"ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement" (Hoshaw 1). This garbage path inhibits the Pacific Ocean and has been doubling in size every year, it is now approximately twice the size of Texas. As sad and disgusting as this picture is to me, what is even more devastating is that it is one of five that inhabit the world's oceans. The mass is made up of some fishing gear, but the vast majority of the waste comes from garbage that comes from land objects that are washed out to sea by storm drains. Plastic makes up most of the pile and is also the major contributing factor for why this pile destroys the environment around it.

I never really thought about what the long-term effect of not picking up all of those cigarette butts, fastfood wrappers, fliers, and cans. I also never, in my wildest dreams imagined that we could hurt our own world so much, and really have no good reason for the damage. Are people that lazy that by not picking up trash or haphazardly discarding it along a roadside, we have actually built a memorial to our ecological stupidity without even knowing it?

The fact that humans are actually destroying portions of the world that we can not physically live upon is mind-boggling to me. We are actually destroying patches of water in the ocean. This sounds naive, but I never really considered water pollution beyond oil or waste dumping. I never pictured it, quite literally, as the accumulation of a state-sized eye-sore in the middle of the ocean.

What is even more disturbing to me is that somehow I had always associated plastic materials with being okay to use, because they can be recycled. But I guess I am not being very realistic about that, since I know that many plastic materials can not be recycled. In Europe, everything can be recycled, from glass, to paper, to any sort of plastic. Recycling is a cultural stigma that everyone knows they must abide by. I wish that Americans had a better recycling system, or that we made everything out of completely recyclable materials.

Here is a link to the article from the New York Times
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html?_r=1