Living plastic free: Brain Food: Plastic Ocean

People ask EnviroWoman “What have you got against plastic?”

Well, it bugs me that almost every piece of plastic ever made still exists and will for who knows how long. We assume it just ends up in landfills… ‘so hey, no big deal’. But it doesn’t. Often it ends up in our wild areas….and in our oceans where it can have disastrous effects.

That’s why EnviroWoman asks you to take 20 minutes out of your life and read a pretty fabulous (and scary) article…Plastic Ocean. It’s a great read with sad, sad pictures too. "

It starts by introducing you to the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a 10-million-square-mile area 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. It’s very calm water, so garbage that makes it’s way there accumulates. Scientists call it the “Eastern Garbage Patch” and the trail of plastic trash goes on for hundreds of miles covering an area twice the size of Texas.

Minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, are everywhere and the water contains six times as much plastic (by weight) as it does plankton. Isn’t that super super scary?

The plastic makes its way into the food chain and is consumed by whales to zooplankton where it disrupts gene activity, digestion, and causes cancer. Seabirds wash ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic, things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators. (One animal dissected contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.).

More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating plastic garbage or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

And it gets worse…

The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such zones in the oceans. Together, they cover 40% of the sea, one-quarter of the earth’s surface, each with its own garbage patch…that means 25 percent of our planet is ‘a toilet that never flushes.'

The article then introduces you to the scary world of plastic after-effects from phthaltes, bisphenol A and BPAs and how they affect not just wildlife, and lab rats…but you.

Ya gotta read it sweets…Plastic Ocean.

EnviroWoman recommends you watch this great video too, by Cryptic Moth…on the same subject.