Garbology Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of Garbology mainly addressed about a sixty year old woman named Mary Crowley and her experiences throughout Project Kaisei. During her time at sea, she had seen our trash floating in the ocean, from floating detergent bottles to lawn chairs to cracked pieces of plastic. What grabbed my attention was when Crowley mentioned that it wasn't what she saw that terrified her, it was what she couldn't see. She talked about how she couldn't see anything from the surface but when she got samples of the sea water, she found tiny pieces of plastic, "trash confetti" that is too small to be pointed out by the naked eye. She refers to the ocean as plastic chowder. The chapter referenced different scientists that had worked with Crowley through her discoveries and examined the intestines of fish that lived around the areas that had the most pollution. Researches found more than 9 percent of the fish had plastic in their digestive tracts. A two year old whale, located in the San Francisco Bay Area contained 450 pounds of debris in its digestive tracts and later died from starvation. We are causing deaths in order to live comfortably. Bar soap alone, Humes explains, contains tiny grains of plastic. Each time we take a shower with our favorite scented shampoo, we are draining down grains of plastic that eventually land inside a baby whales intestines. All our illegal dumping add up. An engineer named Norton Smith, worked with Crowley in inventing The Beach. This device was used to collect plastic from the sea by being careful not to suck in marine life with it. After multiple tests, the device was successful. I truly agreed with Crowley's point of how building such a time consuming and expensive device is pointless, when what we should really do is have a "worldwide reduction in disposable plastic garbage, and an end to the constant flow of plastic that goes missing every year, and ends up as marine chowder"(Humes 123). Although The Beach was successful, we didn't have a need for that. What we need is to correct our mistakes in order to not make it worse. We need to use less plastic in our products and try to find another source. If manufacturers internationally decide to make their products safer, we could put an end to this unintended plastic chowder.