Excerpts from the Globe’s environmental blog.
You’ve probably heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast concentration of plastic litter trapped by ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean. Now, researchers at the Woods Hole-based Sea Education Association have found a garbage patch in the Atlantic.
The organization, which runs undergraduate sailing oceanography programs, has been towing nets in the western North Atlantic Ocean from Newfoundland to Venezuela for 22 years. Students have made more than 6,000 tows, pulling up nets to count marine organisms - and plastics - in them, and carefully recording the data.
Their data show that while a whopping 62 percent of the tows found plastic, researchers consistently saw one area with the highest concentrations: due east of Atlanta in the western Sargasso Sea.
The precise size of the patch is unknown, but the plastic is probably gathering for the same reason as in the Pacific: Because gyres, or rotating ocean currents, trap the waste. And while you may expect to see plastic bags and milk jugs floating in an ocean garbage dump, most of the plastic is in tiny bits, broken down by the ocean and the elements. Most of the debris is plastic from common household products, from straws to milk jugs.
Plastics can soak up harmful chemicals that fish and seabirds can eat and accumulate. And sometimes, humans eat the contaminated fish.
“We really decided to look at this more closely,’’ said Kara Lavender Law, the Sea Education Association’s oceanography faculty scientist. Lavender and Sea Education colleague Giora Proskurowski recently presented their findings at the Ocean Sciences meeting held by the American Geophysical Union in Oregon. “I don’t know of any such potentially important work that was primarily collected by undergraduates,’’ said Lavender Law.
In June, the researchers will launch the first-ever expedition dedicated solely to examining the accumulation of plastic marine debris in the North Atlantic.
BETH DALEY
Carmichael began her research after her young son was diagnosed with asthma. Her research into the possible causes led her to earn a master’s degree in public health and to write this book.
The slim volume is a fantastic reference, as it is organized well and is easy to use. Each of the topics, which range from green cleaning to personal care products to food, begins with a few paragraphs on why conventional products are harmful and what to look for in a safe product, followed by a list of companies that make nontoxic products.
Many are brands that are commonly found in drugstores and supermarkets.
I’m currently running low on laundry detergent. The old me would have purchased the cheapest option, but after reading this book, I don’t feel comfortable buying a product with benzene, a carcinogen linked to leukemia and other blood disorders, so I’ll bring the book along as a reference to find my trusty new laundry detergent.
DARA OLMSTED 
