Plastic bags choke the ocean

From an article by Dixie Belcher posted on JueanuEmpire.com:

Most of us are unaware that the health of the ocean underlies all life - even a cactus can't live without the ocean. And almost everyone is unaware that this basis of life on earth is dying. Many marine biologists now call their work "documenting the decline."

The ocean provides at least 70 percent of the world's oxygen. Sylvia Earle, a world-renowned oceanographer and director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for many years, puts this figure at 85 percent. Most nitrogen is also produced in the ocean - and air is about 80 percent nitrogen.

The ocean acts as a collection basin for carbon dioxide. It absorbs at least one third of the carbon dioxide created by gasoline engines. Carbon dioxide acidifies the ocean - it makes it sick - and dissolves the bodies and shells of the billions of tiny plants and animals that produce oxygen and nitrogen. One of the worst effects of global warming is happening in the ocean.

For centuries we have thought that the oceans were so big that it didn't matter how much garbage, sewage and toxins we threw at them - we believed humans were too small to affect something so big.

A primary cause of ocean pollution is plastic. The world uses one million plastic bags per minute. A plastic bag is used an average of 12 minutes and takes an estimated 1,000 years to decompose. Many sink - some parts of the deep ocean are so covered with plastic bags that scientists can't even find the bottom. Nothing lives under these bags. As for the plastics that remain on or near the top, the United Nations estimates there are 300,000 pieces of surface plastic per square ocean mile. In huge areas, there is now 30 times more plastic than plankton - in some places as much as 1,000 times. Every year, birds and animals eat plastic, mistaking it for food, and die. Their bodies decompose, but the plastic remains to be eaten again.