Plastic in Paradise

Memorial Day weekend hiking the coast near Ozette I came across treasures wild and weird, but with a new perspective. The treasures had traveled across the Pacific Ocean: a skin cream bottle with writing in Arabic, a water bottle from Hong Kong, and a square bottle from Japan. I picked them up with the delight of a child "these come from across the ocean!!" But the find was sobered by memory of an article I'd read recently in Orion magasine. Plastic, is everywhere.

Somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific spirals a gyre of plastic estimated to be 10 million square miles in size, nearly the size of Africa, making plastic the most common surface feature in the world's oceans. "It's where all things end up that flow down rivers to the sea." These water bottles and skin cream containers will continue to be in the worlds ocean for as near as we can understand as forever. Even if they break down, the small polymer chains left behind will be eaten by filter feeding mammals and fish. Eventually the ocean's wildlife will all be choaking on plastic. Even if the most virtuous of us today gave up all use of plastic it would seem minute compared to the floating, girating masses of polymers already out there. How long before we, too become plastic-wrapped?