In honor of World Oceans Day I'm collecting all my plastic trash, recyclable and non, for a week. What does my plastic bottle of conditioner have to do with the oceans? Since much plastic takes hundreds of years to decompose, it often winds up in unexpected places, like the central Pacific Ocean.

Two years ago Beth Terry decided to stop using plastic and began chronicling her saga on a blog, fakeplasticfish.com. She recently issued a challenge to readers to collect all their plastic trash for a week and submit photographs and tallies (the results are posted here). Inspired and curious, I decided to keep track of all those bits of plastic refuse.

Sunday morning marked the beginning of seven days of hoarding my plastic. As usual, I got up and went downstairs to collect the newspaper. Which was wrapped in a blue plastic bag, despite the sunny weather. I hadn't been awake 15 minutes and I had my first item.

Once you being setting aside your plastic trash you being to see plastic everywhere. Because it IS everywhere -- it's holding my so-called "organic" conditioner, my "all natural" chicken, it's even holding together my kitchen sink. According to the rules, I must live normally the first week and not artificially reduce my plastic consumption. This is turning out to be harder than it sounds, the idea of keeping my plastic makes me want to avoid it as much as possible. But I want to know how much plastic I casually use each week and toss away without thinking about it. Sure, I carry reusable bags to the store, drink from a stainless steel water bottle, use glass storage bowls at home and switched to an all-natural facial scrub when I realized that those little micro-beads in the scrub were made of plastic. But I'm not all that fastidious -- I use Ziploc bags for my lunch, saran wrap to roll out pie crusts and many, many of the items I buy are bottled, wrapped and sealed in plastic.

By the end of the day I had a small plastic produce bag containing:

1 newspaper bag

1 Ziploc bag

1 produce bag

1 plastic container, plastic wrap and bag from a pack of chicken thighs raised without antibiotics

2 broken plastic screw things that held my faucet together until they broke

1 bottle that contained "organic" hair conditioner

It's a little early in the experiment to draw any conclusions but I was struck by the evidence of my consumption of more environmentally-friendly and healthy products -- that came in plastic. Check back next week to see the full results.

For more information on plastic in the oceans and several simple steps you can take to use less plastic, check out my post on simplesteps.org. And celebrate World Oceans Day by telling your representative to co-sponsor a national Healthy Oceans Act. After decades of industrial fishing, 90 percent of the world's large fish are gone, over 75 percent of fish species are not at sustainable levels, coral reefs are dying and global warming is increasing the acidity of the oceans. Without coordinated leadership and management of our oceans, they will collapse. Take a minute to voice your support for national legislation to reduce pollution, protect ocean habitats and coordinate efforts to manage the coasts and oceans wisely.