Follow up to previous posting on Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, this new research – Economist [with links from additional sources]: “The amount of plastic produced around the world increased fivefold between 1976 and 2008, and the amount thrown away by Americans went up fourfold between 1980 and 2008. It is a reasonable assumption that, as the amount of discarded plastic increases, so will the problem of oceanic pollution. Reasonable but, as it turns out, wrong. For a 22-year-long study of the North Atlantic and the Caribbean, just published in Science, suggests things are not getting worse. Kara Law from the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and her colleagues have found that between 1986 and 2008 there was no increase in the concentration of plastic in the areas they looked at.”