What can be done about the Great Garbage Patch of the North Pacific and similar patches?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

There’s even thought that it may be as large as the continental US!

All about eliminating needless, single use containers and packaging. Beyond that @Dr_Lawrence has it right. Education would go a long way I’m sure as would changing peoples habits. Cleanup projects prior to the pollutants reaching the oceans would help too. The key is to approach it from a variety of angles and be consistent and enabling in the social messaging. The easier you make it for people the more likely they are to do it. Holding producers of the waste responsible could be helpful too but likely would be very problematic, politically costly, and expensive.

I wish there were something we could do. Looks like another problem for our great-great grandkids. “Sorry kids! We were jerks, but it sure was profitable!”

Seriously curbing our use of plastics I guess would be best. Refill containers. Get a filter on the tap or a large glass water cooler. I seriously think that glass is best cause after all it’s just sand anyway regardless of where it ends up.

When I was a kid, soda, milk, most liquids came in glass bottles with a deposit. We would forage for the discarded ones and return for the deposit to buy a snack. Now everything comes in plastic. In South Australia they have a deposit on plastic bottles but amount is not sufficiently lucrative for kids so the senior citizens gather them and collect the refunds.

Refuse to buy at the supermarket until they stop packing meat in plastic trays with plastic liners and plastic wrap, buy at the butcher shop where meats are still wrapped in paper. May cost a little more but sacrifices need to be made.

Stop using disposable diapers, cloth worked for a lot of years before someone came up with the idea.

There are so many small ways we could all change but it takes effort and sacrifice. And it is a lot easier to sit around and lament the fact or expect the government to do it for you.

Consumers need to show their might and their will with how, what and where they buy.

@rooeytoo
Good points. And it’s really not big sacrifices but just creating conscientious habits that consider the effects of our conveniences.

It is amazing how much you can reuse. For example those 175mg containers of yougurt, the ones with covers that have to be thrown out, (they look and feel a bit like aluminium foil) They can be reused along with the take out coffee take covers, not the flat ones but the ones that look like hats. Just for dry things, though since there is a hole in the cover.

I have some numbers about the amount of trash we generate. It’s disgusting, and every time I see yet another product designed to be used once then thrown out, I shudder. We’re like a swarm of roaches, consuming everything in our path and leaving behind a wake of spoiled resources.
By the year 2005 the US was generating 250 million tons of garbage per year. 4.5 pounds, per person, per day.

http://www.calvert-henderson.com/enviro-waste.htm

In 1995 27% of the United States’ food supply spoiled or went unusd (48,000,000 tons).
Man-made rubbish in orbit includes 8,500 objects and 100,000 pieces of space litter.
74,200 fans at Super Bowl XXX generated 75 tons of trash in Sun Devil Stadium in Phoenix, while 72,000 fans at Super Bowl XXXI generated 68 tons at the Superdome in New Orleans. At Super Bowl XXXII in Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, 70 tons of trash was generated by 68,000 fans.
Every year Americans buy more than a billion incandescent light bulbs. That is three acres of light bulbs a day. A 60-watt incandescent light bulb will last about 750 hours, compared to 7,500 to 10,000 hours that a compact fluorescent bulb that generates the same light.
An average child will use between 8 -10,000 disposable diapers ($2,000 worth) before being potty trained. Each year parents and babysitters dispose of about 18 billion of these items. In the United States alone these single-use items consume nearly 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp. We will pay an average of $350 million annually to deal with their disposal and, to top it off, these diapers will still be in the landfill 300 years from now.
Americans throw away 570 diapers per second. That’s 49 million diapers per day.

http://www.co.cass.in.us/ccswd/trivia.htm

What CAN we do? @rooeytoo and @SeventhSense have the right idea. Unless you’re willing to really get into it and get involved with campaigning and trying to start a movement, there really isn’t much else. Did I mention that people are apathetic? We care theoretically, but mostly not enough to get off our asses and take definitive action. That’s human nature.

@SeventhSense Please read “They can be reused along with the take out coffee covers”, in my last posting. I made a typo.

@Trillian
Thanks for the links. It’s so easy to forget and ignore until, we can’t breath the air, drink our water and the food chain is destroying itself.
I forget about the disposable diapers. That’s a huge problem and represents a big sacrifice for a society used to it and really could benefit from advances in materials. What happens when the third world starts wanting these “conveniences” and we try to deny them?
@flo
Thanks for the info.

I read somewhere this thing was about the size of Texas- so sad. It took a two day drive to just cross Texas so I can’t imagine being on a ship and seeing that, I had no idea. I was raised and have tried to live my life reusing, recycling and not overusing which makes me feel a twinge of guilt when I think how badly I’d like to take an ocean cruise or live some of the year on a traveling cruise/condo.

@hungryhungryhortence
We really need to keep this stuff consciously in our awareness. It has to become how we think and not just the issue dujour. Habits are difficult to change but they can be changed. We must have ecologically sound systems and start exporting this with our goods abroad. The European Union especially the
Scandinavian countries are light years ahead of us in adapting sustainable visions.
The focus can’t be based on an economic model which puts profit above everything else because it will eventually destroy us.

The United States can have a greater impact than any other on implementing this change. We need to pressure our leaders CONSTANTLY. They work for us. Sign petitions on sustainability. Write your representatives. Back up websites which pressure our leaders- Greenpeace, Amnesty International and visit sites like the Hunger Site which are free and offer many excellent petitions online. Make it your home page. We can all take 5 minutes out of our day. Change slowly moves but it happens. It took General Electric decades before they were finally brought to accountability for their PCB discharge into the Hudson River. And finally we need to honor people like Robert F Kennedy Jr for his and many others tireless work. They are heroes.

@Trillian
We’re like a swarm of roaches, consuming everything in our path and leaving behind a wake of spoiled resources.
No actually roaches are completely sustainable.

@SeventhSense As an aside, good luck getting much ecologically minded legislation passed, now that corporations can contribute unlimited amounts of money to election campaigns. Legislators beholden to polluting companies aren’t going to go out of their way to restrain their business practices, and they won’t be working “for us” for very much longer. I know this is another whole topic, but it’s a little relevant here.

@laureth
Well I don’t believe all big business is bad and I think the increasing vision of an international greening trend will pressure them. And it’s becoming more and more clear by the nations of the world that this is not a choice but a necessity. Corporations are still run by people and bad PR is not good for business. We can’t allow a fatalistic view to discourage us into apathy.