RS: OK. And it made me feel suddenly good about everything.
DC: Why?
RS: I don't know, maybe I'm a sucker for good news, but it looked like you're able to put -- what are they, describe the whole process of --
DC: They're giant booms of plastic that have been carried out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and they --
RS: Which is where?
DC: That is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, spread out over approximately 2,000 square miles, but it shifts depending on whether we're having an El Nià ±o or La Nià ±a year; somewhere between Hawaii and California, that is where the Northeastern Pacific Gyre is located. And they have pulled them out there, and they are going to be passively cleaning up, I believe, the top three feet or something of the ocean. But the plastic that's in the ocean is spread out over that 2,000-square-mile area; it's in the water column, and the entire water strata, and it's on the ocean floor. It will not be cleaning those parts up.
RS: So it's a good thing to do, but again, it just really tells you how big the problem is.
DC: It may contribute to some of gathering a little bit of it. But I mean, in my personal opinion, that's really, that's the end of the whole chain. I think we need to look back and think, plastic appears to be an inexpensive material; but what is the true impact in our dependence on plastic? From war and extraction, through manufacturing and production, through delivery packaging, et cetera -- and then instantly a waste issue, waste management, incineration, particulate pollution. If you look at the whole chain, it impacts us negatively -- our health, human health, animal health, the planet, the entire chain. So really, I think while plastic is a useful and valuable material, when we use it and design things with it with intended obsolescence, to be used for a short amount of time, we are using a valuable material in an irresponsible way.
RS: And the "we," this is something we, we -- we Americans have led the world appetite in the use of plastic. We pioneered --
DC: I think we've definitely contributed to it; it appears that though there seem to be points where there's a lot of plastic pollution being generated in Asia and Southeast Asia, when you look at the brand audit data, which is coming out of cleanups in Manila and different places in Southeast Asia, what you find is that the top corporate polluters are European and American corporations.
RS: Right. And my point is, this is what the multinational economy is about. It was like, you know, selling sugar water to the natives; that's what Pepsi and Coca-Cola claimed they were doing. They had a clean water supply, we put it in a bottle, we sell it -- oh, we can put it in a plastic bottle, it makes it easier to ship, and so forth. And environment be damned, in the long run. But I just want to be very clear about this. It's a serious problem, and if we think in terms of where we get our consciousness from, that scene in The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, he should have, when that uncle or whatever came up and said "plastic," he should have -- in the manner of the Berkeley sixties, right, that he was supposed to be evoking and so forth -- he should have said, go to hell with your plastic, you're destroying life on the planet.
DC: But I don't think that people knew that at the time that that film was made.
RS: Exactly, exactly, so --
DC: Yeah, that's what makes that scene even more deeply ironic now.
RS: Right, right. The revolution was betrayed, the revolution was supposed to be facilitated by plastic, and plastic ends up, right, poking out -- what did you say, not the eye but the --
DC: The nostril. Got stuck in the nostril.
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