Moby Duck!

I just finished reading this baby. The premise is that a shipping container traveling form Asia goes overboard with 28,000 rubber bath toys, and these self-same toys travel thousands of miles on complicated oceanic currents, washing ashore everywhere from Alaska and Hawaii to Maine, Nova Scotia, and the United Kingdom.

I foolishly thought this to be an adventure travel tale of the kind I like to read, but slowly, over the course of many pages, I began to aprehend Moby Duck as a somber book about the savagely polluted state of our oceans, about the mythical indestructability of plastics, and about how when you throw something away, there just IS no away. It's not a feel-good story necessarily, but I mean as humans in charge of our own destinies, we should know this stuff.

Anyhoo, chew on this: The top trash items most frequently found in the ocean:

1: cigarette butts

2: paper pieces

3: plastic pieces

4: styrofoam

5: glass pieces

6: plastic food bags

7: plastic caps and lids

8: metal beverage cans

9: plastic straws

10: glass beverage bottles

11: plastic beverage bottles

12: styrofoam cups