The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest landfill in the world... only it's not supposed to be there. It's a soup of garbage spread over the water surface and throughout the water column, spanning an area the size of Texas. Captain Moore of the Algalita Foundation discovered the environmental disaster while navigating the North Pacific Gyre, off the north coast of Hawaii.
The Gyre is about the size of Texas: 696,241 square kilometers, about 1150 times as big as the city of Chicago, shown (partially) in the photo above, so the sticker is not to scale. If it were, it would cover most of my apartment (it would have a 100 foot diameter).
All of our waterways are connected. Pollution in one place cannot be 100% isolated to a specific, confined area. Certain pollutants which are less tangible, like the dioxins leached into the water by the plastics, are much more difficult to clean up. This is a case where we actually have the chance to stop the secondary pollution at the source: the Gyre. A proposed next step might be a "feebate" on cigarettes, which would probably not go over too well with smokers or cigarette manufacturers, but at $1 per butt, would significantly reduce the number of butts carelessly flicked on the ground. Another part of an effective system could be enforcement of littering fines -- I know, "Crazy..."
A school located anywhere there is any body of water can drive home an important lesson by making this problem concrete to their students. The cigarette butts and packaging floating down local waterways should be recognized as part of a story, part of a story that sometimes ends in a place called the great pacific garbage patch.
GyreSticker raises funds to DO something about the urgent issue of ocean pollution.
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