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IPFS News Link • Environment

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: We Are Literally Filling Up The Pacific Ocean With Plastic

• http://chrisinmaryville.net/
We are starting to see that there are very serious consequences for filling up our oceans with massive amounts of plastic that never biodegrades. In fact, this is one of the greatest environmental disasters of all time and yet you rarely hear it talked about. Virtually every molecule of plastic ever created still exists somewhere, and we all use things made out of plastic every single day. But have you ever stopped to think about what happens to all of that plastic? Well, the truth is that a lot of it ends up in our oceans. In fact, humanity produces approximately 200 billion pounds of plastic every year, and about 10 percent of that total ends up in our oceans. In other words, we are slowly but steadily filling up our oceans with our garbage. In the North Pacific Ocean, there is a vast area where so much plastic has collected that it has become known as "the Great Pacific Garbage Patch" and as "the Pacific Trash Vortex". This "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" stretches from Hawaii

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by PureTrust
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One method that breaks down plastics almost instantly is, burn them clean. That is, burn the plastics so that every molecule is combusted.

Plastics are made from, basically, hydro carbons - petroleum, and plant based oils - often containing chlorine, but also many other components. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic.

A business might be evolving where a person could develop a scoop-ship to scour the oceans for the plastics, and present them back to nations for burning in furnaces especially made for them. This could provide heat for homes in winter, and heat for anything that industry might need heat for.

At the present, this would probably not be a viable business, because there isn't a big enough concentration of plastic in the oceans,yet. But if we start planning now, we will be ready for the future when the concentration makes it a paying business.

Imagine touring the world in a ship that gets its fuel from filtering the plastic out of the oceans... all the while doing mankind the favor of helping to save the planet.



PurePatriot