The Great Pacific Garbage Gyre

After you see this thing called the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre and what it actually contains, you will never be the same. Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is now and has been growing for the past 30 years since disposable plastic was invented a swirling pile of floating plastic that represents in large part the garbage from we humans. This miasma of floating plastic trash has collected in the center of the Pacific ocean because currents tend to flow in a swirling pattern that causes in the end every piece of floating trash in this vicinity to conglomerate into this one floating cesspool of bags, two-liter bottles and, in effect, every single piece of plastic that has been thrown out that has found its way to the ocean.

Let yourself not forget this fact: plastic never degrades. There are no bacteria or organisms of any kind that consume plastic. Every single piece of plastic that has ever been created is still in existence, no different from the day it was made, whether that plastic grocery store bag is buried in an earthen landfill or if it swirls in the Great Pacific Trash Gyre or any of the other half-dozen or so other existing gyres with their tangles of fishing nets, plastic bags, bits of cups and of course the fragmented flakes of plastic that are the only possible degradation of plastic, meaning, the chemical nature of the plastic is unaltered, it's merely broken into millions of tiny fragments of plastic. No further decomposition occurs--ever. And we're not referring to a time scale that is in the hundreds of years but in the hundreds of thousands of years.

So, if you feel the same as I, the question arises in my mind: why have I been offered as disposable items that were in fact permanent. The plastic plate that I ate a hotdog from on July 4th, 1967--well, that exact plastic plate still exists in a landfill near Wisner, Nebraska. If washed, that 40-year-old plastic plate would be exactly as good a plate as it was in 1967. Plastic is forever. We are horribly mistaken treating it like one.

The presence and fact of the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre, the physical desicration of the planet, the death of fish and poisoning of the food chain with plastic, are hard evidence that plastic cannot continue.