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10/26/2007: "Giant raft of plastic waste blots oceans, kills wildlife"

The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers. It floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.

The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.

[ What kind of emotionally unstable species allows this to happen? ]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL&type=politics