This has been on public TV for years, and the thing is growing. There have been other issues as well, since quite a bit of what is washed overboard from freighters on the Pacific often winds up on the beaches of the U.S. West Coast.

I'd favor some sort of import penalty, e.g. 10k percent, imposed on any freight line whose cargo ends up verifiably traceable to the west coast of the U.S. If there were an economic incentive for freight lines to secure their cargoes properly, then insurance would cover the associated losses when a storm or accident causes the loss of an entire ship.

Garbage dumping in the sea has been a problem for decades, yet nobody has concerned themselves with it with sufficient vigor to engender any form of political will to curb it. If there were a $100 deposit on plastic bottles, perhaps that would make a difference. Of course, I'd favor a $100 deposit on glass jars and bottles, too, as most beer bottles could be recycled, but aren't.

The problem with recycling is that municipalities can only afford to recycle what someone else will buy. If there were a price on selling the plastic, glass, cardboard, foam, steel, and aluminum containers that outweighed the monetary efficiency of using and disposing of them, like that $100 deposit on the beer bottle, maybe people would behave differently. After all, the bulk of the price difference between the "best" and "worst" beer isn't in the part you drink, but, rather, in the container and its advertising, since the price difference between the best and worst 12-ounces of beer is about 1 cent, which is 20% of the actual cost of the beer. The rest is advertising, transport, printing, labeling, etc.

RE