RP358 A Floating Landfill

 RP358 A Floating Landfill

Did you know that the world's biggest landfill isn't even on dry land? It's actually the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a sprawl of floating garbage located in the waters between Japan and California.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of trash that has been dumped by ships, expelled by sewers, or just thrown into the ocean. Garbage from all over the world gets caught up in ocean currents and herded to the same spot. Some experts say that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the size of Texas. Others claim that it could be twice the size of the United States. What everyone can agree on is that the plastic in the garbage patch is not going away anytime soon.
Plastic is a tough synthetic substance that never naturally biodegrades. Think about that for a second. That means that pretty much all of the plastic we' ve ever made is still lying around somewhere. At least we know where a lot of it ended up; it's floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!
Plastic doesn't just threaten ocean ecology but human health as well. While plastic does not biodegrade, sunlight can still break it down into smaller and smaller pieces. The smaller these pieces get, the easier it is for fish and other sea life to mistake them for food. This means that the next fish you eat may have eaten some LEGO fragments in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Cleaning up the garbage patch won't be easy, though some organizations are trying. First of all, it's hard to see, so the media doesn't pay attention to it. It's not a giant island of garbage. Rather, it's an underwater sprawl of tiny fragments of plastic and other trash. These tiny, dispersed fragments of trash also make it hard for us to clean up. Therefore, if we really want to clean up our oceans, we need to stop using so much plastic and to recycle whenever we can. Maybe all it takes is some effort and a few reusable bags, and 10 years from now, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will have become the Moderate Pacific Garbage Patch.