Trashed: Across the Pacific Ocean, Plastics, Plastics, Everywhere
I just came across this June 2008 post from my old Blogger blog, which I'm retiring. The image of plastic bags drifting in predictable currents over the Milwaukee cityscape -- predictably toward the apartment building I called home back in the mid-90s -- makes me oddly nostalgic. It also seems fitting to rescue this from all the pointless flotsam of my old blog, itself an eddy of trash in a sea of information.
A sobering piece on the enormous accumulation of trash -- mostly plastic -- afloat in the North Pacific subtropical gyre:
Trashed: Across the Pacific Ocean, Plastics, Plastics, Everywhere CHARLES MOORE / Natural History v.112, n.9, Nov03
I used to live in a u-shaped apartment building in downtown Milwaukee, on the corner of Kilbourn and Marshall. The courtyard of this building was a dumping ground for airborne plastic bags. Every time a front came through the city, bags would show up in our trees and bushes. From a distance, I would spot bags, ten to fifteen stories above street-level, floating and spiraling their way across town. Every time I stopped to watch them, the air currents eventually dropped them off in my courtyard, or high in the branches of the old trees along Marshall, and I cursed our littering species.
The next time I see a plastic bottle afloat in the Pacific, I'll have a pretty good idea where it's headed.
Trashed: Across the Pacific Ocean, Plastics, Plastics, Everywhere CHARLES MOORE / Natural History v.112, n.9, Nov03
I used to live in a u-shaped apartment building in downtown Milwaukee, on the corner of Kilbourn and Marshall. The courtyard of this building was a dumping ground for airborne plastic bags. Every time a front came through the city, bags would show up in our trees and bushes. From a distance, I would spot bags, ten to fifteen stories above street-level, floating and spiraling their way across town. Every time I stopped to watch them, the air currents eventually dropped them off in my courtyard, or high in the branches of the old trees along Marshall, and I cursed our littering species.
The next time I see a plastic bottle afloat in the Pacific, I'll have a pretty good idea where it's headed.