Hasta La Ideas

In the past two years, residents of North America’s west coast have received some “gifts”: Soccer balls, wooden flooring and even entire boats have washed ashore. Amazingly, this stuff traveled all the way, untended, from Japan.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the tsunami of March 2011 washed some five million tons of Japanese debris into the Pacific Ocean. Seventy percent of that debris is estimated to have sunk to the ocean floor around Japan, but the other 30% was buoyant enough to keep going. And yes, some of it has washed up on American shores, and if the experts are to be believed, there is more to come.

Earlier reports have been panicky. In September, NOAA released this graphic based on a computer simulation:

That shows a field of garbage larger than Texas, and about two times the area of Japan itself, on a collision course with California. In an update released just this week, however, NOAA points out that that is not a solid mass of debris:

…Whatever debris remains floating is very spread out. It is spread out so much that you could fly a plane over the Pacific Ocean and not see any debris since it is spread over a huge area, and most of the debris is small, hard-to-see objects.

We don’t care if this island of garbage is contiguous or not; what’s distressing is that there is 1.5 million tons of trash headed our way. What’s more distressing, however, is this:

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