Garbage the size of Texas
You ever wear a shirt or an accessory and just know that people will comment on it? It could be something ridiculous, something interesting or something that connects to people such as wearing a sports team jersey or apparel.
Sometimes the best way to spread awareness is simply to wear clothes or accessories supporting your cause. Since this summer I’ve been wear two bracelets supporting 4Ocean, a non-profit attempting to clean up our oceans. Buying one bracelet funds taking out one pound of trash out of the ocean. One of mine is the generic clean up bracelet with a blue string with small glass beads strung on, while the other is a red string supporting overfishing, two causes I’ve been actively helping this last summer.
Last night at dinner, my roommate and I ran into two friends and had a short conversation while waiting for our food at Ono Hawaiian BBQ, highly recommend the chicken katsu with double mac salad, but back to the story.

One of my friends commented on my bracelets, asking what they were for prompting the whole conversation 4Ocean and the cause behind the bracelets and the nonprofit. Not your typical late Thursday night conversation, but then we all started talking about 4Ocean’s goal and objectives of cleaning the trash and plastics in the ocean, while also now supporting topics such as overfishing. The other friend was shocked and had no idea about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which I mentioned was now twice the size of Texas (Rice, n.d.). TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS. My friend stopped me, looking at me puzzled and asked to repeat what I had just said. Yes, there is a huge mass of trash in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas. And very few people know about this! I didn’t even know it was that big until I researched it and I think of myself being pretty educated on this topic for a college student.

Just in this small sample size, we can see how unaware college students and people in general are about this growing problem of trash in our oceans. One thing we mentioned was why was there not a discussion when the trash patch was the size of one Texas or even half of Texas? Thankfully there are people now trying to clean it up and reverse the damage humans have been doing over the last century, however there is still a lot of work to do. The problem is only getting worse though as estimates are getting larger and larger for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch now saying it was sixteen times greater than previously estimated (Science Daily). There are 1.8 TRILLION pieces of plastic weighing 80,000 metric tons. That’s a lot of plastic. And its not going anywhere. The average decomposition time for plastic is about 400 years. 400 years… In 2400, all of the plastic of today will still be here unless recycled into something else, but still on the earth in the form of plastic. All of the plastic today plus all of the plastic that will be produced in the next 400 years. This problem is growing rapidly and won’t slow down unless we make drastic changes to the amount of plastic we use and produce while cleaning up the mess we’ve created in the last century. The first step to this solution is getting the whole world on the same page and on the path to global pollution recovery.

