There is a floating island of plastic waste, twice the size of Texas, caught in a current gyro between USA and Hawaii! The huge area is filled with plastic which never shows up on satellite. The massive area of gunk was found by someone who sailed into it by mistake as he was returning from a yacht race. The enormous stew of plastic garbage weighs over three million tons and grows tenfold every decade. Horrific or what?!
It is so dangerous for wildlife; sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jelly fish, and eat them. Birds swallow shards of plastic. More than a million sea birds, 100,000 marine mammals and countless fish die each year either from eating the junk or becoming ensnared in it and drowning.
Any sort of cleanup operation is virtually impossible as some plastic bottles disintegrate into particles as fine as dust, and the larger pieces become entangled with derelict fishing nets and waterlogged tyres.
There is a major dispute as to who will clean up this mess as it currently lies about a thousand miles west of California and a thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands. Any nation that embarks on the cleanup automatically admits that it is responsible, so they won’t acknowledge it!
That story is disturbing enough, however a vast swirling mass of plastic bags and rubbish has now been discovered in the Atlantic too! The floating garbage heap, which contains debris blown off the coast of Britain and carried by currents, is a smaller version of the huge plastic island as described above. Marine researchers who made the discovery say that every ocean is now contaminated in plastic waste. (The findings come from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza)
Now ask yourself a question? Who put it there in the first place? Who helped to create these massive islands of garbage, that are destroying so much of our environment? People like you and I unfortunately. Over the last 50 years, our generation has created this gigantic problem. And, our generation needs to now start to eradicate the problem.
Don’t know where to start?
All we need to do is carry on doing what we are doing, with a slight difference. Instead of using plastic bags, we can switch to TOTALLY degradable bags. D2W technology produce fully degradable bags that will completely degrade to H20 and Co2 within a period of 12 – 18 months, unlike the typical plastic bag that will be around for 400 – 1000 years! The bags are also fully recyclable.
One step at a time, and that next step can be taken in the next 5 minutes! Check out Ecomarketstall and see the range of totally degradable bags, from refuse sacks, bin liners, freezer bags, nappy sacks/degradable dog waste bags.
Let’s make a fantastic start on the clean up operation by ensuring we don’t carry on adding to the mess!
(copywright Wikaniko)
