ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS WE CAN SOLVE

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While many of our pollution problems seem overwhelming in their scale, there are a few that lend themselves to a solution.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/06/05/marine.debris.crash/index.html
Earlier this week, investigators said they had located pieces of the plane in the southern Atlantic Ocean, which might have given them clues to the origin of Air France Flight 447's crash.
But on Thursday, Brazilian officials said what they had found was nothing more than run-of-the-mill ocean trash.
This highlights a little-seen environmental problem: Scientists say the world's oceans are increasingly filled with junk -- everything from large items like refrigerators and abandoned yachts to small stuff like plastic bottles.
Much of the ocean trash is plastic, which means it won't go away for hundreds of years, if ever. And the problem has gotten so bad that soupy "garbage patches" have developed in several locations, called gyres, where ocean currents swirl.
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He added: "The ocean is just like land. It's part of our whole ecosystem of the whole earth. We know a great deal about land but we know very little about the oceans."
While they aren't likely to help with the plane search, volunteer groups seek to collect trash before it hits the ocean and is swept away to a garbage patch. The Ocean Conservancy says it organizes the largest of these efforts. Last year, 400,000 volunteers from 100 countries collected trash off of the beaches, preventing it from harming the ocean, said Tom McCann, a spokesman for the group.
"It's entirely preventable," he said of the problem of trash in the ocean. "It's something we can solve ourselves."
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