The trash mix up of what was thought to have been debris from the missing Air France plane last week, but was just a garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean, has brought more even attention to the world's oceanic trash dumps. The largest one is called The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and is made up of about 3.5 tons of trash that floats around and sits on the ocean floor in layers. Ocean currents create a circulating effect and pull debris in the water from North America, Hawaii, and Asia, and have created this huge area of refuse.
This huge patch extends from the coast of California to China and is bigger than our continent, spreading over millions of square miles. 80% of the garbage is plastics that have not biodegraded. According to this article from the Mother Nature Network, "Unlike most other trash, plastic isn't biodegradable – i.e., the microbes that break down other substances don't recognize plastic as food, leaving it to float there forever. Sunlight does eventually "photodegrade" the bonds in plastic polymers, reducing it to smaller and smaller pieces, but that just makes matters worse. The plastic still never goes away; it just becomes microscopic and may be eaten by tiny marine organisms, entering the food chain."
The video below, from a segment on Good Morning America, gives more information. They interviewed Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, who has been studying the trash in this area for over 12 years. When the reporter compares it to a "trash soup", Moore replied, "It's like a minestrone that's out there, and all the little vegetables are different colored plastics." His samples taken from those waters have shown that the trash quantities have more than doubled in the past 5 years, and that many fish and sea creatures are being affected by this as well.
Efforts have been made to clean it up by the Ocean Conservancy, but what needs to be done is preventing more trash from piling up out there. When we can take responsibility and start changing our ways, then we can start making a difference.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2009.