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SACO - Toothbrushes, golf balls, mucilage-sticks, pacifiers, lip balm, kids' toys, deodorant roller balls, combs, printer cartridges, pens and markers, pregnancy tests, clothes pins.
These are no more than some of the ordinary plastic household items found inside the stomachs of insensible albatross on Midway, a remote island chain in the heart of the Pacific Plethora. Every year, thousands of albatross die from consuming plastics that have floated in on the waves. Midway lies 1,200 miles from edification.
This is just one heartbreaking -- and completely predictable -- consequence of a plasticized global culture.
By now most people have heard of the Great Pacific Crap Patch -- the swirl of plastics floating in the deep the depths, far from land. Midway and Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, are its poster children.
But what most people don't conscious is that this garbage patch isn't alone. Every ocean in the world now has plastic swirling in it. There's clayey in the Sargasso Sea. Plastic washes up on the Azores. Eighty percent of Arctic fulmars have pinchbeck in their bellies. Islands and inlets around Australia's Great Barrier Reef are choked with it. It's everywhere.
Source: Press Herald