Captain Moore's Plastic Ocean

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Without trying, plastic is literally at our fingertips everyday. In our modern world, there is no way to escape it. We use it to hold our drinks, to hold our groceries, and even to type onto computers. This useful and indestructible creation birthed an outbreak and it’s production skyrocketed. The first form of plastic was created in 1907 and to this day we continue to manufacture 300 million tons each year. But if it indestructible, where does it go when we’re done using it? You may find it along the roadside, sewers, or even stuck on trees but sooner or later, it all ends up in one place-the ocean. Imagine all of the plastic that has been produced since 1907 still somewhere out there in the ocean. In Plastic Ocean, by Captain Moore, Moore started noticing trash bobbing and floating around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1997. Moore knew it was a major problem. He explains how plastic takes forever to biodegrade and the smallest bits of plastic can continue to pollute the earth for centuries. In this essay, I describe how Moore is motivated to study the plastic waste in the ocean and how he faced many challenges on his journey to do so. Then I discuss about how Moore still has many unanswered questions about the status of the plastic in the ocean. Although plastic can be a…show more content…
It was not a crazy thing see bottles, bottle caps, or any plastic fragment floating around in the ocean every five minutes. It was astonishing to him to find so much plastic in the middle of California and Hawaii. He could be thousands of miles away from civilization but never away from the plastic waste. There were specks and flakes of plastic everywhere. What he had found was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and to his surprise it was not a patch at all. Unlike how the media describes it to us, it is not a patch, nor a mountain, nor an island, but it is more like a soup. It a big, nasty, trash

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