The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: We Are Literally Filling Up The Pacific Ocean With Plastic

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Public DomainWe are starting to see that there are very serious consequences for filling up our oceans with massive amounts of plastic that never biodegrades.  In fact, this is one of the greatest environmental disasters of all time and yet you rarely hear it talked about.  Virtually every molecule of plastic ever created still exists somewhere, and we all use things made out of plastic every single day.  But have you ever stopped to think about what happens to all of that plastic?  Well, the truth is that a lot of it ends up in our oceans.  In fact, humanity produces approximately 200 billion pounds of plastic every year, and about 10 percent of that total ends up in our oceans.  In other words, we are slowly but steadily filling up our oceans with our garbage.  In the North Pacific Ocean, there is a vast area where so much plastic has collected that it has become known as “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” and as “the Pacific Trash Vortex”.  This “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” stretches from Hawaii to Japan, and it has been estimated to be larger than the entire continental United States.  It contains more than 100 million tons of plastic, and every single year it gets even larger. (Read More...)