The Great Pacific Garbage Vortex

An overlooked consequence of our throwaway culture has recently come to light. The vast amounts of garbage dumped by ships and coastal inhabitants coalesces into gigantic pools of toxic muck. A vortex is created when currents make a circular pattern in the ocean basin. Everything from shopping bags to packing peanuts, broken down into tiny pieces by sun and water, collects in these vortexes. The particles are too tiny to be picked up by satellite, so unfortunately there aren't any graphic depictions of the trash heap.

It's basically a layer of glop, mistaken for food by the fishies. The particles attract heavy metals during their swim, which enter the food chain when Nemo mistakes a toxic speck of flip-flop for dinner. Flounder eats Nemo, Flounder gets picked up in a fisherman's drag net along with a couple dolphins, Flounder ends up on your plate, and you've just eaten poison when all you were trying to do was get more omega-3s in your diet.

I hope you didn't eat any canned green beans as a side dish, because it turns out that the plastic lining in many canned goods leaches BPA into the food. According to the Endocrine Society, low-level exposure to BPA adversely affects male and female reproduction, thyroid function, metabolism, and could increase obesity. Consumer Reports conducted a study of 19 common canned goods and "almost all" of them showed measureable levels of BPA.

What does this mean? “A 165-pound adult eating one serving of canned green beans from our sample, which averaged 123.5 ppb, could ingest about 0.2 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, about 80 times higher than our experts’ recommended daily upper limit.” (Emphasis added.)

But what can be done about this? BPA is a building block of plastics, a material we all depend on. Not to mention it's an essential part of a $6 billion industry, the lobbyists of which are working hard to keep FDA-approved levels of BPA far higher than the level used by Consumer Reports.

As for the garbage vortex, the slop has been collecting for over 60 years, and only now are scientists beginning to study it. Discovering an effective way to clean up the goo, not to mention preventing more waste from being dumped in the ocean, is going to be an uphill battle.

As for me, I'll keep using my reuseable shopping bags and buying organic foods as often as I can.