Ocean Current’s Trash Collection Service

It’s Dan (the General Manager) again! I hope that your week is going as great as ours at GreenDimes. More and more of you are joining as we work harder and harder to eliminate all that junk in your mailboxes.

And speaking of junk, I observed a headline in the news today that caught my attention: “Floating Mass of Trash – Can It Be Cleaned Up?” You may have heard of the Great Pacific (Ocean) Garbage Patch, but I had not. Apparently, there is a large and stewy body of plastic waste floating around the Pacific Ocean about 1,000 miles north of Hawaii. One marine researcher says that it is twice as big as Texas and it weighs 3 million tons! 

How did this happen? According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a two-liter bottle that is inappropriately thrown away in San Francisco rolls into a storm drain and heads out to sea. Once there, ocean currents off the California Coast pick it up and several weeks later it will reach the floating debris. The trash all collects at this single location, the North Pacific Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that circulates along the Pacific Rim. 

Because the bottles and other plastic trash does not biodegrade, it will “photodegrade,” meaning the sun’s UV rays will turn the bottle brittle and break it down into small pieces that makes the patch almost impossible to clean up. The resulting soup is adversely affecting marine habitat as scientists attempt to devise ways to remove it. You can learn more at www.algalita.org.

What does this mean to GreenDimes and our green-conscious members? It means that we all need to do all we can to minimize plastic waste on land – pick up your trash at the beach; recycle; use our nifty reusable GreenDimes bag; and recycle (did I say that again?).

Most importantly, we are preventing the Great Junk Mail Garbage Patch by eliminating it in the first place. Hold on while I pat ourselves (and you) on the back!