Our Oceans Are Filling With Plastic

Best Life has published a disturbing feature about the amount of discarded plastic that collects in currentless doldrums in the open ocean.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

It’s not just large pieces of plastic polluting the ocean, either, but tiny particles that spread into the water to be consumed by animal life.

Plastic doesn’t biodegrade, for all practical purposes, meaning every single plastic thing we’ve every created in the last hundred years or so of plastic creation is still with us, either in original form or at a molecular level. The idea that every single thing we create needs to be reclaimed and reused in daunting, but increasingly I’m starting to think that the challenge of controlling every last aspect of our impact on the planet is a possible and necessary task. It’s a question of whether we want our species to be a cancer or a beneficial symbiote. Plus I just want the oceans to stay healthy, because I like to play in them.

Plastic Ocean [BestLifeOnline.com]