Twice the Size of Texas
Good lord. This has to be one of the most depressing bits of environmental news I've heard in a long time:
Now multiply that amount by about 110 million (the number of households in the US, give or take), and ponder that probably 1% have access to programs like this (and, I would imagine, a fraction of that percentage actually uses the program). The rest of it has to go to the landfill. Or, I guess, into the ocean.
Most people don't think about where their trash goes. I certainly try not to, although I try my damnedest to minimize what I do consume. Still, I'm no angel, and I love shiny gadgets (which come in plastic packages, of course) as much as the next American. But the majority of the plastic we create, use, and throw away doesn't go away. Not on any time scale humans can appreciate.
Plastic is cheap and convenient. I get that. But we're thinking in the short term here, and we can only dodge the bullet for so long.
What can be done? I would venture this: Nothing. Not that we shouldn't try. But, damn, when you have huge islands of plastic floating in the Pacific, and you see people pitch the crap out of car windows without a second thought, you have to wonder.
Nihilistic? Absolutely. But how can you read this sort of thing and not be?
A little Carlin (although that video will probably be gone before anyone reads this) to brighten up an otherwise abysmally depressing post:
When we moved into our house last November, Jana discovered that Portland participates in a "Master Recycler" Program, where they collect all the plastic that curbside recycling can't (or won't) take. So we started socking it away in the garage. Currently, we're weeks away from the next event, and we have eight good-sized boxes full of the stuff. Stuff that we would normally have to throw away.
In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. [...] The area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.
The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas.
Now multiply that amount by about 110 million (the number of households in the US, give or take), and ponder that probably 1% have access to programs like this (and, I would imagine, a fraction of that percentage actually uses the program). The rest of it has to go to the landfill. Or, I guess, into the ocean.
Most people don't think about where their trash goes. I certainly try not to, although I try my damnedest to minimize what I do consume. Still, I'm no angel, and I love shiny gadgets (which come in plastic packages, of course) as much as the next American. But the majority of the plastic we create, use, and throw away doesn't go away. Not on any time scale humans can appreciate.
Plastic is cheap and convenient. I get that. But we're thinking in the short term here, and we can only dodge the bullet for so long.
What can be done? I would venture this: Nothing. Not that we shouldn't try. But, damn, when you have huge islands of plastic floating in the Pacific, and you see people pitch the crap out of car windows without a second thought, you have to wonder.
Nihilistic? Absolutely. But how can you read this sort of thing and not be?
A little Carlin (although that video will probably be gone before anyone reads this) to brighten up an otherwise abysmally depressing post:
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.
Labels: We're Doomed
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home