The Great Garbage Patch

So there’s an artist/designer who set out to prove that you can sell anything as long as the packaging looks good, especially New York Trash.  Funny, considering most New York trash is packaging.

And recently, Walmart and H&M  were caught being naughty this last FREEZING winter: destroying and TRASHING perfectly good clothing in broad daylight.

And while we’re on the subject of trash IN the city of New York, it’s probably a good idea to brush up on the history of Fresh Kills landfill, (soon to be Freshkills Park) – the largest human-made object in the world, larger by volume than the Great Wall of China.

According to the New York Times:

Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.

Then there’s this one from CDNN profiling Charles Moore, the sailor who discovered the Patch in 1997:

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill… 

Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

And although it might seem unrelated, here’s an AP exposé on drugs in our drinking water.

And another about plastic beads in facewash.

It is all connected my friends. All connected.