Friday, August 08, 2008

Trash Island floating in the middle of the Pacific??

Have you heard of this? I have seen it on several sources, and thought there were maybe exaggerating, but it's true. Trash, esp styrofoam (which is forever!) and plastic washes off our shores, or floats down our rivers, and into the ocean. Because of the currents in the Pacific, it ends up in the Pacific Gyre, and area in the center roughly the size of the US. It's like a toilet that never flushes, just rotates around in there. So what happens when the Pacific is full, where do we flush it to then? Also I have seen photos of beaches where the sand is mixed with small, multicolored particles of plastic.

Here is a website about a ship that is doing research on the Gyre, and get this, the ship is called Junk, because it is made of trash. Junk Blog The blog also had a nice list of site with more information.

Suddenly I am going to get pretty insistent about recycling.

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