Just something I heard on the news the other day and I thought might be interesting to share.
Here is a link to one of the articles on the "garbage patch" that I found on the Mother Nature Network: Garbage Patch
When my dad was watching the news last night, the words "great garbage patch" and "ocean" caught my attention and I wandered over to the couch from the kitchen. On the news, they spoke about how trash in China and Japan is ending up along our Western coastline, traveling by the ocean currents. I didn't catch much more than that, but this topic sort of follows up on a previous article I did on how plastic was hurting aquatic life, so I thought it would be appropriate to mention, and did a little more searching on it.
Plastic, especially, does a lot of damage, but there are other things that an animal often mistakes for food and cannot digest that are also lethal, or things that they get caught in like nets and fishing line. Being that there is 100 million tons of garbage now floating in our oceans, who knows what kind of damage this is causing. Yes. 100 million tons of garbage. Of course, this is only an estimate, but such a monumental number should be attracting more attention. Studies have yet to be done on exactly how this is effecting fish and other aquatic populations, but we can speculate that it is likely having some effect on declining populations.
The largest problem this poses is that the ocean is so large that it is impossible to drag nets and pick it all up, and most of it lies right beneath the surface, where it is difficult to see from above. Some of the floating garbage is turning up along our coasts, but there is little that we can do to remove it. So what do we do about it? Prevent the garbage from washing out, or even prevent it from being created in the first place. No garbage = no waste = no landfills = no garbage pollution.
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