What is it?

Since long before humans were around, the North Pacific Gyre has been collecting marine debris and spinning it slowly around between Japan and California until it either sinks to the seabed or biodegrades. The Gyre, one of five such circular oceanic currents, is naturally occuring and, in itself, causes no problems to man nor beast. However, for the last 100 years or so, a nasty soup of non-biodegradable flotsam has been building in the north pacific, reaching disgustingly epic proportions today.

Imagine, if you can, a patch of the ocean roughly the size of Texas. Now imagine that same patch of ocean literally choked in plastic and other modern marine debris. Now double that so you have two state-sized rubbish dumps side by side. Not a pretty picture, but exactly what is today to be found in the middle of the North Pacific. An estimated 3 million tonnes of plastic currently swirl around in this floating rubbish dump, in concentrations as high as millions of pieces per square kilometre. Scientists conducting studies believe that 80% of the rubbish comes from land sources, and and the remaining 20% from ships, etc.

The main contributors of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are Asia and North America, the two continents on either side of the Pacific. It is thought that debris from the east coast of Asia reaches the gyre in less than a year, whilst garbage from the west coast of North America can take much longer, up to five years. Once something made of plastic or another non-biodegradable material enters the pull of the gyre, it could remain trapped there for tens of years, slowly photodegrading. The gyre regularly “spits out” masses of debris which appear on shores all along the pacific coast.

Why is it a problem?

It would be easy to look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as simply a nasty eyesore, not a great reflection of the human race, but hardly a disaster in the making. That view could be very, very wrong! The first problem is the effect this debris has on marine and bird life. Small bits of plastic bag look very tempting to turtles and other marine life, and if swallowed, can quickly choke any animal unfortunate enough to eat it. Animals, birds and fish have been found with their stomachs literally full of indigestible plastic. According to the Greenpeace website, a turtle found dead in Hawaii had over 1000 bits of plastic in its stomach.

The second, and potentially much more serious problem, is the risk of the polymers and other chemicals (reading about the effect of exposure to some of these chemicals is enough to give you nightmares) which make up the plastic getting into the food chain. Whilst plastic does not biodegrade, it does photodegrade over time. This means it breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces until it eventually becomes tiny particles and then individual molecules. When these hard to digest particles are consumed by marine life, they inevitably end up in the food chain. Which, of course, leads eventually to us humans…

This problem exists everywhere that plastic is allowed to photdegrade in the ocean. The North Pacific Gyre isn’t the only place where plastics enter the food chain. The problem is the scale and the concentration. Water tests have shown that polymer particles outnumber Zoo Planckton (pretty much the start of the ocean food chain) in the gyre by as much as 6 to 1. So whilst polymers are undeniably getting into the food chain from other sources, any planckton feeding animals, such as jellyfish, in this particular area will be gobbling up polymers in far higher quantities.

As if the thought that we could be eating our own toxic rubbish wasn’t bad enough, there is another element to consider. Plastic acts as sort of a chemical sponge, absorbing even more nasty stuff from the surrounding water called Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). The range of POPs in the ocean is large, but one of the most common found in the pacific is DDT, despite the fact that this chemical was banned 30 years ago. Anyone fancy a nice piece of fish for dinner?

What can be done about it?

The main thing we can do as individuals is reduce our use of plastics. Unfortunatly, with current technology, there seems little that can be done to clean up the existing garbage patch, according to Charles Moore, a marine researcher and the man most responsible for bringing this problem into the public gaze. Numerous ideas have been put forward such as boats trawling the surface with very fine nets, but this would be both massively expensive and hugely difficult. The remoteness of the area is one of the major problems, as is the tiny size of the plastic particles and the fact that much of it is below the surface (up to several hundred metres) rather than on top of it as people might imagine.

The answer to this problem, it seems, is not straightforward. However, what is clear is that we must do more to reduce plastic use, recycle it more efficiently and do much more to stop plastics of all kinds fouling the earth’s oceans.

Let us know your thoughts on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Perhaps you have an idea about how it can be cleaned up?