What isn't the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Part 1 of 2

Marine Debris on Hawaiian coast; NOAA

If you travel out into the middle of ocean, thousands of miles from the closest continent, you’ll see a floating soup of plastic commonly referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  By some estimates, it’s twice the size of Texas. By others, it’s just really enormous. It swirls around in the middle of the ocean in what’s called a gyre, or an ocean current similar to a whirlpool.

The garbage patch is primarily composed of plastic, and most of it is easily recognizable as single use disposable items from our daily lives. Plastic bags and plastic toys, chip bags and Styrofoam peanuts, as well as millions of tiny little pieces of photodegraded plastic. The Algalita Marine Research Foundation took a trip out to the gyre in July 2011, and observed that most intact pieces were fishing materials, but that plenty of bottles could be seen from quite a distance away.

Many people (ourselves included!) who learn about the garbage patch for the first time have similar reactions and plans to fix it. So we thought we’d clear some of those misconceptions up by defining the garbage patch by what its not.

1. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not an island.  If you were thinking that it would make a great location for condos or for a luxury hotel, think again. The garbage patch is actually more like soup than soil. Plastic floats on the surface and several feet or yards below it with water floating freely between plastic clusters. It’s far too amorphous for any building foundation.

Marine Debris, NOAA National Ocean Service

2. The Garbage Patch cannot be easily cleaned up. Plastic volume outweighs zooplankton (microscopic floating organisms that make up the diet of many larger fish) by 8 to 40 times. Everyone wants to clean it up. However, many of those plastic pieces are so small that they’d slip through even the most tightly wound sieve. Additionally, not only are the pieces small, but the actual task of what to do with all that plastic trash once it’s hauled out of the ocean. Shipping billions of pounds (yes, billions!) of plastic trash back to land is neither economically feasible nor environmentally worthwhile.

3. The garbage patch isn't the fault of any individual country--it's the fault of all of everyone.  Plastic that has been recovered from Midway Atoll, likewise located in the middle of the ocean and covered in trash, has writing on it in many different languages. Trash that originates on the streets of New York and the factories in Shenzhen all ends up in the middle of the ocean. We all use single use disposables. And we all dispose of them improperly, whether by littering or failing to recycle.

Ocean Currents and Gyre Locations

4. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the only one of its kind.  Though the trash swirling around the North Pacific gyre is by far the most famous, it’s not the only plastic soup around. Garbage patches exist in each of the major ocean gyres, in the north and south Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as in the Indian Ocean. And when you consider that we dump 14 billion pounds of trash in the ocean every year, that there are numerous patches is not surprising.

Okay so we can’t clean it up, we can’t blame someone else and have them clean it up, and we can’t build our vacation homes on these garbage patches. So what can we do? Are we helpless? No, of course not! The items out in the gyres are everyday items. And by refusing to use these everyday items, we can reduce (or even eliminate!) the flow of SUDs into the oceans.

This post is part 1 of a 2 part series. Stay tuned for part 2 on what the garbage patch means for you.

Comments

[Vinod Bodhankar]

In my city of Pune, India, 81,000 school students are collecting plastic waste from their homes (only from within the four walls of their own homes with the help of family) and fetching it to school every month in a monthly-collection-bag. This is the Sagarmitra Abhiyaan which began in 2011 with 150 students; 2012 - 10,000 students; 2013- 61,000 students and now in 2014 - 81,000 students in Pune and 15,000 in three other cities. This plastic being from home is clean and empty and dry and is purchased and recycled. AIM- every school on our planet. Timeline- before 2025. SAGARMITRA ABHIYAAN means Friends-of-Oceans Mass-Movement. www.sagarmitra.org . Vinod Bodhankar.