The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In case anybody was wondering what happens to all the plastic trash in the world, here’s the answer…

There is a 3.5 million ton cloud of garbage that floats around the Pacific Ocean.

It is twice the size of Texas.

Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage for 10 years.

“With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it’s the perfect environment for trapping,” Eriksen said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm.”

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

The thing is wreaking havoc on aquatic animals:

Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean’s surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.

“These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs,” Chabot said. “It doesn’t pass, and they literally starve to death.”

This is pretty crazy. It makes sense that all the trash people create would add up over time, but I’m still kind of dumbfounded by how big this thing sounds.

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GMA has some visuals:

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Kevin Danaher @ DC Green Festival

Yesterday, I listened to Kevin Danaher give the last keynote address at the DC Green Festival.

In 2000, The New York Times described Danaher as the “Paul Revere of globalization’s woes.”

His wife and fellow activist Media Benjamin introduced him after The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel gave a talk.

Both Danaher and Benjamin helped found Global Exchange, one of the organizations responsible for starting the Green Festival.

He laid out some pretty amazing ideas on jumpstarting the Green economy. He made me think that SF is gonna be ground zero for this innovation.

He also made me think the coalition of organizations he’s working with might be part of the answer to the question – what has happened to all of the anti-globalization protest energy that came to a head in Seattle at WTO?

Afterwards, I picked up his new book (pictured above).

It’s full of vignettes of folks who are doing really interesting work in the ‘green’ sector. I am planning on picking out the best ones and blogging about them.

There is some really good stuff.