An ocean-borne vortex of plastic trash as big as Africa - growing bigger every day

It’s the size of Africa, but it’s not Africa. It’s twice as big as Texas, but it’s not Texas. Its mass floats throughout the Pacific Ocean and is increasing day by day. While few will ever really see the vastness of it, its effects cannot be ignored forever. Its very existence asks silently, when trash is out of sight, is it really gone?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an expanse of plastic waste in the ocean spanning the waters between California and Japan. It’s comprised of plastic scraps, from pellets a fraction of a centimeter to abandoned fishing nets and all manner of land-based plastic garbage that slipped through storm drainage systems into the ocean. It’s not solid like a floating landmass, but a collection of trash held together by ocean currents in a sort of vortex, with chunks bobbing on the surface, and below the waterline, random blooms of debris all the way down to the ocean floor. It’s a place where out-of-sight garbage with a nearly geological lifespan collects and remains - and it’s growing.

“My generation is the last to have ever experienced the ocean without plastic debris in it,” said Captain Charles Moore. He’s the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a non-profit collective of scientists and friends of the ocean who have made it their mission to “shed light on one of the most under-recognized yet ubiquitous issues facing our planet.”

In 1997, Moore discovered the expanse of trash while taking a shortcut back to shore after a yacht race. Two years later he returned to the area to troll and see what he could find in the depths. Moore was astounded at the analysis - he found six times as much plastic in the water as plankton, the basis of the marine food chain.

Plastics in the ocean, on this scale, cause more problems than just the trash that washes up on beaches worldwide. It affects all kinds of marine life throughout the food chain. We’ve all heard about sea turtles mistaking plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a main staple of their diet, and starving to death with full bellies. Moore’s research lab has also captured numerous photos of albatross as they regurgitate common ocean trash like plastic bottle caps, cigarette lighters and old toothbrushes to their newly hatched chicks.

Moore says the real issue, however, is the plastic polymer’s ability to absorb toxins, which then easily find their way into the surrounding ocean water, as well as into the food chain. In a 2001 paper published in the science journal “Environmental Science & Technology,” Japanese scientists found plastic resin pellets in the ocean that had high levels of toxic chemicals like PCBs and DDE, toxic pesticides that have been shown to harm Laysan and black-footed albatross common to the area around the Garbage Patch. In these pellets, used by the plastic industry worldwide, toxins were absorbed from the ocean, making them like a concentrated toxic pill that marine life sometimes ingest and potentially pass along all the way up the food chain.

Plastic trash is widespread throughout the world’s oceans, and the debris even in the North Pacific gyre alone is far too dispersed for anybody to do anything to remove it from the ocean, said Moore.

“There’s no engineering feat to remove it,” he said. “We’re drowning in our own trash.”

It’s a problem Moore attributes to “throw-away living.” He’s skeptical about government involvement (“The government doesn’t care because there is no government for the deep ocean,” he says), although some countries are taking steps to try and find solutions.

In the U.S. this past summer, California’s Ocean Protection Council released a wide-reaching strategy to reduce and prevent ocean litter. Often a forerunner in environmental protection strategies, California’s plan has three main strategies: packaging-producer take-back, product prohibitions and litter fees.

The first, producer take-back, is a lot like when you get a new car battery; you’re charged a fee until you return the old one to the shop. This has been shown to significantly reduce litter in developed nations around the world. Product prohibitions are bans on products like plastic grocery bags and Styrofoam packaging. Litter fees would make free packaging like plastic cups at fast food restaurants cost consumers money. That income would go toward litter cleanup projects and education.

But this is a plan for one state in one country, and while it might reduce some of the plastics slipping into the ocean, it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of what’s really needed. And there’s still the floating continent of plastic trash out there that, according to Capt. Moore, may take 100 years to process and come to rest on the ocean floor, or on the world’s beaches.

It may be out of sight but it’s not necessarily out of mind, as more and more people are taking notice of the problem. The Algalita Marine Research Foundation has been bombarded by media requests recently, with everybody from CNN and MSNBC interviewing Captain Moore and articles in major magazines and newspapers all over the world.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine the scale of what generation after generation of throw-away living has created, when few will ever see it and none will see the whole of it at once. And somehow, it seems ironic that doing something about the world’s trash problems doesn’t cost any money – it only takes a little care to be a conscious consumer on a daily basis, to put your trash in garbage bins, and recycle as much as possible. Is that too much to ask?

For more information, go to www.algalita.org.