About a thousand miles off the coast of California, in the great blue Pacific Ocean, there is a flotsam of plastic that covers hundreds, possibly thousands of miles. It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and various iterations on the theme). It is largely governed by the gyre in the North Pacific Subtropical Zone, which is a fancy term for a bunch of clock-wise-circulating ocean currents that converge in this moderately stationary part of the ocean. It appears to migrate north and south seasonally, as much as a thousand miles, but one thing's for sure: it's big. The verdict is out on definitive answers about the volume, primary sources, density, and average size of the debris, but another thing's for sure: it's growing. When I first heard of it, about 6 years ago, it was estimated to be roughly the size of Texas. At the time, I could hardly believe it - how could pollution of that proportion be so relatively unknown? Now, some estimated the Great Plastic Patch to be twice that size. Could it have grown that fast? It's hard to say.
Since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) first documented it in 1988, increased scrutiny has revealed a can of worms. First, the Great Garbage Patch is not as visually concrete as one might expect. Robert Knox, deputy director of research for California's Scripps Institute of Oceanography explains, "There may be a misapprehension...that if you got out there and stood on the middle of a deck, you'd see nothing but plastic litter from horizon to horizon...Certainly one does encounter pieces of plastic stuff that are big enough to see. But the other side of the puzzle is all the little bits and pieces of plastic that you can't even see unless you scoop up a sample of seawater and see what's in there." The density of debris may not be solid enough to walk on, in part because the plastic stuff is breaking down, though not nearly at the rate in which it is accumulating, but also due to the extensive possible depth of distribution. The fact that it's breaking down intersects a causal concern about plastic as a material, which poses a significant danger for the entire marine food chain. The most obvious danger is for larger animals such as birds, fish, and turtles mistaking pieces of plastic for food and ostensibly starve to death because their guts become full of indigestible plastic and are unable to ingest enough real food. But, a deeper and more complex concern is for small organisms at the bottom of the food chain that ingest small particles of plastic and feed it up the food chain. Unlike polluting debris that biodegrades (meaning it breaks down in to materials that exist in nature or are similar enough to plant and animal matter to be put to use by microorganisms), plastic photodegrades, which means that as it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, it will always remain as a petroleum-based polymer even when broken down to the molecular level. What this really means is: plastic never ever really goes away. Climbing up the food chain, where larger animals eat smaller animals, plastic inevitably enters the human food supply too. Among the questions about how a diet of plastic will affect the scope food chain over time, one that surfaces with quiet concern is: what's the impact of a massive scale marine breakdown and ingestion of the plasticizers that are widely used in plastic, such as BPA (Bisphenol A), which have shown hormone disrupting traits? It's a short stretch of the imagination to be sure we'll find out. The question that is likely the most pertinent is: what can we do to about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Learn more, get involved, and opt out of plastic whenever possible. Thanks to increasing interest and media coverage, 2009 marked the year that clean-up efforts have begun on a scale with potential to make a dent in this doozie.
To learn more and to get involved in the action, visit www.projectkaisei.org
Visit Renée Loux at www.reneeloux.com
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