If enough plastic collects, can it be considered a land mass, and can we plant a flag on it to claim it as our own country?

I seem to recall a question the wife and I posed to Fandango awhile back: Is it better to ask for paper or plastic at the grocery store? Practically, he said it didn't really make much of a difference. Although technically the plastic bag will take longer to disintegrate, both forms of bags theoretically should end up in a landfill, and neither would decompose within our lifetimes. Unfortunately, a substantial amount of the plastic produced in the world manages to avoid the garbage dumps altogether, and never makes it to that landfill. If you're a piece of plastic that's lucky enough to have escaped to the Pacific Ocean, you'll likely find yourself perpetually floating in the great sink of the Northern Pacific Gyre, a huge collection of circulating bits of trash, driftwood, and the like that seems to be forever trapped due to the natural currents of the water.

So realizing that some of our plastic waste could take a detour to places we never even dreamed of, we got a little more enthusiastic about recycling. In fact, now our trash seems to be miniscule in comparison to the stuff we throw in the recycling bin for pick-up every week. And we felt like we didn't have to make a decision between paper or plastic--we'd just throw both in for recycling. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be quite the utopian answer I was looking for. According to this article in Salon, recycling those plastic bags isn't such an easy task, and actually disrupts what's otherwise a pretty streamlined operation:

Ask John Jurinek, the plant manager at Recycle Central, what's wrong with plastic bags and he has a one-word answer: "Everything." Plastic bags, of which San Franciscans use some 180 million per year, cannot be recycled here. Yet the hopeful arrow symbol emblazoned on the bags no doubt inspires lots of residents to toss their used ones into the blue recycling bin, feeling good that they've done the right thing. But that symbol on all kinds of plastic items by no means guarantees they can be recycled curbside. (The plastic bags collected at the recycling plant are trucked to the regular dump.) By chucking their plastic bags in the recycling, what those well-meaning San Franciscans have done is throw a plastic wrench into the city's grand recycling factory. If you want to recycle a plastic bag it's better to bring it back to the store where you got it.

As the article points out, the best answer seems to be reusing those bags as many times as feasibly possible or switching to canvas bags and bringing those to the store the next time you need something to haul your groceries home. Of course, in a world where its trendy to show just how conscious one is about humanitarian and conservation issues, someone had to make a particular canvas bag the "it" bag to prominently display ones good deed. The "I'm not a plastic bag" bag is so hip, in fact, they sold out in New York City faster than Tickle Me Elmos at Christmas time. The demand is so insane, people from as far away as Hong Kong actually flew to New York in hopes of getting a hold of one of the coveted bags when they were released at Whole Foods Markets across the city--think of how much in the way of carbon emissions was released during that flight alone. Way to fight the fight for global warming...idiots.