What Shall We Discuss Today? How About Ocean Plastic..?

Ocean Plastic: It Can Be Removed

Folks, ocean plastic has been driving me crazy. There is enough plastic shit in the Pacific ocean alone to cover entire countries, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans probably aren't faring much better. But what drives me even crazier is when writers and scientists write loads of column text insisting that we can't do anything about it. "No, we can't remove plastic from the oceans; and here's why..." Their rationale is "No, we can't do anything about the stuff already in there; all we can do is reduce the amount of plastic that hasn't washed out to sea yet." I don't know about you; but that, to me, simply isn't good enough. Why the hell CAN'T we remove the plastic that's already out there, before too many more marine mammals eat the stuff and die, washed up on a beach with plastic bottles floating out of their gullets? Shoot, why can't we harvest the ocean plastic (along with breaking it down with plastic-eating bacteria), recycle and reuse it for more constructive purposes? Why can't we develop whole industries dedicated to harvesting and reusing ocean plastic?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I want to talk about real or potential solutions and actions that can be taken; I don't want to waste any time or column space wailing about lingering problems. I'm sure as hell not going to accept that problems like ocean plastic are too far gone to deal with. That's why I'm excited about orgs, movements and companies like The Ocean Cleanup, a bunch of folks who are actually rolling up their sleeves and taking boats and massive nets out to sea to collect ocean plastic. As their website proposes, "In parallel to developing technology to extract plastic from the ocean, we also investigate how we can reuse the material once it is back on shore. Initial work on ocean plastic recycling shows our material can be turned into high quality products. Imagine your next phone, chair, car bumper or sunglasses could be made from plastic retrieved from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch." I can definitely get behind this; I would definitely support it by donations if I could afford to. I definitely want to get the word out about such efforts. I will certainly link to them via social media platforms. They can also expect to find their site among our planned Links pages on this blog. More on this subject later...