Youre checking out at your local grocery store and you hear, paper or plastic?

Which do you chose? Environmentalists would hope that you would chose paper but on
average

about

one

million

plastic

bags

are

used

each

minute

(http://plasticvpaper.weebly.com). Out in the Pacific Ocean, swirling west of Hawaii and

east of Japan, is something often referred to as The Pacific Garbage Patch or The
Trash Vortex. This is a huge accumulation of trash the size of Texas wreaking havoc on
marine wildlife. In this report I propose a plastic tax on all plastic items, single use and
bulk, that I believe will help minimize the use of plastics in America. With America
having a consumer-based economy, I am predicting that Americans will either not buy,
or buy less plastic as a result of this tax. Drastic change must be brought about by drastic
decisions.

The garbage that circulates in the patch is caught and captured by the north pacific gyre,
in the subtropical convergence zone. In this area, a combination of high atmospheric pressure,
and the earths rotation slows down the ocean currents and moves them in a clockwise spiral,
thus creating the garbage patches (http://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu). There is so much trash
that it is said that for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton there is an estimated six kilos of
plastic (http://www.greenpeace.org). The garbage patch is actually two substantial heaps of
garbage concentrated in the Pacific Ocean. The larger patch is located off the west coast of
California and lies within the area of the North Pacific Subtropical high, and the just slightly
smaller one located to the east of Japan and is thought to be a small recirculation gyre. The
plastic finds its way into the larger trash vortex via humans. Daily, people carelessly consume
single-use plastics and toss them; this liter then eventually ends up in