by frog
The Independent has an early contender for grossest news of the year when it reports on a “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean. Scientists say that it is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States.
Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the “North Pacific gyre” – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.
He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. “Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by,” he said in an interview. “How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?”
I’m amazed by the sheer, blind lethargy that would let this new floating continent of plastic build up (‘The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic’). But also I’m left wondering what the impact of this might be on the environment’s health, and our own. That’s a lot of plastic soup floating about near the bottom of our food chain.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Mon, February 11th, 2008
Tags: Pacific Ocean, plastic, Pollution, Rubbish
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
yah. Provide your reasons please. One would think...
Ewww Gross. One interesting thing I found when I was living in Korea was how much more recycling is part of everyday life.
For instance when you go to most fast food joints, you seperate out your food scraps and paper scraps and cups. Also there is a packaging tax on bags. Though nominal, it was not unusal to see people reusing the bags (though it is becoming a more common occurence here) .
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Makes one proud to be Human doesn’t it!
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“the impact of this on the environment’s health” is something along the lines of: sun breaks down plastic, animals eat plastic, we eat those animals. Would imagine some of the animals are eating the plastic and dying before we get them too.
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Yes… and it’s not just the Pacific…. It is pretty astonishing to be seeing cr@p floating past the ship 1000 nm from any land. I think that that was when I first really became an “environmentalist” rather than simply a worrier about population and resources.
I first saw that 32 years ago.
respectfully
BJ
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Saw a film on this at the Environment Film Festival in New Plymouth in 2006. If someone know of this film perhaps we can get it dusted off and shown again?
Scott
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Estimated at twice the size of Texas, not the continental US.
Still large of course.
The government want to clean it up….
“Bamford said she has noted some “gaps in the research” that suggest the affected area is not as large as Moore estimates (Moor estimates twice the size of Texas). Yet there’s no question that marine debris is gathering in the area and is having a negative impact on marine life, such as fish who mistake the particles for food.
“But before we embark on a huge removal process,” Bamford said, “we need to understand what we’re dealing with.”
Bamford added that the agency had attempted to take satellite photos of the area last year, but the overhead photos were inconclusive. “It’s hard to distinguish a whale reaching the surface versus a piece of plastic,” she said.”
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Bluepeter said: Estimated at twice the size of Texas, not the continental US.
For many Texans, and one former Governer in particular, there is no difference!
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The rubbish in the picture seems to be twice the size of the USA, not just Texas.
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That’s the size of the gyre, not the floating rubbish entity, which is very difficult to estimate. Pedantic, I know.
Either way, it isn’t good and should be cleared up.
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Would certainly be expensive…how do we do it – buy up some old fishing boats? yuk
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…buy up some old fishing boats?
Hopefully Japan may well soon have a fleet of redundant whaling vessels that could be used for the purpose
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# toad Says:
February 11th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
>> …buy up some old fishing boats?
> Hopefully Japan may well soon have a fleet of redundant whaling vessels that could be used for the purpose
nah, they’re in such poor condition that they’re in danger of causing oil slicks and making the situation worse. And you can’t catch this rubbish with harpoons anyway.
What you need is a couple of drift net fishing boats to pull a net 5 km long and collect the rubbish that way. Obviously the nets should not hang down as low as drift net fishing nets, because that would take all the fish out of the water at the same time.
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…like some fishing boats?
That sure would take a long time though, and who would take it all? There’s the option of dumping, and possible recycling, but that would…take a long time, gosh.
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Utterly gross.
Would be great to be able to believe an enthusiastic World body, (UN?) might lead the way on a) cleaning up the plastic sea, and b) assist in preventing it happen again.
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Steve Connor: Why plastic is the scourge of sea life
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For some weird reason that escapes me, it seems that MONEY is the only thing many humans take seriously.
Let us work out a strategy collectively:
For starters, here are some ideas (“off the top of my head”!)
1. Collate the evidence.
2. Work out the financial cost (as accurately as possible) of gathering, cleaning up and recycling the various messes.
3. Work out the contribution to the mess made by each country: (population, lifestyle, manufacture, disposal/recycling habits etc etc.)
4. Through international bodies (UN for starters?) work out the cost per person/country (corrected for the amount of plastic each country uses) and add this cost to every bit of plastic made.
etc
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I think between 1 and 2 there would have to be ‘why this is a problem’ (for humans??), unfortunately a problem just for animals obviously doesn’t resonate as much as for one humans, although there has been a fair bit of progress on protecting gulls/albatrosses from fishing boat long-line hooks.
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When oil hits $200 a barrel nations will be fighting each other to harvest all that plastic. Using converted bottom trawlers.
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Sigh. If this goes on, there’s probably nothing much we’ve left of Mother Earth to give the younger generation. Something must be done about this…
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