Photo courtesy of Greenpeace
A mound of trash nearly twice the size of Texas currently floats within the Pacific Ocean. The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, is home to billions of plastic debris accumulated from landfill runoff, storm drains, trashed beaches, cargo spills, and manufacturing plants.
The garbage patch lies within the 10-million-square-mile oval that constitutes the North Pacific Gyre. The area of heavy currents and slack winds keeps debris constantly swirling in a clockwise vortex.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer believes the trash is actually split into two distinct patches called the Eastern and Western Garbage Patches. The Eastern Garbage patch lies between California and Hawaii while the Western Garbage Patch sits to the east of Japan.
The rubbish comes from nearly every continent since 10% of plastic produced worldwide – over 200bn pounds annually – ends up in the ocean, according to Greenpeace.
Voyagers are six times more likely to come across mounds of plastic trash than they are to catch sight of anything living, according to Captain Charles Moore. The founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation is credited with drawing attention to the massive ocean-based landfill.
Moore stumbled upon the buoyant rubbish in 1997 while returning from a sailing race in Hawaii.
Astounded by the trash, he spent a week on his vessel, the Alguita exploring it. “I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic,” Moore wrote in an article for Natural History.
On a recent marine conservation voyage, Moore discovered a drum of hazardous materials, an inflated volleyball, a plastic coat hanger, a cathode-ray tube, and numerous pieces of floating plastic debris. The patch is a virtual plastic soup thick with drift nets, bottle caps, six-pack rings, grocery bags and plastic bottles.
Photo by Till Westermayer
In fact, Moore estimates that nearly 90% of all marine litter is plastic, a menacing statistic since there is no data on how long these plastics take to degrade. The very reason we value plastics – their durability – is precisely the reason that the world ocean is fast becoming a sea of plastic.
Not only a visual menace, the debris is also wreaking havoc on wildlife. Plastic has been found in the stomachs of whales, dolphins, fish, birds, manatees, turtles, jellyfish, and even microscopic plankton.
Birds are especially vulnerable since they mistake lighters for fish, and nurdles (pre-production plastic pellets from manufacturing plants) for tiny eggs. The birds quickly fill up on plastic particles and die of starvation because their stomachs are full of trash. The birds also experience problems when they try to feed their young. The chicks often starve when their parents choke trying to regurgitate the plastic.
Perhaps worst of all, is the way plastics act as sponges for hazardous chemicals. Poisons that are normally diffused in the ocean are attracted to plastic debris that concentrates the chemicals. Some pollutants become a million times more concentrated attached to plastic residue than they do in the water as free floating substances.
Small animals like plankton consume these plastic particles before larger animals eat the plankton and spread the chemicals up through the food chain. Ebbesmeyer said he worries about what this might do to humans.
“Plastic, it disintegrates, but the plastic molecules never go away,” Ebbesmeyer told CNN. “What I’m afraid of is they’re getting into the food chain and coming back up into the food we eat.”
Companies have already started making changes to halt the flow of plastic production. On 22nd April 2008, grocery giant Whole Foods banned plastic bags in their stores. Before the new regulation, the world’s leading retailer of organic foods used over 100m plastic bags annually.
And last year the city of San Francisco passed an executive order banning city departments from buying bottled water. The ordinance includes purchasing water coolers and has spurred debate about outlawing bottled water throughout the city.
Such measures are small but vital steps to combat the growing oceanic landfill. Moore argues the reason landfills aren’t full is because the majority of trash ends up in the ocean. Though much work has been done recently to address the problem, scientists need more time to see how humans and nature will react to the creation of a plastic sea.
