#title Plastic Poem, Plastic Plague #author Sara Loosestrife #SORTauthors Sara Loosestrife; #date 1986 #source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/324-fall-1986/plastic-poem-plastic-plague]] #lang en #pubdate 2020-11-07 #notes Fifth Estate #324, Fall, 1986 *** Plastic Poem Yellow garbage bag ties pieces of ziplock bags whole ziplock bags and baggies tips of tiparello cigars orange bread bag ties, green ones juice bottle top milk bottle top camera lens cover pieces of pampers disposable diapers toy soldier toy truck wheel chapstick coffee stir pieces of bic pens bic pen top toy rudder piece of yellow comb orange elmer’s glue cap black binocular lens cap many caps of many unidentified things many nondescript pieces of things in many colors pieces of fishing line, pieces of netting’ blue baby doll brush baby doll arm toothpaste tube cap nyquil cold medicine cup tampon applicators—everywhere bic cigarette lighters—everywhere cigarette filters—everywhere pieces of styrofoam cups and plates straws—red and white striped, blue and white striped pieces of forks and knives and spoons six pack beer can yokes shotgun shells pieces of balloons—green ones, yellow, blue and red champagne cork. Let’s celebrate. . The sand cannot cover this. The earth cannot bury this. The lake cannot swallow this. —Sara Loosestrife, White Pine Beach, Point Pelee, Ontario, August 31, 1986 *** Plastic Plague —More than five million plastic containers are dumped into the ocean each day by the shipping crews of the 50,000+ ships that sail the seas. —Commercial fishermen alone dump more than 50 million pounds of plastic packaging into the sea each year and lose some 300 million pounds of plastic nets, lines and buoys. —Participants in an Oregon beach cleanup two years ago collected 26 tons of garbage in three hours. —2,000,000 seabirds, several hundred thousand mammals and turtles die every year because of plastic ingestion. —90% of albatross chicks on Laysan Island have some quantity of plastic in their digestive system. —Plastic banana bags dumped from docks in Costa Rica are found in the digestive tracts of sea turtles which probably mistake the bags for jellyfish—one of their favorite foods. —Lost fishing nets trap and entangle fish and other water wildlife. A single piece of netting, recovered in the North Pacific contained one hundred dead seabirds and two hundred dead salmon. —Each night, Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean fishermen set out eight-mile long, twenty-six foot deep nets, stretching 20,000 miles of invisible netting. Each morning when the nets are retrieved, an average of ten miles of netting escapes detection, continuing to entrap and kill fish. Thousands of miles of old, deteriorated nets are consciously left behind or dumped overboard each year. —Each year ten times as many fur seals killed by native Alaskans are killed when they become caught in plastic netting left out by commercial fishermen.