'Great'..!! Pacific Garbage Patch

Hello all,

I recently read an article about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. See, the irony is we have used the word 'great' for a bad creation of humans. As written here every small bit of plastic you throw it ends up at the city dump or in one of the oceans because we do not have any kind of method to get rid of the plastic we have generated. The other important thing to remember is that we cannot just blame Americans or Chinese to create such a mess. As it is mentioned there might be one in Atlantic or Indian Ocean. So every single person on this earth has to take responsibility and stop using plastic immediately.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a tragic by product of the plastics industry and consumerism that is an island of garbage floating in the northern Pacific Ocean. Originally the size of Texas (more than twice the state of Maharashtra) and getting bigger and bigger day by day, this gargantuan pile of plastic is collected by currents that swirl around in a big circle. Most of the debris is picked up from the shores of both China and North America that sandwich it.

As plastic never goes away, it eventually crumbles up into tiny bits (photo-degrades). These bits of plastic enter the food supply and are passed from the jelly fish all the way back up to humans where it is stored in their livers (that part is only fair). Plastic also pollutes the water with PCB’s (Polychlorinated Biphenyls, dangerous carcinogens and hormone disruptors).

While no one person is to blame, every person has contributed to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (it’s a safe bet the Indian or Atlantic also has one lurking somewhere). Whether one throws litter on the ground or trusts in their municipal trash companies to do it for them, everyone throws away plastic and it ends up in the ocean and then back in our bodies.

While some say cleanup is impossible, some say hopefully someday someone will find a solution. But do we sit idle till anyone finds a solution. The best and immediate way should be to stop using this demon named 'plastic' wherever we can. Some say there can be a way to convert plastic to energy (it is made of oil after all), and they can make a ship refuelling station out there that will produce energy from plastic. But it is not getting rid of the problem. It is like creating a solution which is in turn a problem (the green house gases generated by burning the fuel) itself.