First lady Laura Bush again addressed the topic of marine debris this week, in a speech at the J.L. Scott Marine Education Center’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, at the University of Southern Mississippi. It's obvious by now that marine debris is a pet issue of Laura Bush, and she's got strong feelings about the plastics part of the problem.

Here are some excerpts from her speech:

I've seen what humans can do and what our behavior can do to devastate marine life. Jim told you about -- Jim and Secretary Kempthorne and I got to visit Midway Island. Midway is the only inhabited island of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands that President Bush designated as a National Marine Monument. It's 140,000 square miles of National Marine Monument that he named. And when we were there -- we happened to be there at the very same times the Laysan Albatross were nesting. The Laysan Albatross is a tall bird. They nest on the ground because there are no natural predators of theirs at Midway where they nest. And so when we were there, we literally had to look where we walked or we would step on one of these funny little chicks, little Laysan Albatross chicks that were in their nest on the ground.

And they don't leave their nest because their parents do leave and fish on the oceans and then come back and feed them, and so they have to be where their parents left them, and they just instinctively stay in these nests.

We became very fond of these funny little birds that we watched, but we also saw the carcasses of a lot of these infant Laysan Albatross, because when their parents fish, they fish on the surface for squid, and that's where the plastic floats. And so they eat plastic and then feed their babies, regurgitate this plastic that they've eaten.

So we would see the little carcasses, and when we sort of looked in them, you would see cigarette lighters and toothbrushes and bottle caps and toys -- toy cars or little tires from toys -- and every single type of plastic that we all know we use every day.

And this is not from falling off of a boat. I mean, this isn't plastic that fell overboard, although certainly a lot of debris in the ocean is fishing gear that did fall from boats or was tossed from boats. But this could be a cigarette lighter somebody dropped in a curb, you know, on their street somewhere in the United States or anywhere in the world, and it slowly washed through the drains out into the oceans, and then finally ended up at these Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

So that reminded me, when I saw these little Laysan Albatross carcasses, baby carcasses, of how what we do here can affect every single part of our world, and why it's so important for us to make sure children know that. And that's one of the great things about what we just saw with these children inside. They were going through debris that somebody had picked up, marine debris. And of course, a lot of it was Styrofoam buoys, real marine debris that happens because of marine economy. But a lot of it were just things that people had dropped somewhere -- a lot of plastic, a lot of wrappers from -- plastic wrappers from paper, a lot of cans, a lot of beer cans. (Laughter.) That's what they got to go through.

But it really is very important that state and local governments and industry and academia and non-profit organizations and our federal institutions work together to make sure we reduce and remove debris in the marine environment.

And...

Thanks to each of you for your stewardship of our ocean and for making sure that their treasures can be enjoyed for every succeeding generation. In the meantime, I urge people here on the Gulf Coast and across our whole country to join these conservation efforts; volunteer for beach cleanup; get involved in public policy discussions about the sustainable, responsible development of our coast; reuse plastics; only buy plastics that are recyclable or reuse the ones that you've got. These efforts will preserve a cleaner, healthier ocean for everybody.

You can read the full text of her speech here.

The American Chemistry Council is taking this issue seriously, and today we posted a story on our Web site about the association's new $2.5 million public education campaign aimed at California. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the plastics industry responds to this intitiative. Plastics trade associations to often have a tendency to work on their own. But this is a mainstream issue, and if ACC's effort fails, then we can expect more product bans in the industry's future.