As large as the USA, the Great Pacific Waste Patch is the biggest dump in the world. Ed Cumming discovers that it keeps getting bigger, and could be poisoning us all
by Ed Cumming
The world’s biggest rubbish dump keeps growing. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – or the Pacific Trash Vortex – is a floating monument to our culture of waste, the final resting place of every forgotten carrier bag, every discarded bottle and every piece of packaging blown away in the wind. Opinions about the exact size of this great, soupy mix vary, but some claim it has doubled over the past decade, making it now six times the size of the UK.
Dr Simon Boxall, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, goes even further: “It’s the size of North America. But although the patch itself is extremely large, it’s only one very clear representation of the much bigger worldwide problem.”
Plastic is the main issue. Fifty years ago, most flotsam was biodegradable. Now it is 90 per cent plastic. In 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that there were 46,000 pieces of floating plastic in every square mile of ocean. With its stubborn refusal to biodegrade, all plastic not buried in landfills – roughly half of it – sweeps into streams and sewers and then out into rivers and, finally, the ocean. Some of it – some say as much as 70 per cent – sinks to the ocean floor. The remainder floats, usually within 20 metres of the surface, and is carried into stable circular currents, or gyres “like ocean ring-roads”, says Dr Boxall. Once inside these gyres, the plastic is drawn by wind and surface currents towards the centre, where it steadily accumulates. The world’s major oceans all have these gyres, and all are gathering rubbish. Although the North Pacific – bordering California, Japan and China – is the biggest, there are also increasingly prominent gyres in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Our problems with plastics are only just beginning.
The Pacific Garbage Patch had been predicted as early as the late Eighties but it was only formally discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, an American yacht-racing captain sailing home across the North Pacific from a competition in Hawaii. He noticed a large amount of debris in the centre of the gyre, and together with the oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, formulated the idea of the Eastern Garbage Patch. Other research revealed a secondary patch to the West, and these two together constitute the Great Pacific Patch, located roughly between 135-155°W and 35-45°N. In 1999, Moore followed up his initial findings with a report showing that there was eight times as much plastic as plankton in the North Pacific. And there is a lot of plankton.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/16-6
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