As I canoed down the Mississippi River from its beginning at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, it started out as beautiful as a dream. Within five miles, I watched hundreds, then thousands of plastic containers float alongside me after having been pitched by other boaters. Plastic bags hung from trees and billowed in the water as they draped from branches along Old Man River. People drove cars over the river’s edge and left couches and lawn chairs on sand bars. Clothes and junk got tossed along its 2,552 mile trip to New Orleans. It made me sick every day. I filled two large trash bags a day and I couldn’t begin to get it all.
On my bicycle ride from Norway to Greece in 2005, we boarded a ferry from Italy to Patros. Along the way, we witnessed huge floating gobs of plastic trash collected in ugly swarms hundreds of yards long.
Plastic proves the worst human invention, besides chemicals, because plastic doesn’t break down or biodegrade. About the only thing that destroys it is fire, but then, the pollution from the smoke proves fatal to the environment.
Alan Weisman, author of “Polymers are forever” published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/270 He wrote, “The true answer is we just don't know how much is out there."
Weisman wrote about Richard Thompson, “He knew the terrible tales of sea otters choking on poly-ethylene rings from beer six-packs; of swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green sea turtle in Hawaii dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst was a study on fulmar bird carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of forty-four pieces per bird.
“There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. When they get as small as powder, even zooplankton will swallow them."
"Can you believe it?" said Richard Thompson, one of the men researching how widespread plastic moved into water systems. "They're selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to be swallowed by little sea creatures."
Soon, the disposable diaper arrived! On my bicycle travels across America and the world, I’ve seen tens of thousands of soiled, plastic baby diapers thrown into every corner of the planet.
On our oceans, “In 1975, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences had estimated that all oceangoing vessels together dumped 8 million pounds of plastic annually. More recent research showed the world's merchant fleet alone shamelessly tossing around 639,000 plastic containers every day.
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