My daughter sent me a  link to an article in today's Independent  (25 February 2008) with the title:

The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

Her only comment was "OH my GOOD God!". The article starts off:

"A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said".

"The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan."  [...]

Interested? See Full text of Article. Shocking enough, but I found it more shocking that some of the early comments on the article were dismissive of the problem.  One commenter wrote that based on the figures supplied, the weight of plastic floating per cubic meter in the area in question is "0.025 grams per square metre unless I have counted on my fingers incorrectly" and went on to remark that "This is soup in the same sense homeopathic medicine is medicine".

Well, normally I don't have time or inclination to check other people's figures, but today I did and calculated that the correct figure is 250 grams of plastic per square meter (not 0.025!). My calculations motivated me to send in my own comment - I just hope MY calcs are correct :-) What I find interesing about the whole thing is that the language of some of the early comments - commenters referring to the "the usual Green hype", "A sad state of affairs, but one with which we have to accept as the small price we pay for modern living", etc. - plus the calculation mentioned above, were almost enough for me to disregard the significance of the news story. Moral I suppose is, digestion of the news needs to be an active process, rather than a passive one.

As I am posting this, I note that more comments have arrived and the debate is more balanced which is always a good thing :-)