Group finds 6 million pounds of trash on world's beaches

Group finds 6 million pounds of trash on world's beaches

news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON - The world's beaches and shores are anything but pristine. Volunteers scoured 33,000 miles of shoreline worldwide and found 6 million pounds of debris from cigarette butts and food wrappers to abandoned fishing lines and plastic bags that threaten seabirds and marine mammals.

A report by the Ocean Conservancy, to be released Wednesday, catalogues nearly 7.2 million items that were collected by volunteers on a single day last September as they combed beaches and rock

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"This is a snapshot of one day, one moment in time, but it serves as a powerful reminder of our carelessness and how our disparate and random actions actually have a collective and global impact," Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy said in an interview.

I could not have said it better. This is crazy. One day?! Wouldn't it be cool if things like this happens collectively once a month? Imagine a world where it's occupants were so conscious of the land they have inherited, that they held a high priority to keep it clean for us, and for those after us?

I can taste that world, literally.

The 378,000 volunteers on average collected 182 pounds of trash for every mile of shoreline, both ocean coastlines and beaches on inland lakes and streams, providing a "global snapshot of the ocean trash problem."

Well, I just hope this feels good to the rest of the people that read it, and perhaps we can reassess our priorities. *fingers crossed*
Don't forget to read about Earth's Eighth Continent


AAC

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 15-4-2008 by AnAbsoluteCreation]

Originally posted by AnAbsoluteCreation
I can taste that world, literally.

I would suggest clearing the world of a bit of human trash (the sort that hides them selves) in the process... Else you will be painting the proverbial Forth Bridge.

Originally posted by Now_Then

I would suggest clearing the world of a bit of human trash

That is already in our destiny. Que sera sera.

AAC

reply to post by AnAbsoluteCreation


That's a 181 pieces of garbage per mile.

And here, a picture of the worst of it.

It is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.)

Shameful...

global warming? this is why we have global warming...cause business is all important to slave suits and never consider the paradises under garbage...i wish this world would just end now.

reply to post by AnAbsoluteCreation

The trashiest people of this world have a long history of throwing trash out of their vehicles onto public areas (land & water) & private areas for others to remove. Stay clean & stay smart. The governments of this world don't care about our health. They want us to die.

Ok, I'll try and say this as politely as possible without sounding racist. When I lived in LA and Orange counties it was very obvious that socio-economic conditions were directly linked to the amount of trash on the beach. Before I provide an example, the answer to the problem, in my opinion is education. In the schools and in the community. Any given weekend, the beaches of southern LA county ( were I lived ) including Long Beach were littered with pop cans and bottles, kids drink bottles, cigarette butts, plastic bags, etc to the degree that is was a serious eye sore. A large part of the population of Long Beach are hispanic Now, on the same weekend I could visit a beach north of LA, for example Zuma or Malibu and I'd have to search for trash. In Orange country, Huntington, Seal and Sunset beaches were pristine.

While this absolutely disgusts me, I am not surprised. Check this diagram of trash in the world's oceans:





North Pacific trash patch

So what exactly is going on?

A set of four currents in the northern Pacific creates a clockwise vortex known as the North Pacific Gyre, which encompasses 10 million square miles, or basically the entire northern part of the ocean.