The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
As Big as Texas!
Right now,
there is a gigantic “soup” of trash floating somewhere between California,
Hawaii and Asia. This is called the North Pacific Gyre, or more commonly
referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is a swirling
collection of plastic debris, or garbage, in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean that is bigger than the state of Texas! This enormous collection of trash
moves with the currents of the ocean and cannot be seen from the sky because
most pieces are very tiny and float a few inches below the water’s surface.
How Did it Get There?
No one
really knows when the Great Pacific Garbage Patch began. In the 1970s,
scientists started studying the area. They noticed that garbage was floating in
the water, collecting together in a cluster, or group. They could see
that ocean currents carried this plastic garbage. Currents are the flow,
or continuous movement, that water takes in one direction. Some large currents
are circular; instead of moving in a straight line, they move in a
circle, kind of like the way water moves when you flush a toilet! These
circular currents are called gyres (rhymes with fire,) and the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch is basically one enormous collection of trash
floating in a huge circular current. The only time trash leaves the gyre is
when it sinks, or is flushed out by a big storm and washes ashore hundreds of
miles away.
About 80%
of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from activities on land.
Litter like plastic bottles, bottle caps, and candy wrappers can end up in storm
drains or in rivers and streams that empty into a bay or the ocean. Also, in
coastal cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, the wind often blows litter
into waterways or directly into the ocean. The rest of the trash in the Garbage
Patch (20%) comes from activities at sea. Every year, about 100 million
containers are shipped over the world’s oceans. One of the shipping routes is
between Asia and North America. There are frequent, severe storms along this
route, which cause hundreds of containers to go overboard each year. Many of
these containers hold things like tens of thousands of shoes or millions of
plastic shopping bags and other plastic items.
Persistent Plastic
Plastic
tends to make up a large part of ocean debris. Since plastic is buoyant,
or able to float, it can easily travel long distances on ocean currents. In
addition to being buoyant, plastic is also persistent. That means it
lasts a vevery, very long time without naturally breaking down or decomposing
into smal particles or tiny pieces. Another way of saying this is
that plastics do not biodegradBio means “life,” and degrade means
“tobreak down.” When something is biodegradable, it means it is made
from something natural that was once alive (eithea plant or an animal.) It also
means it can decompose and return to the natural elements or naturally
occurring materials found onEarth. Most plastic is made from petroleuor
oil, which is not biodegradable. Thereforit can take 500 years for a
piece of plastic twear down into smaller particles! And even it still doesn’t
return to a natural element. It just becomes a very tiny piece oplastic.
Another source of plastics in the ocean, are nurdles. These are small
plastic pellets, or balls, that get melted down to make a variety of
plastic products. Nurdles cause big problems! They often end up in the ocean
where animals will eat them and get sick from the poisonous chemicals that
nurdles contain. Nurdles also damage the bodies of fish, which makes it hard
for themto breathe through their gills.
Some
people think that because the ocean is so big, a gyre full of floating garbage
doesn’t matter that much. Well, they’re wrong! Oceans are complicated ecosystems
where billions of organisms, or living things, live in natural
balance. Plants like algae, plankton, and seaweed make up the beginning of the
food chain for animals such as shrimp, fish, jellyfish, birds, sea turtles,
otters, dolphins, sharks, and whales. A food chain is the natural order
of how animals get food. When plastics end up in our ocean, they often appear
as food to animals and become a dangerous part of the food chain. Imagine a
plastic bag floating in the ocean. It can look just like a jellyfish, which sea
turtles and dolphins love to eat! When these animals eat plastic bags, it can
choke them. It can also fill their stomach with trash that doesn’t digest or
move through their bodies to provide them with the nutrition needed to survive.
Often, animals will stop eating if their belly is full of plastic, and they end
up starving to death! Each year, more than 1 million sea birds and 100 thousand
marine mammals die from plastics. Not only do they die from eating, or ingesting
it, they also die from getting entangled or caught in it. Plastic
six-pack rings and plastic ropes and nets are common traps for fish, birds and
other marine life that get entangled in them.
What can we do to help?
1. Stop buying water in plastic bottles.
Instead, drink tap water from reusable bottles made from glass or steel.
2. Use cloth bags at the store instead of
plastic bags. We often don’t even need a bag!
3. Put lunch items in reusable containers
instead of plastic baggies. Carry a
reusable, metal spork so that you don’t
need to use plastic utensils.
5. Eat ice cream in cones, not plastic
cups.
6. Cut plastic six-pack rings so that
animals can’t get caught in them.
7. Stop litter! Tell family and friends
that litter hurts animals. Join beach clean-ups.
8. Pick up trash outside your home and
sweep sidewalks with a broom. Hosing sidewalks wastes water and can push trash
into storm drains.
9. Recycle! Learn your city’s recycling
rules for plastic and other items.
10. Use bio-plastics made from plants like
corn or potato. They biodegrade naturally.
