The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

There are large pieces of plastic that make their way into the Pacific Garbage Patch - drawn in by the North Pacific Gyre* and this material does pose a threat to ocean mammals and other animals like sea turtles. that will sometimes mistake it for food. Imagine you are a sea turtle that has been alive for 150 years! They have been known to attain even greater ages than that. You spot what you think is a jellyfish and you try to eat this morsel. Only this is not a jellyfish but a plastic bag! You choke to death immediately. This noble creature has lived a century and a half and a lousy plastic bag ends it's life! That is an abomination! So the plastic garbage (plastic bags, bottles, etc.) is a big problem, but that is not the only problem.

That which constitutes a large portion of the garbage patch is "microplastic." These are minute pieces of plastic, the end result of being battered and ground by the action of the sea. It makes for a polluted soup that is ingested by a wide range of sea creatures, often unintentionally.

From seabirds all the way to larval fish, microplastic enters the marine food chain and as it does, it releases a variety of polluting chemicals as part of the process of breaking down - this breakdown we have come to call "biodegradable" but plastic doesn't really ever disappear; it simply continues to separate into smaller and smaller components, releasing chemicals into the water and into the tissues of many ocean species, many of which end up on our dinner table.

And this environmental threat is not being confined or contained within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After all, the plastic that is there did not just drop out of the sky. It came from the coastlines and spent weeks, months, and maybe even years, floating about, slowly disintegrating and discharging pollutants throughout the ocean, on its way to the ultimate plastic graveyard.

Is there anything we can do? The obvious answer would be to use less plastic and to dispose of plastic in a manner that keeps it out of the ocean. Both are challenging because the ubiquitous material has become a mainstay of our lives for the past century. And our sewage/trash transport infrastructure is still predominantly designed around the idea that the ocean is our convenient dumping ground.

We must do what we can to minimize our "polyethylene footprint." (Are you bringing your own cloth bags to the supermarket or at least asking for paper bags over plastic? That's a start.) It would be very difficult to clean the mess we have now, we cannot, for instance, drag nets through the all of the oceans of the world to collect the trash, we would surely catch a lot of marine life.

The trash is certainly not limited to the gyre, it has to come from other locations. We are constantly adding more and more plastics to the ocean, effectively putting the ocean and it's creatures and life forms on a plastic diet. We are on a plastic diet as well, we are at the top of the chain, but we are still part of the chain.

*Gyre- a vortex or circular ocean current

Plastic is made from crude oil. Yes, once again the oil industry is hurtling towards it's destiny as the destroyer of this planet. Why don't we turn the plastic waste back into fuel, you could ask. The reasons are simple, this would cause more pollution than the process would be worth.

There is a system that could turn one kilogram of plastic waste into one liter of hydrocarbon. The hydorcarbons could be distilled into a gasoline that would be suitable for powering machinery, vehicles and ventilation systems.

In order to extract a singe liter of fuel takes one kilogram of plastic and 100 grams of coal, and there still is not a way to collect the waste floating in the Pacific ocean currently. There is one ridiculous example of this shown below this text.

As I stated earlier there is only one way to solve this problem, we must stop depending on disposable plastic bags and bottles!

This is one method that has been suggested to collect the plastic dump from the ocean. The half circle shaped items, labeled 'B', are the nets designed to collect the trash. It should be obvious that if the nets collect trash, they will collect marine life as well. The portion labeled 'A' are modular plastic harvesting nets.