The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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 waterbottle.

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.

Capt. Moore and crew put out trawls from the back of their boat to take samples of the surface waters. Then they scraped out the insides of the very fine mesh trawling net, cataloged what they found and put it in jars. They found that in a sample the plastic to zooplankton ratio was 6 to 1 (in weight) and in the most concentrated area, 1,000 to 1.

There is this misconception that there is a contained mound of garbage, roughly the size of Texas floating around out in the ocean. But it is more spread out and a lot of the garbage is broken down into small pieces. This is worse because we can’t just go out there and pick up large floating pieces of junk. They are too small to see even from the edge of the boat. You have to scoop the water up to see the plastic pieces. It is like trying to clean dirt out of the sands from the Sahara Desert.

The ocean pulls the garbage into this vortex created by the currents, the gyre, until a big storm comes and then it regurgitates its contents out onto the nearest beach. This is similar to how our body would create a cyst around an infected splinter, until the body either absorbs the irritant or can get it out. The closest beaches to the gyre, like Hawaii, are littered with debris, which is mostly plastic.

Kamilo Beach

Another issue, besides the massive amount of debris that ends up at sea, is the effect it has on our sea life. One million birds and 100,000 marine animals die each year from the ingestion or entanglement of plastic.

These tiny pieces of plastic seductively float with the waves and shimmer as the sun reflects against it. To many ocean inhabitants they mistake these plastic particles for lunch. Nurdles also act like sponges absorbing and carrying highly concentrated levels of toxic chemicals (more on this at another time).

These contaminated fish will eventually end up in our food sources. Many of the animals especially birds, will die of starvation as their bellies are filled to the brim with plastic bottle caps, plumbing parts or any other plastic item we may have discarded. They cannot digest the plastic and their body is tricked into believing it is full, while no nutrients are absorbed from the plastic cuisine.

Albatross carcass

I feel like I am going deeper down the rabbit hole as I learn about how many of our habits are destroying the earth and it’s other inhabitants. When does it end? Plastic is cursed by its own success - lightweight, durable and cheap to make. It’s hard to get rid of and we have a lot of it!

There was a time when plastic was not used for every day storage. You may even remember a time when milk was purchased in glass bottles that were washed and reused. Food storage containers were glass and the deli packed your lunchmeat in paper. Plastic only became mainstream in the past 50-60 years. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that we started using plastic grocery bags. Before then we managed to survive quite well without them.

The only advice I can give on this is to become more aware of our consumerism. I by no means am claiming to be a plastic free consumer, but I try. When I come home from a shopping trip I look at my products and see where I went wayward. I look around my house taking inventory of the materials my home goods are made of and I ask myself, “is this something that my grandmother or great grandmother would have used?” If not, maybe I can do with out it too.

References:

www.algalita.org

www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm

All pictures courtesy of Algalita Marine Research Foundation

If you would like to watch the video I reference above you can find part 1 of 12 below, if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing watch parts 9-12.

Follow this link http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1485308505 to watch the rest of the video.