The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

May 2008

By Brynn Stonehouse

I recently watched a video where Captain Charles Moore and the crew of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, took a boat out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean to take samples of the water. The area they were studying is called the North Pacific Gyre, it is comprised of four ocean currents that swirl in a clockwise direction. These currents create a vortex where most of the debris in the Pacific gets caught and is therefore known as “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

Roughly 60-80% of marine debris is plastic, which does not biodegrade. Instead, it goes through a process called photodegradation. Sunlight breaks down the plastic making it brittle, thus it easily breaks into smaller pieces. Eventually it will become plastic dust, but still plastic nonetheless. So let’s say you have a plastic water bottle, and it photodegrades (which is estimated to take 1,000 years) into 5,000 pieces. You still have the same amount of plastic. Only it’s in 5,000 pieces instead of one water bottle.

The high portion of the plastic found is actually in its virgin form, small pellets, called nurdles. How did these nurdles get out into the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles away from any land? The nurdles get there from boat and train container spills, which are carried to the ocean via water run off from our rivers and streams. [read more]

Plastic Bags

April 2008

By Brynn Stonehouse

These days all I can think about is plastic. I’m obsessed with the amount of products that are made with plastic - from the packaging of my food, toys for my daughter, to the bags that I carry these new purchases in. Plastic is everywhere!

I could (and many have done so before me) write an entire book on the state of plastic in our world, however for this article I will focus on plastic bags.

Here are a few facts to get started:

• The U.S. uses approximately 100 billion plastic bags annually, of which around 2% are recycled.
• 500 billion – 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide annually, of which around 1% is recycled.
• Plastic is made up of primarily petroleum (another word for OIL) and natural gases.
• The average use rate of a bag is 20 minutes, from store to home, and the estimated average decomposition rate of a bag is roughly 1000 years (according to the E.P.A.).

So what happens to a plastic bag after the 20 minutes of use and before it has fully decomposed?

[read more]

[Back to main article page]