It’s hard to imagine what life was like without plastic. It’s everywhere: covering our food, holding our purchases, protecting our sports stars, rolling along the highway, saving patients in hospitals and floating along our waterways and oceans.
The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.
During a recent team meeting at BrownFlynn, we started brainstorming potential (generally ridiculous) solutions to cleaning up The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This Garbage Patch the size of Texas has accumulated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where ocean currents push the pieces of (mostly) plastic into a particularly inhospitable whirlpool. It’s growing in size and every year people find other similar garbage patches around the world’s oceans.
Photo from students.umf.maine.edu/learykp/public.www/
The main problem with this is that the plastic deeply affects ocean habitats and ends up in our own bodies. The pieces of plastic break down into smaller particles, making them extraordinarily difficult to clean up, and the plastic particles both absorb and release toxic chemicals in the water, making them small pieces of contamination. Fish eat these plastic particles, mistaking them for plankton, and end up saturated with the toxins that were absorbed in the plastic. Guess who eats the fish.
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