This is just one post in the Pacific Ocean Garbage Dump Category

Dan Haifley, Our Ocean Backyard: What can be done about that plastic soup caught in ocean gyres?

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 27, 2008 at 7:52 am

From San Jose Mercury News:

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of two concentrations of mostly plastic garbage caught in swirling ocean gyres between the U.S. and Japan. Similar phenomena exist around the globe. But they aren’t just floating landfills that can be fixed by removing trash. Why?

Plastic does not biodegrade. It undergoes a solar-driven process called photodegradation. The sun breaks down the plastic into smaller pieces called nurdles, which retain the plastic’s polymer structure. So, much of the millions of tons of pollution in these garbage patches consist of ubiquitous nurdles in a watery soup. In the North Pacific gyre, plastics outnumber surface plankton six-to-one, according to Capt. Charles Moore, the leading researcher.

Wallace J. Nichols, senior scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, uses turtles as an example of the effects plastics can have on sea life: “A study in the 1990s in Florida found that of 83 loggerhead turtles that stranded dead, 83.1 percent had ingested plastics and 33.7 percent had ingested tar. Nearly all ingested plastics were consistent with high-density polyethylene that had photodegraded into small shards or that was ingested as spherical precursor pellets.”

Is anyone working to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Howard Wiig, a member of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Marine Debris in Honolulu, told me: “The U.S. Coast guard periodically retrieves large mounds of net, which areshipping hazards. Now we’re asking how we can deal with the North Pacific gyre accumulations before they come ashore.”