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Shea Gunther

The 8th continent: Pacific Ocean garbage patch

A zone of the Pacific Ocean larger than the U.S. has more plastic floating in it than sea life. It's an environmental disaster, and it's all our fault.

Wed, Apr 29 2009 at 5:26 AM EST
 4

Photo: The Truth About.../Flickr
The Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is one of the biggest environmental problems that no one knows about. Right now there is an area larger than the size of the continental United States in the Pacific Ocean between California and Japan that has more plastic in it, by volume, than plankton and other sea life. The swirling ocean currents conspire to aggregate trash that doesn't biodegrade (i.e. plastic) into a giant soupy mass of environmental pain.

 

 

I'm a green blogger and make my living staying on top of state of the environment, and the garbage patch has only popped up on my radar in the past year or so. I wrote it about it when I was blogging for EarthFirst.com and have kept tabs on the slowly growing awareness ever since.
 
Eco-adventurer David de Rothschild recently set sail from San Francisco on a boat made up entirely of recycled materials, including 20,000 plastic water bottles used for floatation. His plan is to sail through the garbage patch on his way to Sydney to get people to start paying attention to this problem.
 
Oprah raised the attention bar by featuring a segment on the garbage patch on her Earth Day show.
 
It's hard to know what to do about it. Plastic doesn't biodegrade and ends up just breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. This plastic dust now greatly outnumbers plankton found in the area and causes massive damage to sea life when they eat it. On top of the microscopic pieces of plastic, the water is also filled with shopping bags, old flip flops, soda bottles and discarded fishing equipment. How do you clean up something on that scale? We can't, at least with current technology.
 
And unlike a lot of environmental problems, we can't really pin this on any one group, corporation, political party or country. This one belongs to all of us. Plastic is a part of our lives and it's nearly impossible to live without it. There have been advances made in biodegradable plastics and it's entirely possible that we could someday fully make the transition to using them, but that won't change the fact that there are megatons of plastic floating around in the Pacific Ocean.
 
So what CAN you do? Start looking at plastic with an eye on the future. Find ways of cutting down on the amount that you use. Use cloth shopping bags, choose glass or aluminum containers when you can, and ask yourself a question everytime you go to purchase something that uses plastic: "Do I need this enough to justify this plastic being around FOREVER?".
 
Some days it's hard to be an environmentalist. Ignorance can be bliss.
 
(MNN homepage photo: Fredrik Thommesen/Flickr)
 
Are you on Twitter? Follow me (@sheagunther) there, I give good tweets.
 
And if you really like my writing, you can join my Facebook page.

 

CLOSE link:
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Related Topics: Garbage Patches, Oceans, Plastics

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anonymous
I B Pretty 10/05/2011 09:15 AM

I bought some pills recently. Inside the cardboard box, I expected the usual plastic bottle. It was missing. Inside, the pills were sealed in some kind of cellohane.!! YEA !

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anonymous
rich 06/23/2011 15:20 PM

so now how big will it be with 25 million pounds more?

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anonymous
REALIZE THIS 04/28/2010 19:53 PM

I THINK THAT YOU ARE DOING A GOOD JOB AND KEEP IT UP. I REAL THINK THAT PLASTIC IS NOT SO GOOD NOW ANYWAYS KEEP UP THE GOOD JOB 4-28-2010

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anonymous
Phillep Harding 02/22/2010 20:03 PM

I'm an AGW denier, commercial fisherman, conservative, hunter, and several other things you lot here don't think much of. I've also recycled hundreds of pounds of plastics, not by putting them in bins (requiring more resources to process) but by actually using the discards. What have you done?

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