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Plastic is Polluting our Lakes and Oceans
You’ve read about all the scary things out there in our oceans. Somali pirates, rogue waves, but how about the real dangers? Plastic.
Imagine the massive breadth and spread of our great state of Texas. Now imagine every square inch of that state piled high with trash. Bottle caps, cigarettes, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, plastic nets, discarded flip flops, Frisbees, soda bottles, milk jugs, diapers, six-pack rings, busted tennis rackets, empty pens, shampoo bottles, empty squeeze bottles of jam, you name it. Now take that image, double it, and plunk into the water.
That’s what is floating around the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Nicknamed the Eastern Garbage Patch, this buoyant stew of toxic pollution—most of which is plastic—is only one of five such garbage heaps caught in the swirling high-pressure currents characteristic of gyres. The others reside in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. And each year, perhaps unwittingly, each one of us adds to plastic to the heap.
Generally, sailors are more environmentally aware than landlubbers. Although, when back on land we tend to resort to our old comforts and that includes using too much plastic.
For more information, contact on what you can do now, to lessen the amount of plastic that ends up in ourlakes and oceans Fred Whiteside Consulting’s at; http://www.bws.com / fred@bws.com
