Today, while listening to podcast of the Thom Hartman radio program, I heard some discussion on a pile of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean almost twice as large as the state of Texas! Let that sink in for a moment.

I wondered how many plastic trash bags once belonged to me.

From the SFGate [...] The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.