A few months ago I came to know that there are areas of floating garbage and plastic debris right in the middle of the Pacific ocean - one each to the left and right of Hawaii. These areas are about the size of Texas each (!!) and collectively this part of the Pacific Ocean is now called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
I was shocked when I came to know about this. These areas are thousands of miles away from human civilization and I could not believe that we could be polluting areas on earth that are so far from us. I subsequently did read up some books on this subject (for example, the book "Plastic Ocean" by Charles Moore) and it was an eye opener of sorts. The more I read about this, the more alarming it got. Turns out that there are such oceanic garbage patches in the Indian and Atlantic oceans as well (which, I guess, one can say, follows by induction)! Needless to say, these garbage patches are adversely affecting the entire marine ecosystems in ways that we probably don't even understand yet...
Plastic has probably been one of the worst inventions of the 20th century. It is cheap to manufacture, extremely convenient to use in our day to day lives and is not bio-degradable. Together, this is a lethal combination. Businesses have exploited the cheapness and convenience of plastic in ingenuous ways (the credit to the most glaring one would have to go to the bottled beverage industry) and have largely ignored the environmental impacts of all the plastic that is eventually "disposed" off in landfills (and oceans!). We, as consumers, are equally responsible for not thinking about what happens to that "plastic bag" after we throw it in our garbage bins. I, for one, now have a completely different view of plastic and now I am an extremely conscious consumer of it.
But unfortunately, I alone cannot solve the plastic epidemic. It will take all of us to collectively reduce our consumption of it in whatever we way we can - be eliminating it wherever possible and recycling it wherever applicable. The biggest excuses we have to not do so - "what difference does it make if I alone do it" OR "this is somebody else's problem that does not affect me" - are nothing short of an extremely myopic and selfish way of "passing the buck". If we genuinely care about our planet, its environment and its ability to sustain future generations of life, we really have to start looking at how we think about "that plastic fork" that we pick up for eating lunch or "that plastic bag" that we get our groceries in ... a fundamentally different view of plastic use needs to take root before it's too late.
I was shocked when I came to know about this. These areas are thousands of miles away from human civilization and I could not believe that we could be polluting areas on earth that are so far from us. I subsequently did read up some books on this subject (for example, the book "Plastic Ocean" by Charles Moore) and it was an eye opener of sorts. The more I read about this, the more alarming it got. Turns out that there are such oceanic garbage patches in the Indian and Atlantic oceans as well (which, I guess, one can say, follows by induction)! Needless to say, these garbage patches are adversely affecting the entire marine ecosystems in ways that we probably don't even understand yet...
Plastic has probably been one of the worst inventions of the 20th century. It is cheap to manufacture, extremely convenient to use in our day to day lives and is not bio-degradable. Together, this is a lethal combination. Businesses have exploited the cheapness and convenience of plastic in ingenuous ways (the credit to the most glaring one would have to go to the bottled beverage industry) and have largely ignored the environmental impacts of all the plastic that is eventually "disposed" off in landfills (and oceans!). We, as consumers, are equally responsible for not thinking about what happens to that "plastic bag" after we throw it in our garbage bins. I, for one, now have a completely different view of plastic and now I am an extremely conscious consumer of it.
But unfortunately, I alone cannot solve the plastic epidemic. It will take all of us to collectively reduce our consumption of it in whatever we way we can - be eliminating it wherever possible and recycling it wherever applicable. The biggest excuses we have to not do so - "what difference does it make if I alone do it" OR "this is somebody else's problem that does not affect me" - are nothing short of an extremely myopic and selfish way of "passing the buck". If we genuinely care about our planet, its environment and its ability to sustain future generations of life, we really have to start looking at how we think about "that plastic fork" that we pick up for eating lunch or "that plastic bag" that we get our groceries in ... a fundamentally different view of plastic use needs to take root before it's too late.
