OUR OCEANS ARE PLASTIC!

There's been talk recently about a giant floating island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific. A crew from VBS.tv--a sort of BBC WORLD meets MTV internet channel that I'm starting to get addicted to--set out to find this 'garbage island'. What they discover (besides sea sickness, cabin fever and smooching) is not a large mass of solid garbage spinning like a trash galaxy. Instead, the situation is far more disturbing. There are billions of small particles of semi broken down plastic polymers floating around everywhere. Birds eat it, sea life gets stuck in it, and the goo itself becomes a chemical sponge for various nasty compounds called persistant organic pollutants.

Garbage you can clean up. But what do you do when the rubbish is dissolved and inseparable from water? What do you do when 6.4 million tons of more trash is dumped into the oceans each year?

Here is episode 1 of Toxic: Garbage Island:


Watch the rest, here.