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FLOATING DEBRIS
An ocean of waste
Rolling Stone, Oct. 29 issue
Sandwiched between an article about Madonna's "Sticky & Sweet Tour" and a profile of the Motorhead frontman who drinks a bottle of Jack Daniel's a day is a four-page, outrage-inducing piece called "An Ocean of Plastic." Did you know there is a floating garbage dump twice the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean? It contains 10 million tons of waste, "a swirling vortex of plastic soup, an immense fetid swamp of debris" and has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In some areas, the birds, fish and sea turtles eat a "plastic diet" that kills them; a photo of a cut-open dead seabird shows a pen, a lighter and 42 other pieces of trash in its belly. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh about five pounds.
-- Rachel Saslow
![[slate.com logo]](http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/09/27/GR2007092701096.GIF)
