View Thomas Morton’s documentary on Garbage Island!
Chase Lauderdale Eco Athlete
watched it and its sad. companies just need to take bottles back for free.
Environmental Impact A heap of trash that is twice the size of Texas is floating between San Francisco and Hawaii. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it's called, is 80 percent plastic, and weighs in at 3.5 million tons. Trapped in a circular course by winds and currents, it's been around since the 1950s, and has been growing tenfold every decade. It's not a dumping ground in the sense that people are flying or boating by and throwing their refuse into the heap. Instead, it's picking up trash that originates onshore, and has since made its way out into the Pacific. Cleaning it up doesn't sound too likely, since the effort would cost billions, but it would be nice if we figured out a way to stop adding to it. .—Chris Parry, Public Education Program Mgr., California Coastal Commission, San Francisco.
Eco Aware: The Environment & Your Wallet Americans add 30 million plastic water bottles to our landfills everyday! According to Solvie Karlstrom with The Green Guide, last year, we spent almost $11 billion on over 8 billion gallons of bottled water, then trashed over 22 billion of those empty water bottles. In production alone, more than 70 million bottles of water consumed each day in the U.S. drain 1.5 million barrels of oil in one year alone.
2 million plastic bottles, the number used in the U.S. every five minutes. - Chris Jordan, artist
