Environment: Plastic in the Ocean

I am ashamed to admit that I did not know about this (and learned of it from, of all places, Nick Olsen's blog on the Domino website), but apparently there is an island of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean that's twice the size of Texas! According to this very disturbing article, countless seabirds, marine mammals, and fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from becoming ensnared in it and drowning. If that's not disturbing enough, chemicals leaching from the stuff are getting into our food chain and have been linked to everything from obesity and diabetes to cancer and infertility. What's more, since plastic takes forever to biodegrade, almost every bit of plastic ever made still exists. I think that I will never buy another bottled water again.