Water samples taken in the patch from the research vessel Alguita in 2001 revealed the presence of six times more plastic than plankton. 

Not long ago I was horrified to hear about something named The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Claims there was an expanse of garbage floating off the coast of California that was "twice the size of Texas".

Surely, in this age of satellite imaging, if such an abomination existed there would be pictures. I looked and didn't find any.

In the absence of any photographs of a floating garbage pile, I hoped it was just a beat-up. Unfortunately all further enquiries have led me to understand that the real story behind the name is much worse than anything I had imagined.

The so called Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area of intense water pollution collected within a sub-tropical high pressure system in the northern Pacific Ocean, hereby referred to as the gyre.

From the surface, the gyre dubbed The Great Pacific Garbage Patch appears fairly normal. Towards the centre there is a higher than normal incidence of plastic bottles floating by, but it just didn't appear that catastrophic. However these visible flotsam and jetsam are the least of our worries.

Garbage sinks, collecting underwater. Beneath the ocean's surface things are really bad.  Water samples taken in the patch from the research vessel Agualita in 2001 revealed the presence of six times more plastic than plankton.  

This is the first blog in a ‘Sustainability Insight' online series created by the Society for Sustainable Business - a group of business and academic professionals motivated to provide leadership to accelerate the change to an economically viable, environmentally sustainable and socially healthy society.

As the pressure to be green and to do green heats up, we run into two major questions: what criteria do we use to choose the route we follow, and how do we know that we are successful?

Let's deal with the criteria. Any green measures may have pluses and minuses. We are working with a system that is not just the region, the state or the nation, but one that is ultimately global. How can we get to a level where the decisions we take are in the best interests of people everywhere and the environment?

There is only one way that I have found, and that is to define an Ideal Vision for the world that we and our grandchildren's children would be happy to live in. This was the idea of Professor Emeritus Roger Kaufman of Florida State University in 1992. Kaufman has tested this proposition on five continents with different political systems, different religions and different races, and has found an amazing degree of unanimity about the future that people really want.

So what do they agree on? They agree on: no war, no disease, no crime, no accidents, and they want health, happiness and a chance to live out their potential. There is also a growing concern for the environment.

How many people since the planet Earth was created must have had their favorite spots? Favorite spots of children are the ones remembered the best. When you see the map of the world you can be sure, that there are many such places of unpolluted beauty, far away from populated centres, which maybe the favorite spots of people living there. When one comes close to thinking of cities and their surroundings the chance of having a clean, clear, place of natural beauty becomes slim. Maybe 50 or 100 years back, here might have been such favorite spots. But now the count is diminishing. How many of the world's total populace of billions have had their favorite spots? How many of them cared they had? Yet how many swallowed their pride, curbed their anger, blinked away their tears, kept silent, did not know how to speak about their favorite spot which was also their secret place... when they found this secret place was there no more!! Lost to rapid modern construction and development work more often than not unplanned and indiscriminate. Or succumbed to a wave of pollution, toxic seepage from intervening industrial influences, overtaking the scenic beauty including your Favorite Spot?!

How many parents, taking their children back to their hometowns on a visit, hometowns from where they had migrated long time ago; made plans, almost having the sanctity of a pilgrimage to their favorite spots of their childhood days? How many stories they had told their offspring about this place, and how many times were the same stories told? And after building up the excitement in their little children's heads, they reached the place where their favorite haunt was-to find-it is not, anymore. It is just Not there... Not even a bit, not even a tail-end. It must be on the other side, hidden behind that structure! No it is not! Or maybe their favorite spot is now, eaten up by pollutants and toxic waste, its not just an eyeful of a sad degraded waste, pool of dirt, sludge and slime, or burnt out vegetation. Flowers have left for some eternal abode. No birds, no plump, furry animals , cute with sounds of peace and chirrups melting like music in your ears. No that is not enough, the nose wants to be a party to the protest. The place just stinks. Repel. Disgust. In the olden days, when people returned to the places they had left several years ago, the places were still there. The scenes of life being painted and repeated, with humans, birds, animals and flowers, like a classic painting by the old masters. Or for the children like a Disney film animation, when pages of opening books follow a brush moving into scenes of Disney's wonderland.