In the famous balcony scene of the play Romeo and Juliet it is Juliet who says, “my love is as boundless as the sea,” and, unfortunately, most people do view the seas as endless or limitless. Are they? Absolutely not, and this is most readily seen by the fact that they are now becoming choked with trash and litter.
Think the seas are too vast to be heavily polluted? A United Nations study and report indicated that there are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic floating on or near the surface of each square mile of the world’s oceans. It gets there in a number of ways, but the biggest culprit is the land. That’s right; it is the trash blown in from the surrounding land that has led to such catastrophic levels of pollution. Whether it is the actual winds that pull garbage from landfills or the runoff from rivers, streams, and storm drains that bring the garbage to the oceans, the fact of the matter is that it happens at unprecedented levels.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.