Tag Archives: Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The world’s largest ‘waste dump’ is found in the Pacific Ocean

By Henricus Peters on | 2 Comments
The Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

If you were to travel from the United States of America to Japan, you would most likely encounter what could be described as the world’s largest waste dump: a 100,000 tonne expanse of debris floating around a large region of the Pacific Ocean. ENN reports 

The total area of this phenomenon has been said to equal the size of continental U.S., but the truth about its true size remains unknown.

Captain Charles Moore first discovered the ‘Pacific garbage patch‘ in 1997. The area in which rubbish gets caught up is known as a gyre, which can be described as a large-scale circular feature made up of ocean currents that ultimately traps waste and moves it around the region.

Plastics constitute 90 percent of all trash in the world’s oceans with 20 percent of this waste being dumped from ships and oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Plastic is of course, a very useful product; durable and stable, yet it is these very properties that deem it troublesome in marine environments.

“The polypropylene and the polyethylene that make up the majority of floater plastics and consumer plastics are just a little bit lighter than water. So if it’s rough they get pushed down under. When it’s really calm, all these bits and pieces can float to the surface,” Charles Moore told the Earth Island Journal.

To Moore, it is clearly a land-based problem and he believes that what drives the market and what subsequently runs off the streets into our oceans is all part of the same problem.

A one-liter plastic bottle, when in seawater, can reduce to so many small pieces that it is possible a single fragment could be found on every beach in the world. The entire marine food-web is suffering as a result. The breakdown of plastics into small pieces allows them to mimic the prey of all marine animals, from zooplankton to whales. When plastic is so prevalent that it fills up a creature’s stomach, it turns off the desire to feed. If an organism doesn’t put on fat stores for reproduction and migration, its population will crash. Floating plastic will even act as transport for some organisms, introducing them to areas where they could be problematic to resident species.

Seventy percent of the plastic waste sinks to the ocean floor and this mass of waste causes considerable damage to bed-dwelling organisms. In the worst case scenario—suffocation.

Plastics are also very good sponges, as such they are often used in oil clean-ups. But Moore explains that “petroleum-derivative toxins are sticking to these plastics, delivering these toxicants to marine creatures from the very base of the food-web to the top, in addition to killing millions by entanglement”.

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Pollution Update : The world’s largest rubbish dump

By Henricus Peters on | 1 Comment
This is map of the worlds oceans currents and ...

This is map of the worlds oceans currents and gyres based on a “dolphins perspective” that is where the oceans are shown as a single body of water and the flux can be easier understood without cutting it anywhere. This is based on a previous work of the worlds oceans. File:Oceans-image.svg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is said to be twice the size of Texas – and is now being added to by debris from the Japanese tsunami. Stephen Moss reports in The Guardian

A motorbike, golf clubs, a football belonging to a Japanese schoolboy: just some of the estimated 4.8m tonnes of debris swept into the sea by last year’s tsunami in Japan, bits of which have already washed up on the shores of Alaska and Canada. Around two-thirds of it sank off the coast of Japan, but the rest is now drifting across the Pacific towards North America, stretching across an estimated 4,000 miles of ocean.

Much of it will swirl around for ever in the fabled garbage patch in the north Pacific. The problem with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is that it’s hard to spot. Most of it consists of tiny bits of plastic, forming a thin and constantly shifting film on the surface of the ocean. Garbage patchologists say it’s twice the size of Texas, but there are also garbage-patch deniers who claim it’s a fraction of that size.

Bill Francis at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in California likens it to “a big toilet that never flushes”. Donovan Hohn, author ofMoby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, who traced the journey of thousands of Floatee bath toys that tumbled overboard en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington in 1992, says he imagined it as a floating junkyard, but that in reality it’s a marine desert where little life can survive. “If you went fishing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” he writes in Moby-Duck, “all you’d likely catch aside from garbage is plankton.”

Hohn’s mock-heroic quest has a serious subtext: the trashing of the oceans. The smaller islands and reefs of Hawaii are the indices of that poisoning. There is little indigenous pollution, yet they are littered with fishing lines, bottle tops, Lego pieces, golf tees, plastic bottles, toothbrushes, cigarette lighters, syringes, tyres, petrol cans and plastic dinosaurs, swept there by the currents of the north Pacific subtropical gyre (a large system of rotating ocean currents).

The garbage from the Japanese tsunami joins this ocean of debris, including not just Hohn’s yellow plastic ducks, green frogs, blue turtles and red beavers, but loads of basketball shoes and ice hockey gloves lost in similar squalls to that which saw the Chinese bath toys go overboard. No one can blame the Japanese for the latest surge of garbage, but for everything else, the great tide of crap that is flooding the Pacific, we have to carry the can.

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