Watch the first five minutes of this video. David de Rothschild spoke at Pratt recently about a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean about the size of Texas. I had no idea that the garbage he was talking about was actually micro plastics that have been broken down over time from the items we consume! The world really is run on plastics, from the medical industry to water bottles, to food containers, then people throw these items in the trash and don’t think about what the item’s final destination will be.
In the samples they found that plastics outnumbered organic sealife 60 to 1. Also, there are no red or orange color plastic bits because fish and birds are attracted to that color to eat! This seems like a really difficult situation to clean up, because they trawled for hours to pick up their samples. The plastic crumbs are dense but widespread over an enormous area… humans have turned the ocean into a toxic waste dump and we have no idea how to clean it up.