http://www.newsweek.com/breaking-plastics-1379320

For the US, it’s cheaper and easier to ship our used plastic, metal, and paper 7,000 miles across the open ocean than to deal with it at home. Make sense? It does to most developed nations. But it’s never been a perfect game, with most global plastics ending up in landfills or in our parks and waterways. Stories related to our shocking excess of plastic garbage stop us in our tracks, like the recent report of a Cuvier’s beaked whale that washed up on a beach in the Philippines, dead of dehydration and starvation, with 88 pounds of plastic bags in its stomach; or just months before, a sperm whale dead in Sri Lanka with 1000 pieces of plastic material in its stomach.

Out of sight is not out of mind, not in today’s world, where the media show us the magnitude of the environmental problem we are facing each and every day because of the plastic-pollution assault on our planet. We find it on our coastlines. We see the grotesque images in the media of animals choked to death from marine debris, or starved from stomachs full of this indestructible material. We swim and surf through it as we hope to enjoy some relaxing time in the sea. We see pictures of children in communities across the world living and playing in trash fields. We know about the five massive whirlpools in the ocean called gyres, where currents meet and plastics form a garbage patch soup; one example, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, stretches more than 1.6 million square kilometers. One day soon, we will all acknowledge the effect this trash has on our own immune systems, transferred to us from the toxicity of the food we eat.