Between Hawaii and Asia is the center of the Northern Pacific Gyre, and today at its heart is a garbage patch twice the size of Texas.  The Pacific Ocean's current circulation pattern has been gathering debris for several decades.  This island of waste is becoming the source of "food" gathered by Albatross parents who travel sometimes over two weeks filling their craw with colorful debris, which they feed to their unsuspecting chicks, often over 700 miles from the "garbage patch."  The photograph shown is one of many un-doctored pictures and portrays the fate of one of these young birds.

This waste represents many symptoms of paradigms we need to explore and change.  One of these paradigms is that we humans live our lives as though there is an "away," a place that does not affect our own existence.  We can without thinking throw stuff "away."  There is no "away."  Another paradigm is that we are not connected to the biological communities of the world and that what we do has no effect on us.  Just as these Albatross chicks are poisoned by our waste, all of us are being poisoned by the toxins from the plastics as they wear down and enter our food chains.  We are connected to a very large and intricate set of systems upon which we are deeply dependant.

We need to design products, e.g. plastics, that are guided by the Nine Laws of Nature, as defined by Janine Benyus, so that they will degrade rapidly out of use and become food.  The wave of the future has to be enzymatic or biodegradable plastics.

- Roger Saillant