Please Recycle
Plastics. It’s not just a quote from “The Graduate” it’s become a way of life in the United States. And apparently, it has become a new floating island in the Pacific Ocean as well.
There is an animation showing the predominant currents in the Pacific ocean that is put out by Green Peace (link at end of this post) as well as an article with some sobering statistics. Basically when you toss that empty plastic water bottle in the trash instead of recycling it, it could end up in a variety of places… including a floating island of trash in the Pacific that is bigger than the state of Texas. 
At our house we throw very few things away. We even bring trash home from other places in order to recycle it. We compost our vegetable matter. We could probably have trash picked up about once a quarter and not have any issues, but our recycle bin is often overflowing before our every-other-week pickup schedule comes back around.
We’re not perfect. We still get plastic shopping bags from Walmart, but we do keep them here at the house and take them back into recycle. For smaller purchases we eschew bags altogether. My sister recycled some of her old blue jeans into denim shopping bags, and she uses those.
Going back to the article, I realize that some folks might find that Green Peace is not the most likely source for an unbiased opinion. So I have also included a link to the Wiki page on this subject, which includes a number of additional sources and links. I don’t think this is an imaginary problem, it’s real.
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