I watched American Idol tonight with my wife and daughter.  It wasn’t the bad performances that upset me – it was a Minute Maid® commercial.

In the commercial, healthy Gen-Y’ers are having a great time boating in the middle of the ocean.  A shark bumps their boat and a plastic cooler of Minute Maid falls over the side. The shark swims off with it, drinks the Minute Maid lemonade and starts jumping out of the water and dancing on its tail.

Here’s a link to the commercial on youtube.com. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfrRhIPx12k

My favorite shot: a bunch of destroyed plastic Minute Maid bottles floating in the ocean.

Does anyone at Minute Maid or its global parent company Coca-Cola® know about the large growing wasteland of plastic debris north of Hawaii or the new one now forming in the Atlantic?

Plastic in our oceans is one of the greatest threats to our health we face. Plastic is poison to sea life and makes its way into us through the consumption of seafood. I bet a portion of it comes from Coca-Cola products.  The problem is that much of the plastic is small pieces floating just beneath the surface, which makes clean up difficult, if not impossible.

Here’s a link to a video that tells the story of the problem north of Hawaii. It has adult language and is long, but shows the plastic problem up close. http://www.vbs.tv/watch/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3

So, tonight my boycott of Minute Maid and Coca Cola begins. They need to pull the ad immediately.

I leave you with the last line of the commercial spoken by one of the kids on the boat looking at the floating plastic bottles:  “Who’s gonna get the empties?” Exactly, my friend. Exactly.