The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Not all trash ends up in a dump. A river, sewer or beach can't catch everything the rain washes away. There is a swirling sea of plastic bags, bottles and other debris that is growing in the North Pacific. This is one of five areas in our oceans in which garbage is collecting. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches hundreds of miles across the North Pacific Ocean, forming a nebulous, floating junk yard on the high seas. Plastic that begins in human hands, yet ends up in the ocean, often inside animals' stomachs or around their necks. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been described as a "trash island," but that's a misconception, according to the director of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Instead, it's like a galaxy of garbage, populated by millions of smaller trash islands that may be hidden underwater or spread out over many miles. It is hard to determine the size due to it being above and below the water. It could be the size of Texas, or even bigger. The mass consists of 80 percent of debris from land (plastic bags, bottles and various other consumer products). Free

floating fishing nets make up another 10 percent as 705,000 tons. The rest comes from recreational boaters, oil rigs and large cargo ships which drop about 10,000 shipping containers into the sea each year. Containers contain various commercial objects such as hockey gloves, computer parts, LEGOs, metal, glass and rubber products. All end up floating in the ocean.

Where else do you think the garbage comes from?

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HOW IS IT FORMED?Earth has five major oceanic gyres which are huge spirals of seawater formed by colliding currents. The largest one is in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, filling most of the space between Japan and California.

The upper part of the North Pacific Gyre is a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. It is where warm water from the South Pacific crashes into cooler water from the North Pacific. This is where the trash collects. According to a 2015 study, about 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean during a typical year. 8 million metric tons is equivelant to finding five grocery bags full of plastic on every foot of coastline in 192 countries.

Most of the garbage comes from people who live within 30 miles of a coastline, but also from further inland. It may take several years for debris to reach a garbage patch, depending on its origin. Plastic can wash from interiors of continents to the sea by sewers, streams and rivers, or it might just wash away from the coast.

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Famous Debris Spills In 1992, a shipping crate containing 28,000 plastic bath toys was lost at sea when it fell overboard on its way from Hong Kong to the United States. No one at the time could have guessed that those same bath toys would still be floating the world's oceans nearly 20 years later. The yellow ducks have bobbed halfway around the world. Some have washed up on the shores of Hawaii, Alaska, South America, Australia and the Pacific Northwest. Some have made it as far as Scotland and Newfoundland in the Atlantic! The most famous floatees, are the 2000 of them that still circulate in the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. The rubber ducks in the North Pacific Gyre have helped scientists figrue out how long it takes to complete a circuit in the ocean currents. It took three years for the ducks to circulate from where they were lost and get to the North Pacific Gyre. No one knows how many shipping containers are lost at sea, but they figure anywhere from several hundered to 10,000 a year.

In 1997, 20 miles off the coast of Cornwall, UK, the container ship Tokio Express was hit with a massive wave. Sixty two of the containers it was carrying were knocked overboard. The contents of 61 of those containers are either not known or too uninteresting to be publicized. But one of them held 4.8 million LEGO pieces, which have been washing up on Cornwall beaches for twenty years. They believe since 1997, those pieces could have drifted 62,000 miles. It's 24,000 miles around the equator, meaning they could be on any beach on Earth. Theoretically the pieces of LEGO could keep going around the ocean for centuries. Scientist are still learning about the movement of ocean currents and tides. "The most profound lesson scientists have learned from the LEGO story is that things that go to the bottom of the ocean don't always stay there. Tracking currents is like tracking ghosts - you can't see them. You can only see where it started and where it ended up." US oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer.

Famous Debris Spills

How long do you think garbage can last in the oceans?What responsibility should humans have in the cleanup?

WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF THE GARBAGE PATCHES?

Eventually the debris which has become trapped at the center of the gyre breaks down into a kind of plastic soup. This is because in the ocean, sunlight and waves cause floating plastics to break down into increasingly smaller particles. But they never completely disappear or biodegrade. These tiny plastic particles are as small as the algae and plankton that form the basis of the entire ocean food web. Species such as shrimp, birds, and fish consume these mico-plastics, which will often kill them. The plastic chemicals can also be absorbed by predators of these species and work their way into human diets since the concentration of these chemicals increases through each trophic level of the food chain. The effects are toxic with health effects ranging from cancer to malformation and impaired reproductive ability.

92% of dead seabirds (northern Fulmars) in a study had ingested plastic in amount equal to 5% of their body weight.

54% of the 120 marine mammal species on the threatened list have been observed entangled in or ingesting plastic.

Americans use roughly 100 billion plastic bags per year. Plastic bags can take 400 to 1,000 years to decompose, but their chemical residues remain for years after.

How do you think all this plastic in the ocean is affecting the sea life?

Do you think it also affects the land animals? If so,how?Why do you think sea turtle like plastic bags?

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?There are multiple environmental health issues caused by marine debris.

The following are the main ones.....

Entanglement:The growing number of abandoned plastic fishing nets is one of the greatest dangers from marine debris. The nets entangle seals, sea turtles and other animals in a phenomenon known as "ghost fishing." Fishermen from developing countries are using plastic nets for their low cost and high durability and many of those are lost or abandoned at sea. These nets continue to float in the ocean and continue 'fishing' on their own for

months or years. The nets become entangled in the sea life and can drown them. One of the most controversial types of nets is the bottom-set gill nets, which are buoyed by floats and anchored to the sea floor, sometimes stretching for thousands of feet.

Virtually any marine life can be endangered by plastic, but sea turtles seem more susceptable. In addition to being entangled by fishing nets, they often swallow plastic bags, mistaking them for jelly fish, their

main prey. They can also get caught up in a variety of other objects, such as plastic ring constricting

around its body.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?There are multiple environmental health issues caused by marine debris.

The following are the main ones.....

Small Surface Debris:Plastic resin pellets are another common part of the garbage island. They are small resin pellets that are shipped in bulk around the world and are used for industrial purposes. They are melted down at the manufacturing sites and remolded into commercial plastics. Being so small and plentiful, they can easily get lost along the way, washing through the watershed with other plastics into the oceans. They tend to float there and eventually photodegrade (sunlight breaks it down into smaller pieces known as microplastics.). But it takes many years. In the meantime, they wreak havoc with sea life. These small pellets bobbing in the water look like fish eggs. Hungry sea birds, such as an Albatross, scoop these up and take them back to feed to their chicks. The chicks eventually die of starvation or ruptured organs. Decaying Albatross chicks are frequently found with full stomachs full of plastics.

Rainbow Runner with 17 particles of plastic in its gut.

Why do you think the fish eat the plastic?

Photo degradation:As sunlight breaks down floating debris, the surface water thickens with suspended plastic bits. This is bad because the plastics often contain colorants and chemicals which have been linked to various environmental and health problems. These toxins may leach out into the seawater. Plastic has been shown to absorb organic pollutants from the surrounding seawater, which can enter the food chain. Small sea life consume the plastic bits, and larger sea life consume the smaller animals. As each animal consumes the animal before it, the amount of plastics increase. Eventually the larger animal has a large amount of plastics and chemicals in its system.

How could humans protect themselves from the chemical toxicity caused by plastics that have been consumed by

animals?

Fixing The ProblemGarbage patches generally accumulate far from any country's coastline. It is nearly impossible to track where they came from, and therefore few nations have accepted the responsibility of cleaning them up. The tiny particles that make up most of the 'soup' patches are also very difficult and expensive to detect and remove. The clean-up process is a difficult process.It has been stated that the clean-up effort would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the cleanup nets as it catches the plastics. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is currently studying the garbage patch. Research teams sail to the garbage island to take water samples and collect debris. They reported an underwater haze of degraded plastic flakes and are analyzing the samples of how the plastics interact with the marine environments.

What can we do?A team based in South of France wants to tackle the trash problem with a massive clean-up ship. The boat would suck ocean water into chambers between its parallel hulls, where a series of filters would catch first the big chunks of plastic, then successively smaller pieces. The filters would allow fish to swim between them and return to the ocean. But its design has yet to be tested.

Another idea is using a two 30-mile-long floating booms that would catch plastic debris in screens that descended into the water, and their V shape would naturally funnel the waste toward a central collection platform. A small prototype boom is currently being tested in the North

Sea. The project team claims that fish would bounce gently off the screens and swim underneath them, but marine biologists aren't so sure. The barriers might also trap plankton, the tiny floating organisms that form the base of the oceanic food chain.The most promising way of controlling these garbage patches is to RECYCLE and use more BIODEGRADABLE MATERIALS! The idea is to stop garbage at its source, before it enters the oceans. People need to be educated on the proper disposal of things that do not break up, like plastics. Instead of continually buying water bottles, purchase one permanent bottle and refill it when needed. Cut down on the use of plastics. We have to get better at reusing what we buy!

Engaging Questions1. Did you know about the garbage patches before reading about them? 2. What are other ways you can cut down on the use of plastics?3. How should countries come together to solve this problem?4. Do you think many people are concerned about this issue?5. How can you help in your daily life to decrease the garbage patch?