yes. Its all over the place and I think its a community problem. Individual efforts will make a dent but cannot provide a whole solution.

I've just been out for a walk for a couple of hours and, thanks to this thread, noticed just how much plastic there is. It's literally everywhere - tangled up in trees and hedges, in the ditches and streams, half-buried in the soil by ploughing (and no doubt loads more buried) and blowing about wherever it hasn't got stuck yet.

Use science to make self disposible packageing

Whenever I'm in the supermarket I see so many products that don't need to be wrapped in plastic. Things that come in boxes often have an additional wrapping of cellophane around the box when a tiny tab of tape would keep them secure; open the box and there may be even more plastic inside. Things like cabbages and cauliflowers come wrapped in individual plastic bags which are entirely unnecessary, as do sweets and candy which could so easily be sold by weight in paper bags like they used to be. On top of all that, the goods often arrive at the shop wrapped in layers of plastic on pallets. When you think how many shops there are and how much they sell, just getting rid of all that plastic would be enough to make a difference and it wouldn't be hard to do.

The vast majority of this plastic is "packaging" for the shipment of goods. These plastics can be made of biodegradeable materials, but probably won't be until we insist upon it by requiring it by law. Biodegradeable plastics are a bit more expensive, hence the resistance to using them. But it can and should be done.

However, this does not deal with the plastics already in the ocean. These can be made into fuel oil by thermal depolymarization, but that faces the same hurdles as the biodegradeable plastics. It's something we have to insist upon. Capitalist forces as they are now motivated are not going to fix it, but will make the situation work.

Once again, the solutions available are through "Socialism". The majority of people are still enamored of "Capitalism" Until we are willing to apply some Socialism to shape the motives of Capitalism, it will run amok and produce problems like this ... and poverty, and pollution and decaying infrastructure... and ... and .... etc...

It is scary! I try to reduce my carbon footprint, reduce, reuse, recycle as much as I can.

Recycle or bury everything, which we cannot do atm. Maybe one day, but there is no money in it.

Here is (part 3 of 3 of) VICE's video from 2012 about the great pacific garbage patch. In it they explain that the bigger problems are the smaller micro-plastics. The bigger items that we can scoop up (like buoys and discarded netting) only require time and "elbow grease" to clean up. The micro-plastics, however, is almost "uncleanable".

Jump to about 3 minutes to see what this "soup" of micro-plastics look like:

EDIT: Actually, the netting apparently would comprise of half the size of the patch as per Boyan Slat's latest video:

First, we do what we can in our own patch. I know Oz and the USA don't contribute to the Ocean plastic like China and India. Re the cleanup of the ocean? I have no idea as yet.

Stop using plastics. Or minimise the use of plastics. I've not taken plastic shopping bags in years. I've always brought my own canvas bags to the grocery. I always take my own coffee mug to coffee shops for about 2 years. For work lunches, I "eaten in" as much as I can instead of getting "take away" in those plastic containers. And I can't remember the last time I bought plastic-bottled water.

EDIT: As for what can be done with the pacific garbage patch? I don't know. I'm hoping someone will find a safe ocean-living microbe that can digest those micro plastics and excrete it as oxygen. But that's highly unlikely.

A kid, many years ago, got a grant to develop LARGE sweepers that can be installed in the oceans. They got a prototype out in the ocean a couple of years back. I'm not sure of its status. The main complaint scientists had against the device was that the sweepers could like microscopic planktons.

Pretty close to everything can be recycled, one way or another. We need to stop looking at garbage as waste and start seeing it as a resource. Some places are ready going this.

One relatively easy way is to follow Reduce, Reuse, recycle religiously. Once at the recycle stage easy to recycle products would be straightforward. Difficult to recycle items (juice boxes, furniture, toothbrushes, mixed material objects) would go through an incineration process to produce electricity (standard temperature process preferred since it would yield greater net energy) and break down most complex chemicals and lower toxicity. All resulting ash, cinder, and slag would be processed and reprocessed as "low-grade ore" for the most cost-effective constituent until almost nothing is left. This would be economically feasible because of the costs associated with disposal of waste would be saved.

Start giving a fuck about where we live.