Plastics. Where do they all go? Our landfills, right?
Perhaps there, too.
They are also accumulating in a spot in the Pacific. As a result our planet's oceans are being silently choked to death, while we eat our next meal or take a swig from that bottle of "pure" water or cart our groceries home in one of those little bags.
Read this whole piece if you can take it. I'm including an excerpt from it below.
A trillion trillion vectors for our worst pollutants are being ingested by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented, the mucus web feeding jellies and salps [pictures] ... out in the middle of the ocean. These organisms are in turn eaten by fish and then, certainly in many cases, by humans.
We can grow pesticide free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pesticide free organic fish?
After what I have witnessed first hand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.
I am often asked why we can’t vacuum up the particles. In fact, it would be more difficult than vacuuming up every square inch of the entire United States, it’s larger and the fragments are mixed below the surface down to at least 30 meters. Also, untold numbers of organisms would be destroyed in the process. Besides, there is no economic resource that would be directly benefited by this process.
We have not yet learned how to factor the health of the environment into our economic paradigm. We need to get to work on this calculus quickly, for a stock market crash will pale by comparison to an ecological crash on an oceanic scale.