Dump the plastic, save the sea

Tag : polyester shoelace

It's called The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and it may be the mostdisgusting object ever born of man. Twice the size of thecontinental United States or merely Texas — it's difficult tomeasure — it drifts 900 kilometres off the California coast,a full 100 million tonnes of discarded plastic. Over the nextdecade, it is predicted that its size will double.
Need more horror? It is 30 metres deep. There are two bulbousslidey linked islands of it, floating on either side of Hawaii. Isay "it" because it is a new substance for scientists tocategorize. You'd think it would be like at the beach, a lot offloating stuff that forms a kind of unreliable ice floe.
No. The best word the scientists can come up with is "soup." It istranslucent and swirls just beneath the surface of the North Pacific gyre current , a kind of quiet vortex in the ocean that gave every plastic thingyou and I have thrown away over our lifetimes a chance to meet andgreet. And stew. When it "barfs," Hawaiian beaches are covered.
Soup du jour
The soup today?
It's water bottles, rubber ducks, carrier bags, beach balls,milk/dry cleaning/carrier/wardrobe/garbage bags, fridge doors,water guns, sneakers, cups, lids, blue boxes, green bins, photoframes, DVD cases, LPs, CDs and their wrap, barbecue covers,loungers, deck tables and chairs, car interiors, buckets,toothbrushes, baby bottles made with bisphenol A, shampoo bottles,detergent jugs, flowers, milk crates, carpeting, Gee Your HairSmells Terrific shampoo bottles, dolls, wading pools, hair dryers,closet organizers, Swiffers, sinks, humidifiers, air cleaners, airconditioners, fridge liners, ab rollers, Happy Meal toys,restaurant trays, shower caps, beer coolers, pink flamingoes,shower curtains, Christo's polypropylene art wraps, Astroturf,tampon applicators, Plexiglas police shields, Lego, bullets, hulahoops, Velcro, Silly Putty, zippers, car bumpers, Formica, Saranwrap, wallpaper, Tupperware, the polyester crimplene pantsuit Isewed in 1972, Teflon pans, acrylic poster glass, pantyhose, rayonshirts, pens, celluloid film, computers, baby bottles, cutlery,Frisbees, hair rollers, Styrofoam containers, catheters, polarfleece, Gore-Tex jackets, piano keys, jellies and Crocs, resingarden pots, galoshes, shoelace aglets (tips), stir sticks,helmets, contact lenses, electronic equipment casing, Silastic forgaskets and breast implants, garden hoses, sex toys, credit cards,banding wrap for corpses, expandable insulation, cigarettelighters, sprinklers, prosthetic limbs, window frames, eyeglassesand all manner of piping.
In other words, it's the story of our lives and I shall not descendinto bitterness but would the world not have chugged along just aseasily if they had been made of wood, minerals, plants, rock, clay,silk and glass? Eventually, these things crumble obediently intothe soil.
Not so plastic . It doesn't biodegrade, it photodegrades, which means it justbreaks into smaller pieces, not into components. Microscopicpellets of plastic in the billions — you just knew they'd becalled "nurdles" and they are — make their way into theoceans where they soak up toxins and are absorbed by sea jellies.The food chain does its thing, from jelly to fish to big fish toour plates, and we are now ingesting toxic mermaid's tears.
Plastic on your plate
When online commentator Mark Morford wrote about this pulsingseaborne plastic kinetic clot last fall, I swear I thought he wasjoking. He says that we might as well sit down at dinner and eatplastic bottles instead of the fish that took in nurdles. Savestime. Everything bites us in the ass, as he would say in thatslangy American style that I love, partly because as the planetdeteriorates, only the baroque Yank argot will do the trick.
The United Nations Environment Program says that every square mileof ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. According toGreenpeace, about 10 per cent of the 200 billion pounds of plastichumans make each year ends up in the ocean. Some of the greatPacific floating landfill comes from oil platforms, spilled seacontainers and cruise ships but 90 per cent of it comes from landand it began 50 years ago, before many of us were born. Not that wedon't all, every one of us, buy, fondle, squeeze, store, sit on anddecorate with plastic.
Don't make me hit you with another list.
Think of it, this huge creature, the cheap mod Disney replacementfor the melting glaciers. It's like a modern version of theprimordial ooze out of which we emerged. Imagine sailing into itand being dropped into its depths. I'd say we'd die wriggling withhorror and screaming for air or even water in our lungs, instead ofthis discharge. But a version of this death will happen to usanyway and we won't have to head for the South Pacific to do it.
We have the foul pollution in our air and water, in the dirt thatgrows our crops that feed the animals that we eat. It is soaked inour environment and in the economic and political systems we humansbuilt and what's done is done.
Disrespectful, logical, right
I have always been slightly snarky about hardline environmentalistsbecause ultimately, I know they want me dead and I don't wish tooblige them.
When we are dead (preferably unembalmed, coffinless and left to rotnormally in a shallow grave), we will not be buying plastic goodsand tossing them away. But I can't blame environmentalists fordisrespectful logic. They're right.
And even if they're not right and we all — and we will— claw and scrabble for the longest, most luxurious,meat-oriented, drug-enhanced, currency-blowing 90 years that we cansqueeze out of North America, we little Richie Riches will face theconsequences.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is going to bite us. It's themistress phoning us at home, the excess of E in the Eightiescancelling a chunk of our brain as we age, it's Dickens' Ghost ofChristmas Past, it's I Know What You Did Last Summer, it is reapingwhat you sow.
Your payback is a hideous chyme stretching and pulsing in the sealike an underwater gob of spiky phlegm. Hey, I never even went tothe West Coast, you say. But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch willget your kids and your grandkids.
The Blob was the dumbest horror movie ever made. Naturally it wasthe one that came true.
This Week
Girls Like Us is the biography of three women who, if we only knew it, probablydecided if we'd have sex tonight, and with whom and on what terms.It's 2008 but Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon hit a wavein the late '60s and early '70s, and they changed relations betweenmen and women. Young women readers, listen up.
Joni Mitchell's strait-laced admirable Prairie housewife mothervacuumed her garage every day. That's what one of the greatest artists of our eraescaped. Carole King had to marry Gerry Goffin, a total bastard,because she was pregnant. He hit her. Most of her husbands did. Shewrote It's Too Late for the Tapestry album. Listen to it, young women, and think of that. Carly Simon,so sexy that a picture of her Playing Possum album cover hangs on my office wall (this was pre-Madonna), hasnever been with a man who didn't resent her sexual and economicpower. Sheila Weller, a workmanlike biographer I have always liked,has told the stories of three artists who broke every rule and paidheavily for it. That's what happens to women who rebel.
In 1974, Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde starred in the S&MNazi love story The Night Porter . I finally got around to watching it. What a dreary plod, Ramplingand Bogarde rattling their chains as they crawl around the kitchenarguing about groceries.
Heather Mallick has worked as a reporter, copy editor and book review editor atvarious Toronto newspapers. Her latest book, Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life , was published by Knopf in April 2007. This column is printed withpermission from CBC.ca where it first appeared.