[www.alternet.org]

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris -- in effect the world's largest rubbish dump -- is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk -- which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags -- is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" -- a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.

"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles -- the raw materials for the plastic industry -- are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.



well, not on MY dinner plate but still.

here's a simple solution or three:

[www.craftster.org]

[www.craftster.org]

[www.craftster.org]

Yeah, I heard about this, pretty crazy isn't it?

Cheers,
J

Ugh, This is so disturbing. i have some friends who work with seabird colonies in the uninhabited Northwest Hawaiian Islands and they say the shorelines are covered in more plastic than any other substance. When they do necropsy's on the seabirds they always find so much plastic in their guts... especially plastic lighters. so much of the plastic is brightly colored so the birds think that it's reef fish. Their guts fill up with that stuff and then there is no more room for food, so they die of starvation with full bellies. a huge culprit in this is the cruise ship industry. They grind up all of their trash and just dump it. As long as it's in "international waters" they aren't breaking the law...and obviously they don't have any sense of ethics to do the right thing. The plastic is awful, but they are also dumping photography chemicals, hydraulic fluids, oil, cleaning chemicals...virtually no waste is off loaded in port...it's all just dumped. ...and don't get me started on the Navy and all the crap they dump.

Truly another symptom of "death by civilization"

Greg

Aloha Nui Loa,

Greg

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices. - William James

There is no pill that can be swallowed,
There is no guru, that can be followed, - Michael Franti (Pray For Grace)

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

more plastic for my new winter wardrobe dresses ( see coco's thread on dresses made from plastic and ballooons)

yeah, well i've done some beach clean ups ( cuz the reward was t shirts and oranges and i like oranges

and anyhow... i couldn't BELIEVE how much muck would come out onto the sand

it was unbelievable. good thing we wore gloves... it made me sad

it also made me wonder if surfing is a smart thing to do after all

Thinking about this a little more...

I started to wonder if anything that has passed through my hands is floating around out there. Obviously i would never intentionally toss something in the ocean, but what about an old ziploc bag that blew out of the landfill and into the ocean.

Sure makes me want to buy less stuff.

Imagine if we could flip a switch, and all of that junk would magically be transported to the bedrooms of everyone who originally used it. with an area twice the size of the continental US, I think it would be a safe bet that over half the population could account for at least one item. maybe more?

It's stories like this that make me think that it won't be too long before we give the Earth such a bad tummy ache that she vomits us all over the bathroom floor of the universe... at least all of us raw foodies will become fertile organic compost!

Greg

Aloha Nui Loa,

Greg

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices. - William James

There is no pill that can be swallowed,
There is no guru, that can be followed, - Michael Franti (Pray For Grace)

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

greg, did you watch The Story of Stuff video? if not, google it. it's worth a watch or two. i viewed it with little, he was appalled at us.

(Beware - Racist Comment)

It has been my observation that people of a certain ethnicity just throw garbage out their car window while driving. That really bugs me. Where I live in the country our roads are clean, but every so often you see someone driving ahead of you or passing you and throwing trash out their window -- and it's not the residents, its temporary workers.

lois that's funny because where i lived in Toronto in a TOTALLY ethnic area it was the big fat tub'O'lard red neck tourists who used to throw crap on the ground. i saw a dude empty his car ashtray right on the sidewalk. actually, i saw a white hippy girl do this in the gorgeous mountain town in BC i lived in. colour me shocked, i couldn't believe it! guess the hippy was just a fashion statement for that one. sheesh.

just goes to show, you can't judge a book by it's cover and that's the truth.

Mmm.. just keep on recycling, using those green bags and generaly being green. Environmental consciousness is spreading, and every little bit helps.

Quote

Appalled by reports of environmental pollution, Catherine Eade and her family decided to try to live without buying anything packaged in plastic. One month on, they are finding the experiment both life-changing and soberingly difficult

Saturday, 8 March 2008

When I told my children we were going to stop buying plastic packaging until further notice, they didn't bat an eyelid.

We had been looking at the front page story in The Independent last month which revealed that a "plastic soup" twice the size of the US was floating around in the Pacific Ocean. "Why don't we give it up for Lent?" suggested my eight-year-old, Joel, and my daughters agreed. (Although my youngest, Alice, confided in me later that she would find a shortage of yoghurt for 40 days quite challenging. I promised her I'd make some.) What they, and I, didn't know was what an impact a plastic ban would have on everyday life in our family of five.

I'm not talking about refusing plastic bags: I've been doing that for years. No, this pledge meant every food item I normally bought for my family would be scrutinised for plastic. Recycled and recyclable cardboard, jars, tins and glass bottles I deemed acceptable; anything made of or containing plastic or some other unrecyclable material would be rejected.

The 10-metre deep vortex of plastic rubbish highlighted by The Independent was first discovered by a sailor, Charles Moore, in 1997. It is now the largest mass of rubbish in the world, totalling an estimated 100 million tonnes, and kills hundreds of thousands of birds and animals every year, as well as introducing toxic waste into the food chain.

Some of the plastic in this giant swirling rubbish dump has been there for 50 years, as it does not biodegrade; toothbrushes, Lego and cigarette lighters are just some of the items that have been found in the stomachs of fish and seabirds. Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans: the UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of the stuff.

The next day – Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent – was my first foray into a supermarket with the intention of buying only unpackaged foods, or at least foods that were not encased in plastic. Yes, I know that for anyone with a modicum of environmental awareness, supermarkets are not the place to shop. But between them, Asda, Morrison, Tesco and Sainsbury's account for three quarters of our grocery shopping in the UK. My aim was to see how easy it would be as an "average" shopper to reduce the amount of packaging I bought, and Tesco was my first port of call.

One particularly interesting point from the article above

Quote

Why has plastic become so widespread as a packaging material? All food manufacturers I contacted gave the same reason: plastic has proved the most successful material for wrapping food because it keeps it fresh and is durable enough to prevent leaks and spills during transportation. Longer distances between food producers and consumers have led to a greater demand for packaging, as has the increase in working families, the spread of microwaves and freezers.

Insufficient packaging is a major contributor to food waste. A shocking statistic from the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment is that more than six million tonnes of food from UK households alone goes to waste each year. The British Plastics Federation, making the case for plastic, says that in Britain, where use of plastic is widespread, food waste accounts for just 3 per cent of food produced – compared with 40 per cent in the developing world.

The rest here [www.independent.co.uk]

It seems we cannot realistically cut out plastic and packaging until we move to a more local form of agricultural production so as not to dramatically increase the amount of food that is wasted in transport.

Local is key.

Cheers,
J

allthat food comes in tons of packaging that the shopper never even sees. and unpacking retail wares for a shop is a sobering task my friend. it's downright scary.

food waste=compost, i'm less afraid of that than i am of a mountain of plastic. there is a better way. there are reusable options, it just costs more but only initially to set it up.

Quote

New 'battle of Midway' over plastic

By David Shukman
BBC environment correspondent, Midway


Wildlife under threat
On the coral atoll of Midway in the central Pacific - famous for America's first victory over the Japanese fleet in World War Two - wildlife experts are facing a new battle against a rising tide of plastic waste.

The Midway Islands are home to some of the world's most valuable and endangered species and they all are at risk from choking, starving or drowning in the plastic drifting in the ocean.

Nearly two million Laysan albatrosses live here and researchers have come to the staggering conclusion that every single one contains some quantity of plastic.

About one-third of all albatross chicks die on Midway, many as the result of being mistakenly fed plastic by their parents.

I watched as the deputy manager of the wildlife refuge here, Matt Brown, opened the corpse of one albatross and found inside it the handle of a toothbrush, a bottle top and a piece of fishing net.

He explained how some chicks never develop the strength to fly off the islands to search for food because their stomachs are filled with plastic.

"It is disheartening to see such a monumental problem. It's really going to take not just people in a refuge or people working with birds like this - it's really a global effort to solve this problem."

According to Matt Brown, the need for action is urgent because plastic waste adds to a list of existing threats.

"The plastic is just another, very large straw on the camel's back that's really endangering the future of these birds."

Many albatrosses are found to have swallowed disposable cigarette lighters - which look remarkably similar to their staple food of squid.

From [news.bbc.co.uk]

See this animation for an illustration of the ocean currents which gives the name to the Trash Vortex [www.greenpeace.org]

Cheers,
J

When I was in Fl almost daily I was on the beach. Favorite one was Hobe Sound Wildlife Refuge. A place where sea turtles where protected. The beach was more than 5 miles long and always close to deserted. I could'nt beleive the junk that washed up there or what people would throw into the ocean. What's at the bottom that doesn't float?

elnatural