their were rats scuttling all over the place.

It was the same when I used to live in Saltdean; rubbish everywhere on the beach - bottles, yoghurt pots, beer cans, bits of old fishing net, tangled lumps of rope, planks of wood - you name it. Sometimes I'd have a clear up operation and start bagging it all up but there'd be just as much shite knocking around the next day.

I think there's this awful 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality where people think if they chuck rubbish in the sea it'll just be 'eaten' by the ocean never to be seen again! All very depressing.

This is the time of year when we're "more" aware of what's left in and on our beaches. Let's help clean up, please. xxxx

"Take only memories, Leave only footprints"