I beg to differ, I've been told to go there many times. Sometimes by the same people that seem to want me to also visit a town in Michigan.
I think "Away" must be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean... seeing as there's this vast RAFT of plastic, which has been tossed "away."
This logic, that there's no such place as away: that everything discarded is still here, on this planet with us, is probably the first "environmental" type argument that ever really penetrated my thick consumerish skull. I was raised to be a good consumer: paper plates, paper towels, plastic Bic lighters and pens, etc etc ad nauseam.... but when I heard this about the non-reality of "away", it made a real impression on me. I still use paper towels, but I don't see that or toilet paper being much of an ecological disaster, considering how rapidly they biodegrade. But we only started buying paper plates to give our cat something to eat off of, which doesn't have any designs to confuse her vision -- cats don't have great vision in normal light for things that aren't moving, and our decorative stoneware just confuses the poor thing. I will gladly wash a few more dishes, to keep down some of our garbage footprint. And we invested in a whole-house water purification system, partly to free us of the cost of bottled water, and partly to cease contributing so much to that plastic raft in the Pacific.
I'm not a "tree hugger" or any other sort of environmental fanatic, but I try to do what I can.
Andria