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The Pacific Garbage Patch

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Homerboy said:
Edit: Thus making NS1's picture likely a true depiction of a beach in the middle of this "patch"
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Hawaii is in the dead center of the North Pacific Gyre. It's not covered in trash.

I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it's not a huge mass of solid plastic. It's mostly smaller granules of plastic degraded by UV rays.
 
It's not covered in trash.
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And it isn't going to be. That doesn't mean that the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre doesn't exist. Most of the garbage is under the surface, and much of it is finely shredded or broken plastic bits. It's also bottles, plastic toys, etc. It's not piles of it, but a higher concentration than in open ocean.
 
Wasn't there a group of scientists studying the items in the area and noting some interesting anthropological things? Let me see if I can dig up the article... Edit: Nope, I can't.
 
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That stuff does exist. I supported the "Project Kessei" (google it). However, they were mainly studying the new ecosystems that has formed in these patches. It's always interesting that no matter what we do, life in general, adapts and finds a way. It's not really about being "green" and "eco friendly." Life has adapted. We move on

It also allowed us to study the surface currents of the oceans. ahah.

It's unfortunate that this mere grad-student project gets so much media attention though. We had camera crews come and bother us for an entire day.

EDIT:
Most of this trash is by stupid people who don't know marine laws. Plastic trash must be held or burned out at sea. Of course, casual sport fishers, cruise ship passengers.. they don't sort their trash.. Just by law of numbers, you'll have idiots throwing stuff overboard. We ALWAYS toss our paper/scullery trash overboard though. Once in awhile, we'll have a stupid guy that will forget that the paper-only bin is for paper only.. and throws a piece of plastic into the bin.
 
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Ns1 said:
have you actually SEEN the pictures?

how is that alarmist?

garbage-patch-1.jpg
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I know it's been commented that this isn't in the middle of the Pacific, and I know people have figured out that the picture was taken on land of a beach. But seriously, see that big green thing there? Do you really think that made it to the middle of the Pacific in that shape??

No one is guiltless when it comes to the Pacific Garbage Patch - if you consume and discard goods, you are responsible for some portion of the plastic that is ending up in the ocean, even if you live hundreds of miles from the seaside. All rivers lead to the sea, as they say. Trash that ends up in a stream in the middle of the US can end up in the ocean and, with the help of ocean currents, find itself in the middle of a trash vortex.
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I'm east of the Mississippi. For the couple of people who said that just because you put your trash in a garbage can doesn't mean it doesn't make it to the Pacific, I'm wondering - does my trash go through the Panama Canal? Or does my trash go around Cape Horn? Cape of Good Hope? Eaten by an albatross who flies 6000 miles, dies, and decomposes, leaving the plastic garbage to float behind?
 
DrPizza said:
I know it's been commented that this isn't in the middle of the Pacific, and I know people have figured out that the picture was taken on land of a beach. But seriously, see that big green thing there? Do you really think that made it to the middle of the Pacific in that shape??



I'm east of the Mississippi. For the couple of people who said that just because you put your trash in a garbage can doesn't mean it doesn't make it to the Pacific, I'm wondering - does my trash go through the Panama Canal? Or does my trash go around Cape Horn? Cape of Good Hope? Eaten by an albatross who flies 6000 miles, dies, and decomposes, leaving the plastic garbage to float behind?
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if you wiki, there's one in the Atlantic too
 
Yeah, I don't get the reasoning here. Suppose that the trash I put in proper trash bins winds up in the ocean. I don't get why the answer is for me to severely alter my lifestyle so I don't put trash in the bins instead of slightly altering trash policies to avoid letting it get there.
 
the amount of fuel it would take to get ships out there to capture the plastic would emit so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the pros of a clean up are greatly reduced by the cons;
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This guy just went down a notch on the credibility scale.
 
I was in Asia and the water looked beautiful from the surface but when I went in there was just heaps of garbage floating around my feet or on the bottom. In front of a 5 star hotel they seemed to just be dumping their garbage in the ocean. So I spent an entire day pulling garbage out and creating a small mountain in front of their hotel. They were not pleased. Neither were the guests. Fuck them.
 
haha, nice Necro, but I still get to respond to an active member!

MrPickins said:
Umm, I pay a trash service so that my garbage ends up in a landfill, not the ocean.
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So do I. but there's the rub--where does your garbage actually go? It's not so cut and dry.

I know that, around here, once the bottle collectors have sifted through everything, tossing trash about everywhere, the garbage collectors have shown up and tossed it into their trucks, taken to landfills or recycling, taken to barges, taken to the incinerator, taken to...eh? And in all that transit, garbage escapes, hits the water table, and accumulates.

Seriously though--just imagine what kind of landfill that needs to be, jsut to store all of your community's take out trays, tampons, water bottles, dead bodies, syringes, etc...

Point being--it is not a 1:1 correlation to someone tossing a bottle on the ground = trash in the ocean. All trash, anywhere, has the same chance of ending up in that ocean. You see, that litter on the street invariably does tend to be collected (waste water treatment plant, for one), and is added to the same pile of trash that you pay to get transported. Some see that monthly sanitation payment as a guilt free trash management solution--which is fair, sure. I'm actually kind of annoyed that I still pay as much as I do and trash still has a strong chance of ending up anywhere that is not where I expect it to land.

The best solution, I think, is to just stop throwing away so much shit. That's actually easier than most want to admit.
 
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Most of it is very fine particles basically in all of the ocean.. Any sample you take is going to have this small particles of plastic.. We fucked it up real good
 
AmdEmAll said:
Most of it is very fine particles basically in all of the ocean.. Any sample you take is going to have this small particles of plastic.. We fucked it up real good
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Was going to post this. The real problem isn't the large chunks that aggregate together but all the fine particles. That gets eaten by organisms and either directly damages them or gets built up into larger organisms and builds up from there.

torpid said:
Yeah, I don't get the reasoning here. Suppose that the trash I put in proper trash bins winds up in the ocean. I don't get why the answer is for me to severely alter my lifestyle so I don't put trash in the bins instead of slightly altering trash policies to avoid letting it get there.
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Actually it needs to start before you. We need to cut down on the amount of pointless plastic (and other) shit that just goes straight to the trash to begin with. This way you don't have to worry about it at all.

I believe a lot of places have banned ocean/water dumping but it doesn't matter when so much production of goods has been outsourced to places that don't.
 
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