Scary article that I want to come back to and finish reading.
...Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore
has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there.
Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration
business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to
spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies,
which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a
university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort
has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle.
After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive
director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and
an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for
analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the
Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has
grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the
size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic
pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making
its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the
dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their
bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette
lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging
bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers
contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea
creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to
zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea
turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass
shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make
it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds,
100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific
each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being
ensnared in it and drowning.
...
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,”
...
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade,
or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the
stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural
disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year,
we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes
disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question
of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for
half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never
really goes away....(link)
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