Giant Trap Is Deployed to Catch Plastic Littering the Pacific Ocean

I generally tend to glaze over and go comatose when eco-warriors spout off. Its not the message, its the messenger that shuts me down. My household has seriously cut down on the use of plastics. Not to save the Earth, just because they are damned inconvenient. They take up too much space to store and re-use and occupy a great deal of space in the trash bin for very little weight. I pay for trash removal by volume not weight.

We grocery shop with metal framed collapsible shopping bags of my own design. It doesn't matter if the bag full of meat is put on top of the bag with bread or eggs because the frame protects what is in the bag. (That's an illustrative example. We actually bake our own bread and raise our own poultry for eggs). Added plus, I can put grocery bags in the back of my truck even in heavy rain and the stuff inside them doesn't get wet.

We use mason jars instead instead of plastic containers. When products come in glass, we either re-use the containers or drop then at the recycling center. When offered, we buy products in bulk bins and put them in our own glass containers. They know the tare weight and subtract it from the cost.

We avoid products that come in plastic containers when we can. When we can't, I feed the plastics into a grinder/shredder. ( As previously stated, I pay for trash removal by volume, not weight.) The grinder /shredder pretty much reduces the plastic down to pieces that are no more than 1/4 inch in any direction and better than 2/3 is less than 1/8 inch in any direction. I keep some of this (coffee can container every 3 or 4 years, for a 4'x16' flower bed, as a soil additive for my wive's flower beds, because it actually helps with water percolation/retention. I also bag it in plastic grain bags and use it to create terraces to reduce soil erosion in paddocks that have a bit too much slope and not enough vegetation (moisture goes through, top soil/silt doesn't).

Hope they are successful and that they recycle what they get.

They say 50% clean up in 5 years, nothing specific on how this material will be disposed of and it’s the size of Texas.