If you kill yourself, please don't leave your body in the ocean!
A note on PHYSICAL sea junk...the ocean is full of ships and planes and other crap. The beauty of the ocean is that physical things, as we know will soon become habitats for good living things. (Chemical and biological refuse is a much different issue).
I'm not condoning ocean dumping, but I know that ships are often sunk to make reefs. I've done some wreck diving and I know that stuff takes a liking to physcal structures (I've seen the metal frame of the "bomber" from the filming of "Thunderball" and the cessna from "Jaws 3" and they are fully encrusted with coral and life all around it.
Maybe it's propaganda, but I remember seeing a display either in the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans, or else Monterey Bay Aquarium where they showed how the presense of an oil rig actually encourages life to flourish in some really bleak areas (Heck we ALL know how life just finds a handhold on anything in our tanks! My pumps, returns, overflows, etc are coated with life)
Batteries is something very different and completely irresponsible (hey, ships sink, planes crash, oil rigs are built with environmental impact studies done first). I find it horrible that some company would do this. I think massive fines need to be imposed...but then again, that is hard to enforce.
I don't know if anyone remembers but years ago Canada imposed a moratorium (sp?) on cod fishing of the Maritime coast (ie; east coast). So Canadian fishermen lost their jobs. That didn't stop the Europeans from fishing there though. As a matter of fact the Canadian Coast Guard had to patrol the 200 miles "international waters border" to keep foreign fishermen out. But those fishermen would fish at exactly 200 miles and one foot...
Who knows who dumped those batteries. Maybe they were even dumped by a company that we all brought our used batteries to for recyling? How do we know the stuff we put in the blue boxes are even recycled?
Man, this IS a downer. The best thing that WE can do is to do what we can locally. Bring cloth shopping bags to the store, buy things in bulk to reduce packaging, recycle everything, etc.
Are we hypocrites though? I know my tank lights eat up quite a bit of electricity! I even use to pay more to use "Green Mountain Electric" because they claimed to dump renewable energy into the powergrid on my behalf...until the whole California energy crisis forced them out of the state.
We do it to ourselves. This thread is depressing because it just shows how powerless we are and how just a few bad eggs can really screw things up.
V
PS. don't kill yourself unless we can recycle your body. I have a can of fava beans and a nice chianti waiting ...
