The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In between California and Japan, just north of Hawaii, there is an area of the sea that the rotating current from Japan to California and back winds up in. This causes a huge portion of the debris that flows into the oceans to arrive in this patch. There are more than 6 of these garbage dumps in our oceans.

It is estimated that the surface area of the Great Pacific Garbage dump is only slightly smaller than Africa, and that this only amounts to the plastic on the surface. A great deal more plastic gets covered by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, Charles Moore of the Angalita Marine Research Foundation took samples of the surface and found that on the surface, there was 6 times as much plastic as there was plankton.

Furthermore, tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles, which are used in the plastic manufacturing process, have the unfortunate resemblance to krill and fish eggs which results in them being eaten by fish and seabirds. This becomes a problem because plastics collect toxins

Studies done have shown that free-floating plastics in the ocean act like sponges and magnets for toxins. Many chemicals that we dump into the ocean, on purpose or by accident, readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic. The measurement results stated that in many cases, the surfaces of plastic had one million times the amount of chemical concentrated on their surface than the surrounding water had. When animals consume these pellets, they are consuming all of the chemical that goes along with them.

Even though it is more expensive to do so, we must recycle all the plastic we can and try to avoid using plastic whenever possible. The best estimates say that plastics will take hundreds of thousands of years to biodegrade, so we have to avoid allowing plastic to escape our hands into the environment. Hopefully one day we have the technology to pull all of this trash out of our seas.


Information gathered for this post was taken once again from Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.
The chapter where we got our information for this post is chapter Chapter 9: Polymers are Forever.
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posted by Sage @ 9/06/2008 11:00:00 PM Comments: 0