Chapter 7:

Have you ever wondered how trash ends up where it does and how many days, our minutes, or seconds it does to reach its destination. Seattle is the greenest city I have ever heard of. They are the recycle Gods! Seattle has created a way to find out where trash travels by inserting a tracker on a piece of trash. Humes talks about a resident in Seattle, Tim Pritchard has become apart of the trash tracker research.  Why can't the people of California get on Seattle's level where they are recycling about 30 percent of their waste. I believe it is possible for us to get to where Seattle is if we put our minds to it. It amazes me how residents are being charged on the amount of trash they accumulate. We know where most of our trash goes, which is in either the ocean or landfills, but the other stuff ends up everywhere! Humes also mentions smart trash. Humes also mentions that the SENSEable City Lab is great for the future. They are trying to shorten down the distance of where garbage travels, a specific trash the e-waste. The Lab is in Massachusetts institute of technology and was inspired by novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling. I feel like we keep getting closer and closer to finding a solution to our trash epidemic.

Chapter 6:

I seriously love how passionate and dedicated scientist Miriam Goldstein is about the research of plastic pollution in the ocean. She amazed me by how she gathered information for the project Kaisei which was mentioned in the previous chapter. Nobody knows where and when plastic has end up where it is now. Humes continues to show how concerned he is with plastic. I was happy to read that funds were going towards the research of garbage patches in the sea to get to the bottom of the situation and how we can help it stop it. How crazy is it to believe that there is a garbage patch that is Twice the size of Texas!! My eyes got huge when I read about that. Plastic has spread out to 1,200 miles! That is scary! I love animals... and it is so sad to see how plastic bags are floating around the ocean and are being eaten by turtles because they mistaken them for jellyfishes. Like I mentioned in the previous chapter, plastic has entered in our food chains. I like how Humes mentions that plastic investigators are more hardworking and kicka** because they have to do twice the work than an archaeologists and a paleontologists because they have no way of telling the age of plastic. I like how Goldstein says "We made it. We own it." because it is true! It is our mess and it is now our responsibility to clean it up instead of ignoring it hoping a miracle will happen.

Chapter 5:

 

I go to the beach almost every weekend over the summer and you wouldn't believe how much trash I found as I walked around. In this chapter, Humes discusses how plastic is harming our oceans. From the start of the book, he introduces captain, Mary Crowley who sailed on a ship named Kaisei, which mean "ocean planet" in japanese. Because I thought the sea was the cleanest place on earth that is trash free, but I was wrong. The sea is actually worst than the land. As Crowley continued her sail along the coast of California and Hawaii she identifies this nasty gooey material that is believed to be plastic that has been broken down to little particles. How nasty is that!? Humans and animals and other creatures have been swimming in this gunk and not even notice it. The plastic in the ocean is being absorbed into the lanterns fish bodies. That is dangerous because fish is in our food chain. Lantern fish are being eaten by bigger fish, which is being into by other bigger fishes then sold at the stores for us to cook and then we consume it. Now we have harmful toxins in our body. I know that trash is everywhere but I could not believe that there are islands of trash in the seas called gyres. Not to mention that there more than 1, but 5. They are located in the South and North Atlantic and the North and South Pacific. Humes says that putting all the trash together in the sea makes up about 40 percent of the ocean. We might at we create another country with the trash. All we need to do is put dirt over it and call it home. I know it wont be easy but at least we would be using the trash as something rather than nothing. I feel like it is impossible for people to stop them from throwing trash into the ocean because they don't know anything about it. This has made me open my eyes to our serious trash problem and has made me want to go out and inform the rest of the world what is happening.

Chapter 4:

Humes continues to discuss about the landfill. In this chapter he talks more about the history of the landfill. I found it interesting how David Steiner, the CEO of material management Inc bought all his competition out. He is convinced that our trash will pile up and take up more room than it already has. However he also believes that there is a solution for companies to buy the trash. I was astonished about when WMI expanded was thought out to be a good thing. Nevertheless, WMI was being blamed for illegal waste dumping. I was stunned by how they did not care for the things they were harming at the areas they were dumping at. A human with no feelings... a robot being controlled. I see they want the trash to disappear, but there must be a better way.