The North Pacific Gyre - the Texas-Sized Plastic Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean

Please watch this 7 minute, 20 second talk from TED (which is my favorite website to visit to learn new and interesting things):



Reduce - Reuse - Recycle. BYOB - Bring Your Own Bag...to the store, any store, when shopping. Buy a reusable bottle and carry your liquids in it, instead of using innumerable plastic bottles. Do anything you can to avoid using plastic. This includes the much-beloved balloons people, especially children, love and which frequently fly away to parts unknown...ending in the guts of both land and ocean animals who thought they were food, to their demise. When you avoid plastics, you'll help reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to boot.

In the same vein, avoid polyester fabrics, buy cotton and linen clothing and linens, buy vintage or antique items. Go to your neighborhood thrift store, contribute to a charity, reuse things and help save our environment at the same time! My favorite thrift store is Savers! I also love e-Bay, as this is a great marketplace for vintage and antique items. What's cool, is that the things you buy have a history, instead of just buying something new, using it, and then throwing it away. Bonus...products produced from natural sources tend to be much healthier for our bodies and our environment. The same thing goes for what you ingest and put on your skin. Chemicals found in shampoos, lotions and underarm deodorants like aluminum, parabens and sodium laurel/laureth sulfates are not good for people. Up to and around 56% of what you put on your body is absorbed directly into your blood stream and is ferried straight into your body's major organs. Genetically modified organisms are not good for us and most people have never even heard of them, never mind know just how many of the products that they eat contain them. The gyre is simply the tip of the iceburg.

Also watch the great, fast-paced 20-minute animated video on the stuff we buy, sell and use in our daily lives. Look for it further down the sidebar of this blog. It's from http://www.storyofstuff.com/.