25 April 2010

A Hawaiian beach "turning into plastic"

An article with video at the BBC website shows a beach on a remote part of Hawaii's Big Island that is deeply and extensively contaminated with plastic.  Not from Hawaii itself, but drifting up from the Pacific Ocean.
"This plastic goes down a foot deep. At one time these were toothbrushes, pens, cigarette lighters, plastic bottles, plastic caps, but now they're plastic fragments and pre-production plastic pellets, together forming a new kind of sand: plastic sand here on the beaches of Hawaii"...

This is the place where Hawaiians came to find bodies of people who were lost at sea. Nowadays, this beach is where we come to find what our throw-away society has done to the environment."
Unfortunately BBC videos are not embeddable, and this one hasn't been reposted on YouTube as far as I can tell.  Please view the video at the site - it is unutterably saddening for those who love the ocean and our planet.

I have previously posted an item at Neatorama entitled "Death by Plastic" with photos of albatross and seabird carcasses engorged with plastic, and one here of plastic retrieved from a fledgling.  Some blogreaders called these posts b.s.   I also posted this indescribably horrifying video of plastic heading out to sea from a Romanian river.  I'll keep posting these items, because what we are doing to our oceans is nothing short of criminal.

5 comments:

  1. How can it be bullshit? Are they saying the photos and videos are faked? Denying a problem won't make it go away... do they think if we don't look it isn't there?

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  2. We all use Contigo resuable bottles to help cut out this sort of thing.

    We've all stopped using water bottles now.

    Here's the website in th UK

    http://www.contigo.ie/

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  3. "It's a Casio on a plastic beach / It's a Casio on a plastic beach, /
    It's a styrofoam deep sea landfill /
    It's a styrofoam deep sea landfill, /
    It's sort of made a computer speech /
    It's sort of made a computer speech /
    It's a Casio on a plastic beach "


    In all seriousness, this is a major problem. Just consider the plastic from bottled water:
    http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/

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  4. With massive industrial scale overfishing, by mid century all we'll have remaining in our oceans is plastic and jelly fish. And oil, almost forgot the oil...

    ReplyDelete