»In which we litter by the billions

Great. Another plastic bag. Somewhere I have a photograph of a carrier bag fluttering high up on a tree growing from a crevice in The Siq.
Some numbers, since statistics ne'er lie: "There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there's now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that's twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There's six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre."

I read once that 1% of the pellets used to extrude the plastic "t-shirt" bags are lost in transit, and many wind up in the sewage system in San Pedro.