The idea of a garbage “patch” or “island” twice the size of Texas, a favorite term in the media for the now-infamous spot in the Pacific, feeds misconceptions, he says. “It’s much worse. If it were an island, we could go get it. But we can’t,” because it’s a “thin soup of plastic fragments.”
Cost externalizing is a socio-economical term describing how a business maximizes its profits by off loading indirect costs and forcing negative effects to a third party. In this case we the consumer, who purchase everything from plastic bags, drink bottles, coffee with plastic lids, and a barrage of small single-usage items are the primary culprits here. I've seen rivers congested with plastic bags in Indochina and streams saturated with crunched up plastic bottles in South America. We consider this type of pollution someone else's concern. Few accept or understand that contamination of the "commons" and toxification and demise of ocean life are all costs that shall be borne by us collectively as a species in the near future.
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