Trash talk . . .

THE ECONOMIST has an article about ocean trash, "A New Year’s wish for less trash". I've posted about this before, but the latest news needs dissemination:

The almost unbelievable reality, says a new charity Science and Technology against Ocean Plastics (STOP), is that large areas of our oceans now contain more plastic than plankton. The plastic graveyard in the North Pacific is well known, covering an area twice the size of the continental United States, and stretches from about 800km (500 miles) off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. It is all held on one place by swirling underwater currents and is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or “trash vortex”.

The news, however, gets worse. Oliver Harris, a co-founder of STOP (which launches on January 1st), says that the researchers they are working with have also recently proven that trash vortices are also found in the South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and Indian Ocean.

More plastic than plankton? Yikes!