Monday, January 21, 2008

Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean

San Francisco Chronicle:

The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.


The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.