Trash vortex

I finally connected with Jane Genovese of Live the Solution.com and she stated that the photograph of the poster from Fremantle was not hers, either. Too bad! I thought I'd solved the riddle.

Anyway, so I was hunting around on the internets for another clue to solve this Scooby-Doo mystery of the Fremantle poster photograph and stumbled on This Way Up e-zine, a site that "prompts the positive, kindles the constructive, highlights the hopeful and leaves you feeling - well, up!" Besides the fact that that in itself makes the site kind of annoying, they did have a good article on the Trash Vortex, something DG and I have been trying to get information on. Two years back, DG posted on what she called "garbage gyres," a supposedly enormous island of plastic garbage floating out in the Pacific. When we started the Need-a-Bag? Project we looked for information for our educational literature on the garbage gyre, but found nothing. So, imagine my happy surprise when I discovered an article on This Way Up about it, entitled "Do Something Drastic, Cut the Plastic." I'm really falling in love with that phrase, by the way.

Here's a pullout from that article:

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting 'soup' stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' or 'trash vortex', believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: 'The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size of the continental United States.'

So, doesn't that make you want to take up the oar of a kayak and go out and start cleaning up? It does to me. Why aren't we doing anything about this???

I looked around some more and found this interview from The International Plastics Task Force with the oceanographer who discovered the trash vortex, Charles Moore. He has a very good explanation for this:

We can't regulate it any of us on our own. The center of the
oceans, no one owns it and it's very difficult to get the nations of the
world to agree on a protocol for rehabilitating a place where theirs no
fishery.

Well how about this for a reason to agree on a protocol: IT'S KILLING THE OCEANS!!!

The search for the source of the Fremantle poster continues...

Got the picture from This Way Up e-zine