Garbage Patch

Does anyone remember me wondering about why there were so many dead sea urchins on the beach of siesta key? That was in the very beginning when I first started blogging. Anyway, in that December post I described seeing little boys driving golf balls into the ocean and I was thinking about the great vortex of garbage collecting in the Pacific ocean.

Well, I was just reading this excellent article, message in a bottle, published by Sierra Club in May/June 2009, which describes this Garbage Patch tragedy in detail. (Side note: I discovered the article after reading Twisty's recent post on I Blame The Patriarchy about a person who sends miniature plastic figurines by balloon into the sky to land at some unknown destination . . . and Twisty's view on the consequences of reckless abandonment of plastic into the environment.)

It's difficult for me to get myself to read articles of any length online. Some people are great at this (take Snark, for instance, who loves to read science articles and news online). For me, it's something about being on the computer, concentrating on the glowing screen, something about my attention span . . . I'm not sure. I have no problem writing on a computer (I can spend hours focused on that), but reading is a different matter. I can't explain it. Give me a book over the computer screen any day!

This is to say, I understand if reading the Sierra Club article about the Garbage Patch is not first on your list of activities . . . or even second, third, fourth. But I think it's an informative article. Since we all use plastic, no matter how much we may try not to, it's necessary to be aware of the consequences of our usage. How does the simple act of drinking out of a straw one time and then tossing it into the garbage affect the world at large?

Because this is an important topic, but most likely will get passed by during people's busy days, I'm going to include a few excerpts from the article to encourage curiosity about it.

From Part 1: The Captain
"Now, after eight voyages, countless experiments, and endless interviews, [Charles Moore] probably has as good an understanding as anyone of the Garbage Patch. What it isn't, he says, is a solid mass like an ice floe. Rather, it is an inconceivably diffuse soup, a little here, a little there, doing not one but two roundabouts: in the eastern Pacific and in the western Pacific. Together these gyres form the shape of a dog bone. Moore describes the Garbage Patch as two to three times the size of Texas, but in fact it might be far larger--as much as 5 million square miles, or one and a half times the size of the United States. Sailors encounter it within 500 miles of the California coast and 200 miles off Japan."

From Part 2: The Scientist
"In an upcoming edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific journal in the English-speaking world, Thompson spells out to the scientific community how deeply plastic has woven itself into nature's web. He solicited reports from biologists, chemists, and toxicologists who span the globe but are few enough to fit on the deck of a trawler. He learned that on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean, hermit crabs live in bottle caps instead of shells. The kittiwake of northern Denmark raises its young in a cliff nest assembled mostly from drinking straws, plastic twine, and ear swabs. In a 600-foot-deep trench off the coast of Marseilles, France, troves of Evian bottles lie perfectly preserved, absent the light or oxygen to break them apart. The fur seals of Macquarie Island, far off New Zealand's southern tip, poop bits of yellow and blue."

"Across the Pacific in Tokyo Bay, a toxicologist named Hideshige Takada took an interest in nurdles because they told him something about pollution. In ocean water, Takada noticed, nurdles and other plastics suck up toxins like sponges. They hold concentrations up to a million times greater than the surrounding water. The round pellets washed up on Tokyo's shores carrying loads of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and the insecticide DDT, even though both had been banned worldwide more than three decades earlier."

The article goes on to say that Takada found the highest concentrations of PCBs and DDT off the coast of the United States! Scary stuff! Scientists are apparently just beginning to study how toxins from our trash consumed by marine animals are held in their bodies, then distributed in larger and larger concentrations up the food chain. Also, drifting plastic in the ocean collects an underwater ecosystem that far exceeds the number of hitchhiking species attached to natural flotsam such as driftwood; this is significant because large amounts of species relocating to foreign shores can disastrously shift present ecosystems.