The Guardian reports that:

 When the crew of the Greenpeace ship Esperanza last year pulled in its 1-metre-net from the surface of the Atlantic about 200 miles south-east of the Azores, it was surprised only by the quantity of what it found.

Washing around in the net were nearly 700 minuscule and unidentifiable fragments of plastic; 57 pieces of synthetic fishing line and leftover strands from dumped nets and rope; a handful of flakes from old plastic bags, including one with a zip-type seal still attached; and a dozen so-called nurdles – white pellets, looking like grains of rice, which are the raw material of the packaging industry. All this microplastic had been collected in just four nautical miles.

“When we conducted the first trawl and brought the sample back on board, I was shocked, and so were the crew,” says Adam Walters, a researcher at Greenpeace’s laboratory in Exeter. “We had been sailing then for over a month, looking at the ocean every day, and had no idea that all this plastic was floating by the ship.”

Once again we are shown just how little we care about the environment and the damage that we do to it.  The “Not In My Back Yard” attitude continues to prevail.  When will we learn?