Alva Review-Courier -

The headline reads: “Ben Lecomte leaves Japan headed for San Francisco 5500 miles away, swimming through shark infested waters and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” At 30 miles a day, that’s a six-month trip, hoping to bring attention to the oceans, which are drowning in plastic. A quote from National Geographic reads, “We made it, we depend on it, we’re drowning in it.” Plastic is everywhere. I see it flying in the breeze and caught in the trees, snagged by fences, and strewn along the highways, byways and waterways.

Since only 25 percent can be easily recycled, and most people choose to discard it anyway, what are our alternatives? Two options are to require customers to bring their own shopping bags and reduce the use of plastic straws. Worldwide, half a billion straws are discarded each day. Did you know that the average “working life” of a plastic bag is 15 minutes and that had the Pilgrims brought bottled water to Plymouth Rock, the trash would likely still be around?

We’ve got to do something as plastic particles are invading our food supply and approximately 3 billion people sustain themselves on seafood. Plastic, like DDT, is found far removed from where it was first used. From Arctic to Antarctic, millions of tons end up in the oceans, dumped carelessly on land and swept out to sea. That sounds like the start of a novel, and, like Gulliver’s Travels, the currents carry the debris to the far corners of the world.