Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash

Anach · Unread post by **Anach** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 12:23 pm

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... e=politics

At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie "American Beauty," a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life's unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a "most beautiful thing."

To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.

In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Molten Prominence · Unread post by **Molten Prominence** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 1:17 pm

Im surprised no one has made the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a tourist attraction by now. They could make it interative...you fly over and everyone throws a piece of garbage out.

Think of all the T-shirts and lunch boxes they could sell.