This is Jan Eliot's marvelous family strip, Stone Soup, on July 28, 2009. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is real, and some estimate it may be approaching the size of Africa. When this blog was new, and I was still learning how to embed pictures, I wrote about this phenomenon here and here.The name 'Garbage Patch' is deceptive on multiple levels. I always think of a patch as being a small piece of fabric or other material designed to repair something. This patch is immense and destroys rather than repairs. I think of garbage as being the biodegradable leavings from food preparation such as used coffee grounds, vegetable shavings, fat scraps and the like. Garbage is stuff that comes from the planet and returns easily to the earth, even improves the earth with nutrients to support new growth. What circles in this enormous floating morass is not garbage. It is non-biodegradable trash, much of which is plastics.
We need to stop calling this the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That's entirely too cute. And the only truth in it is 'Pacific', denoting the location of this one. (No, it is not the only one, just the worst.)
Maybe the Indestructible Pacific Killer Waste Dump. How about that? I'm open to reader suggestions in comments.
More important, the world is open to suggestions on ridding our oceans of killer waste.
Thanks to Jan Eliot whose Stone Soup I read at Go Comics and Arizona Republic newspaper.
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