Environmentalist: It’s becoming a plastic world
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 10, 2010 at 5:59 amFrom CNN:
“Every bit of fully synthetic plastic that’s ever been produced over the past 100 years is somewhere on our planet, a leading environmentalist, David de Rothschild, said Tuesday.
De Rothschild, who’s about to set sail on a boat made of recycled plastic to highlight pollution in the Pacific Ocean, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour there has been a huge aggregation of small molecular-sized pieces of plastic in our atmosphere, in our oceans, or on our land since plastic was first produced in 1909. “We’re seeing them aggregating … and getting into the food chain, which is then transferring toxins back into us through the food we eat,” de Rothschild said.
“We have this sort of voracious appetite for throwaway, single-use plastics, what I call Dumb Planet 1.0 plastics — the plastic bag, the Styrofoam cup.” … “
Continue reading this article from CNN by clicking here.
Chesbro bill seeks to fight spread of ocean garbage
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 3, 2010 at 6:44 amFrom the Eureka Times-Standard:
“California 1st District Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro has introduced a bill seeking to require the fast food industry to reduce and recycle packaging waste.
The bill, Assembly Bill 2138, would create the “Plastic Ocean Pollution Reduction, Recycling and Composting Act,” which would require the fast food industry to only use packaging that is recyclable or compostable in the communities where it is used, according to a press release from Chesbro’s office.
”Plastic ocean pollution is a persistent and growing problem,” Chesbro said in the release. “Despite international treaties prohibiting dumping plastics at sea and other international, national, state and local action, trash in the ocean is increasing. Trash that washes into our waterways and bays poses a real and pressing threat to marine life. California must take on a leadership role in protecting our oceans.”
Chesbro, who chairs the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee, recently held an investigative hearing on ocean pollution and the accumulation of toxic materials in California coastal waters. The testimony given at the hearing is the foundation of Chesbro’s bill. … “
Read more from the Eureka Times-Standard by clicking here.
A sea of plastics
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on February 27, 2010 at 7:59 amFrom U. S. News & World Report:
“Recent studies show that the oceans may hold more “garbage patches” of fine plastic flotsam than scientists realized and that the fragments extend well below the sea surface.
Most of these items are the size of fingernail clippings or smaller. They are the wave-shattered remnants of items such as rubbish, abandoned fishing gear and floats from fishing nets and scientific instruments. These plastic bits are especially common in a region of the Pacific Ocean southwest of California that is sometimes called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Recent cruises reveal that there’s more garbage in this patch than often meets the eye, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass., reported February 24 at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences meeting.
Scientists often tow fine mesh nets behind their boats to conduct a census of floating debris, Proskurowski said. But if researchers tow their nets just at the surface, especially on windy days, they’re likely finding only a fraction of the debris that’s actually present. … “
Continue reading this article from U.S. News & World Report by clicking here.
Trash floats eco-warrior’s boat: David de Rothschild plans to sail the Plastiki, his catamaran made of soda bottles, to the giant floating garbage patch in the Pacific to publicize environmental woes
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on February 21, 2010 at 7:11 am
From the Los Angeles Times:
“Reporting from Sausalito, Calif. – David de Rothschild is talking trash, lots and lots of trash.
“There were 25 billion Styrofoam cups used last year. How do you even get your head around what 25 billion Styrofoam cups looks like?” he said. “Eighty-odd percent of what’s purchased by Americans is thrown out within six months.”
On this day, though, the British banking heir is focused on some very particular refuse as he skims along the San Francisco Bay in a catamaran called Plastiki: The 12,000 or so recycled soda bottles lashed together to build his clunky vessel, and the growing heap of plastic fragments called the Eastern Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific.
If all goes well — so far, it’s been a little hit and miss — De Rothschild hopes to set sail aboard Plastiki in March, tour the garbage patch and end up in Australia, while blogging about the evils of plastic and a consumer society.
He also wants to highlight Plastiki’s innovations, like the glue made of cashew hulls and sugar, which he said “could go to market today and take epoxies — horrible, noxious stuff — off the shelf straightaway.” … “
Read more from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.
Committed to cleaning the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on December 21, 2009 at 7:01 amFrom the Washington Post:
“In the Pacific Ocean, a floating garbage dump exists between Hawaii and California that is hundreds of thousands square miles wide and has been estimated to contain approximately 3.5 million tons of debris.
This “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is the most extreme example of a serious nationwide and international problem: marine debris dumped into the oceans and waterways.
As director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) marine debris program, it is Holly Bamford’s role to coordinate nationwide clean-up efforts, collaborate internationally on solutions to problems such as the garbage patch and develop prevention methods.
“Marine debris knows no political boundaries. It is an international problem,” Bamford said. “The vision of the program down the road is global oceans and coasts free of the impact of marine debris. The whole purpose is to protect our marine environment.” … “
Read more from the Washington Post by clicking here.
Dan Bacher: Schwarzenegger’s MLPA: Marine life guardians or corporate privateers?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on December 1, 2009 at 6:49 amFrom Dan Bacher at IndyBay.org, this commentary:
“Tom Stienstra, outdoor columnist for the S.F. Chronicle, yesterday pointed out the absurdity of the people that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) for the North Coast by listing the appointees and their “qualifications.”
“Sometimes people take issue with political appointments to committees charged with overseeing the state’s conservation management,” said Stienstra. “The Department of Fish and Game provided this list of committee members who will implement the Marine Life Protection Act for the Northern California coast.
Catherine Reheis-Boyd, chief operating officer and chief of staff, Western States Petroleum Association; Gregory Schem, president and chief executive officer, Harbor Real Estate Group; Jimmy Smith, chair, Humboldt County Board of Supervisors; Virginia Strom-Martin, advocate, Los Angeles Unified School District; William Anderson, president, Westrec Marina Management; Meg Caldwell, director and senior lecturer on law, Stanford Law School Environment and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program; Roberta Cordero, lawyer, co-founder Chumash Maritime Association; Cindy Gustafson, district general manager, Tahoe City Public Utility District.”
I’m one of those people who takes strong issue “with political appointments to committees charged with overseeing the state’s conservation management.” Upon announcing the appointment of the task force, Mike Chrisman, Natural Resources Secretary, claimed, “This diverse and knowledgeable group, that includes local public leaders, will ensure that all interests are heard as the MLPA planning process moves to the north coast.” … “
Read more of Dan Bacher’s commentary by clicking here.
Editorial: Who’ll clean ocean?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on December 1, 2009 at 6:47 amFrom the Appeal-Democrat, this editorial:
“Percolating in the Pacific Ocean, about halfway between California and Hawaii, is an aquatic landfill commonly called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch … an accumulation of debris that is estimated to be as large as twice the size of Texas.
The trash comes from oceangoing vessels as well as nations bordering the Pacific Basin and is brought to this one location by converging ocean currents that then hold it captive. The plastic that makes up some 90 percent of the debris breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that float below the ocean’s surface but do not biodegrade. … “
Read the rest of this editorial by clicking here.
Afloat in the ocean, expanding islands of trash
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 10, 2009 at 7:35 am
From the New York Times:
“Aboard the Alguita, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea. …”
Read more from the New York Times by clicking here.
Plastic, plastic everywhere, nor any bite to eat: Pacific albatrosses feast on garbage patch offerings
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 28, 2009 at 7:59 am
From the Scientific American:
“As harbingers of ill fate in maritime lore, albatross have, themselves, come to be an indicator for modern-day oceanic pollution. Snatching up floating and near-surface food, Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) in especially trash-strewn tides now pick up a more dangerous repast than they are accustomed to.
“With increasing amounts of marine debris, what once may have been ‘optimal’ foraging strategies for top marine predators, are leading to sub-optimal diets comprised in large part of plastic,” wrote authors of a new paper on the subject.
The new paper, published online Tuesday in PLoS ONE, documents the new, deleterious diets that many of the wide-roving birds now have. …”
Read more from the Scientific American by clicking here.
Crew knows where the ocean trash goes
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 7, 2009 at 7:26 amFrom the Daily Breeze:
“The ocean-research vessel Algalita and crew returned Tuesday to Southern California, carrying more dismal evidence about ocean pollution. Along the trip, the crew collected trash samples and studied the patterns that bits of garbage and plastic travel in the vast ocean.
The journey – to an area known as “the great Pacific Garbage Patch” – was the 10th for Capt. Charles Moore. And his last – for now, at least. “It’s too dangerous,” Moore said after his return to a port in Long Beach. “It’s too scary.”
Debris in the water can catch in the ship’s propellers and create engine hazards. Moore said extensive work will be needed so that the propellers on the 50-foot vessel are protected. “It will have to be like a bumper car,” he quipped. … “
Read more from the Daily Breeze by clicking here.
Yolo County Creek cleanup day to keep trash from flowing to the sea
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 31, 2009 at 12:50 pmFrom The Davis Enterprise:
“The largest landfill in the world is not, in fact, on land. It floats in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Western Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California, is twice the size of Texas. Ninety percent of the patch is floating plastic.
What’s a local, community-minded person to do? Libby Earthman, executive director of the Putah Creek Council, says volunteering for the Yolo County Creek Cleanup — on Saturday, Sept. 19 — is a great place to start. “We encourage people of all ages and abilities to come out to our waterways and help pick up trash,” she said in a news release. “It’s something tangible that people can do to learn about how little things they do affect life downstream.”
While some of the trash found in local waterways is illegally dumped there, much of it makes its way into creeks by way of stormwater drains. “When you see a piece of trash in the gutter, floating toward a drain, most people assume that the water and floating trash are heading to the water treatment plant. They are not. They drain directly into creeks, or in Davis, into stormwater collection ponds,” Earthman said. …”
Read more from The Davis Enterprise by clicking here.
Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 28, 2009 at 8:11 amFrom the Associated Press:
“A tawny stuffed puppy bobs in cold sea water, his four stiff legs tangled in the green net of some nameless fisherman.
It’s one of the bigger pieces of trash in a giant patch of garbage-littered water — one that’s bigger than Texas — where most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean.
But most of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has broken into bite-sized plastic bits, and scientists want to know whether it’s sickening or killing the small fish, plankton and birds that ingest it.
During their August fact-finding expedition, a group of University of California scientists found much more debris than they expected. The team announced their observations at a San Diego press conference Thursday.
“It’s pretty shocking — it’s unusual to find exactly what you’re looking for,” said Miriam Goldstein, who led fellow researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego on the three-week voyage. …”
Read more from the Associated Press by clicking here.
Millions of tons of plastic debris floating in oceans is now thought to be toxic
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 21, 2009 at 8:59 amFrom AlterNet:
“Scientists have identified a new source of chemical pollution released by the huge amounts of plastic rubbish found floating in the oceans of the world. A study has found that as plastics break down in the sea they release potentially toxic substances not found in nature and which could affect the growth and development of marine organisms.
Until now it was thought that plastic rubbish is relatively stable chemically and, apart from being unsightly, its principle threat to living creatures came from its ability to choke or strangle any animals that either got caught in it or ingested it thinking it was food.
But the latest research suggests that plastic is also a source of dissolved substances that can easily become widely dispersed in the marine environment. Many of these chemicals are believed to toxic to humans and animals, the scientists said. …”
Read more from AlterNet by clicking here.
The North Pacific Gyre: 100 million tons of garbage and growing
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 19, 2009 at 7:36 am
From Environmental Graffiti:
“In 1967, American Charles Moore was sailing his yacht back to California after participating in the Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He chose a short cut usually avoided by sailors and entered the North Pacific Gyre….
In a gyre, very little wind and extremely high pressure weather systems combine to greatly reduce ocean circulation. The largest marine ocean ecosystems are subtropical gyres which cover 40% of the earth’s surface. These immense regions of slowly spiraling warm equatorial air pull in winds and converging sea currents. Everything in a gyre moves slowly. Yachtsmen avoid them because there is too little wind for effective sailing. Gyres are the ‘doldrums’ of maritime history and legends. They contain regions of ‘dead calm’ where no wind blows for several days. Surface chlorophyll density is low, plant and animal growth and biomass is low as well.
Expecting little excitement and a slow uneventful cruise towards California, Moore was soon to have a shocking, unexpected experience. …”
Read more of this story, which includes lots of pictures, by clicking here.
Pacific Ocean houses world’s biggest landfill
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 6, 2009 at 10:57 pm
From Accu-Weather:
“The Pacific Ocean, the biggest and deepest body of water in the world, covers about 46 percent of the Earth’s surface and is home to millions of marine animals. The ocean is also home to arguably one of the biggest and most unpleasant manmade phenomena in existence, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The floating mass of trash, located north of the Hawaiian Islands, is estimated to be twice the size of Texas and is made up of at least two smaller patches, the largest of which is estimated to contain at least 3.5 million pounds of trash, according to www.greatgarbagepatch.org.
The phenomenon is caused by a gyre, or a collision of warm and cold oceanic currents, known as the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone (STCZ). This current acts like a vortex and swirls most of the trash into the middle of the ocean. …”
Read more from Accu-Weather by clicking here.
Texas-sized patch of plastic debris draws activist attention
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 3, 2009 at 6:59 amFrom the San Diego News Network:
“Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins have a message in a bottle that they just cycled 2,000 miles to deliver.
There is a patch of plastic debris slowly circulating in the Pacific Ocean that covers the size of Texas. It has doubled in size in the past 10 years and there is new evidence to suggest that the toxins it harbors are making their way into our food supply.
The couple, who work for the nonprofit environmental group Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), stopped at Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach on June 27 after they had completed a 2,000-mile cycle from Vancouver to Tijuana to raise awareness about a heavily polluted area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Eastern Garbage Patch. Eriksen and Cummins spoke with surfers and locals about their journey and mission and plan to return to give a full presentation to the nonprofit San Diego Coastkeeper in the fall.
The bike trip was part of a campaign called Junk Ride 2009 that gave Eriksen and Cummins the opportunity to speak at 40 events, meet with five mayors and deliver bottles of plastic-laden water samples that they took from the Eastern Garbage Patch in the Northern Pacific Gyre a year ago. The Gyre is a remote area of the Pacific Ocean approximately 2,000 miles from the coast where the confluence of currents sets up a slowly rotating mass of water larger than the United States that traps the plastic debris in a massive gyre, or circular swirl. …”
Read more from the San Diego News Network by clicking here.
Researchers launch study of ocean garbage patch: Scripps, Project Kaisei set sail on 4-week, $1.1 million inquiry
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 30, 2009 at 7:41 amFrom the San Diego Union Tribune:
A plastic vortex of trash twice the size of Texas floats about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, invisible to the naked eye.
Just about the only thing researchers know for sure about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is that it can’t be good for the environment. The plastic and toxins it attracts have become a part of the Pacific Ocean’s ecosystem, killing everything from fish to birds to sea turtles.
On Sunday, researchers from UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and Project Kaisei, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, will board two ships for a $1.1 million, nearly four-week voyage that will launch the most extensive study of the waterborne landfill to date.
Project Kaisei founder Doug Woodring says his ultimate goal – after several more trips – is to clean up the mess, a feat that several leading researchers have said is impossible. But even in the worst-case scenario, the voyage will raise awareness about the harmful effects of plastic products, Woodring said. “Everyone has said that it’s too big and there’s no way to fix it,” he said. “We think that if we made the problem, there must be a way to solve the problem. Informing people is the first step.”
Read more from the San Diego Union Tribune by clicking here.
Plastiki, a ship of plastic bottles, hopes to send eco-message
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 26, 2009 at 6:17 amFrom the Fresno Bee:
You’ve heard of a ship in a bottle. How about a ship made of plastic bottles? That would be the Plastiki, designed to sail the Pacific on an 11,000-mile voyage highlighting the dangers of living in a throwaway world.
“Waste is fundamentally a design flaw. We wanted to design a vessel that would epitomize waste being used as a resource,” said expedition leader David de Rothschild.
The boat is named in honor of the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl, an ocean adventure that inspired de Rothschild.
There’s a bit more of a tie-in. One of the Plastiki team members is Josian Heyerdahl, the explorer’s granddaughter. An environmental scientist who works on business sustainability issues, Heyerdahl, 25, became part of the project after reading about it and introducing herself to de Rothschild.
The plan is to sail all the way to Australia. Find out more from the Fresno Bee by clicking here.
Voyage to the Pacific Ocean’s ‘Garbage Patch’
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 19, 2009 at 7:05 amFrom Scientific American:
Editor’s Note: Scuba instructor and underwater videographer Drew Wheeler is traveling on board the Algalita Marine Research Foundation’s 50-foot (15.2-meter) Ocean Research Vessel, Alguita, on a two-month voyage to sample and study portions of a 10-million-square-mile (25.9-million-square-kilometer) oval known as the North Subtropical Gyre (a.k.a. “Pacific Garbage Patch”). Wheeler and the rest of the Alguita crew left Long Beach, Calif., on June 10 with a plan to cross the International Date Line and investigate regions of reported high plastic concentrations, northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. This is his first blog post for ScientificAmerican.com.
June 17, 2009
Over 1,100 miles (1,770.3 kilometers) traveled.
Well, we are one week into our journey, and already Mother Nature has proved to be the boss. We expected to have a day or two of northwesterly winds. But we thought once we left shore behind, our catamaran would catch the prevailing northeast trade winds and take us to our objective—the international dateline, north of Hawaii.
Not so fast. We had five days straight of almost pure north wind that kept pushing us farther and farther south. At one point Alguita Captain Charles Moore made the famous call, “We can’t there from here.” So we then started discussing other objectives, finally settling on an area where some plankton are blooming, just northeast of the Hawaiian island chain.
There is a theory that the same current and weather patterns that lead to plankton clouds may also corral the plastics on the ocean surface, so we are going to see if this is the case. According to [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)] coastal watch scientist Dave Foley, there is a bloom occurring as we speak, and we are only a few days away, so we are going for it.
Read more from Scientific American by clicking here.
De-mystifying the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “Trash Vortex”
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 8, 2009 at 6:42 am
From Axis of Logic, a Q&A article on the Pacific Ocean garbage patch:
Q. Where is the “garbage patch”?
The concentrations of marine debris (”garbage patches”) that have been covered in the media are within the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone (STCZ) (see map, Convergence Zone) – sometimes referred to as the “trash superhighway” that connects the “eastern and western garbage patches”. It is our belief that these “patches” lie within the STCZ.
The North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone (STCZ) is a known area of marine debris accumulation in the North Pacific Ocean. This area does not have distinct boundaries and varies in strength and location throughout the year. This amorphous area moves seasonally between 23° and 37° N latitude. The STCZ shifts farther southward during periods of El Niño.
Read more from the Axis of Logic by clicking here.
Dan Haifley, Ocean Backyard: Can the Pacific’s plastic wasteland be fixed?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 31, 2009 at 7:12 amFrom columnist Dan Haifley and the Silicon Valley Mercury News:
Project Kaisei is the name bestowed on a fledgling effort — which has its skeptics — to capture plastic waste caught in giant swirling gyres in the north Pacific and turn it into diesel fuel. It is derived from “Kaisei” — an ancient Japanese term for ocean planet.
To be successful the project would have to sweep an area twice the size of Texas, which is alternately called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the plastic vortex, or the plastic continent. It would be a massive undertaking in a harsh environment.
Over 100 million tons of waste reside there — it’s where much of the junk floating down our streams and rivers winds up. Once on the high seas, plastic becomes degraded by the sun and saltwater, breaking it into tiny particles which mostly become embedded below the ocean’s surface.
This June the 151-foot Japanese sailing vessel “Kaisei,” operated by a California-based conservation group called the Ocean Voyages Institute, will unfurl its sails in San Francisco and head seaward to assess how to implement the project. The flagship will be joined by a decommissioned fishing trawler with specialized nets. If they are successful, the next step will be to capture and process the waste.
Read more of Dan’s column from the Silicon Valley Mercury News by clicking here.
Ocean, interrupted: How single-use plastics are littering the ocean and disrupting the food web
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 29, 2009 at 8:02 am
From the Chico News & Review:
Imagine a clogged toilet of colorful plastic confetti. As the water turns, the scraps wash against the porcelain rim and back again. The mechanical churning erodes the plastics, forming a swirling mass of debris.
Now imagine fishing here for dinner.
That’s the North Pacific gyre: 10 million square miles of open ocean currents, circulating in a continental bowl formed by North America and Asia—littered like the morning after bar mitzvah.
Popular myth describes the gyre as a vortex of garbage twice the size of Texas—an island of waste suspended off the shipping lanes between California and Hawaii. But the Pacific “garbage patch” is more ocean than anything. What exists is a stewing flotsam of convenience, fully enmeshed with the marine ecosystem, drifting to and fro among nations. “This is what you get when you skim the ocean surface,” said Marcus Eriksen, while holding up a syrup bottle of murky brown water to a group of Chico State students last week. “Two-thirds of the Earth’s ocean is now a plastic soup.”
Swirling the bottle, pale speckles of plastic no larger than a pearl clustered at the bottleneck. Eriksen said the worn and polished beads could have been anything, from water bottles to straws to picnic utensils from the Fourth of July of 1997. In a steady march toward the sea, the runoff of single-use plastics parade through watersheds to the Bay Delta, and then out to sea to float off to the great “away.”
Read more from the Chico News & Review by clicking here.
Voyage to the centre of the ‘Plastic Vortex’
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 25, 2009 at 8:07 amFrom AFP:
A group of conservationists and scientists is due to set sail for an obscure corner of the Pacific Ocean in the coming months to explore a vast swirl of waste known as the “Plastic Vortex.” The giant gloop — which some scientists estimate is twice the size of Texas — has been gradually building over the last 60 years as Asia and the United States tossed their unwanted goods into the ocean.
Everything from flip-flops to plastic bags have been slowly broken down by the sun’s rays into small particles, and ocean tides have meant much of it has settled in a spiralling pattern just below the ocean surface between Hawaii and the mainland United States.
After only coming to scientific attention in recent years, little remains known about the vortex, also known as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” so the expedition hopes to find out if the plastic can be fished out of the sea — and what can be done with it.
Jim Dufour, a senior engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, who is advising the trip, said establishing the extent of the problem was vital for the future health of the oceans.
“Importance is an understatement, it’s imperative. It will take many years to understand and fix the problem,” he told AFP.
Read more from AFP by clicking here.
The plastics “out there” [in the ocean] and “in here” [inside our homes and our bodies]
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 13, 2009 at 7:51 amFrom Wallace J. Nichols of the Huffington Post:
There’s a patch of ocean out there about as far as you can get from people on this small blue marble we call Earth, and it is slowly filling with tiny flecks of plastic.
First, they said it was a “large area” the size of Texas. Then it was two Texases. Then, a continent. They said the plastic fragments outnumbered plankton, then later that there was six times, and then seven, and now thirty times as much plastic as plankton. They call it the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Trash Island, The North Pacific Gyre, or the Pacific Trash Vortex. It’s described as an oceanic trash dump, a giant bowl of plastic soup, a place where sea turtles and albatrosses fill their stomachs with lighters and bottle caps.
I know of a half-dozen expeditions now mounting or planned to visit this heart of the plastic problem… “out there.” But, here’s what else I know: they don’t need to go “out there” to see the problem, because the problem is “in here,” too.
And over there, where you are.
It’s in the Sargasso Sea and the Mediterranean. It’s in our lakes and rivers. It’s on remote sea turtle beaches in the South Pacific. It’s in your kitchen. And, it’s in your blood.
Read more of Wallace’s commentary by clicking here.
The Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, twice the size of France: There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world’s oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up, so how do we turn the tide?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 29, 2009 at 8:15 am
From of Telegraph:
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.
It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.
For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.
‘It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,’ says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. ‘Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.’
Read more from the Telegraph by clicking here.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: The world’s biggest landfill
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 23, 2009 at 5:59 amFrom the Oprah Winfrey show:
Water covers more than 70 percent of the planet’s surface, making our rivers, lakes and oceans the lifeblood of our planet. Many of these bodies of water may be out of sight and out of mind, but our health may depend on their protection.
Currently, scientists believe the world’s largest garbage dump isn’t on land…it’s in the Pacific Ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches from the coast of California to Japan, and it’s estimated to be twice the size of Texas. “This is the most shocking thing I have seen,” Oprah says. In some places, the floating debris—estimated to be about 90 percent plastic—goes 90 feet deep. Elsewhere, there are six times more pieces of plastic than plankton, the main food source for many sea animals.
Where did this trash come from? Marine biologists estimate that about 80 percent of the litter is from land, either dumped directly into waterways or blown into rivers and streams from states as far away as Iowa.
Read more from the Oprah Winfrey show website by clicking here.
Trash choking the world’s seas, and waters off Santa Cruz no exception
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 12, 2009 at 6:04 amFrom the San Jose Mercury News:
Trash remains one of the biggest threats to the world’s oceans, hampering marine life, the tourism and fishing industries and efforts to combat global warming, according to a report released Tuesday by the Ocean Conservancy.
The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit documented nearly 7 million pounds of debris collected worldwide on a single pickup day last year, an outlay of trash no part of the planet escaped and which is traced primarily to carelessness and indifference, even here in Santa Cruz. “We’re throwing this stuff out the windows and onto beaches,” said Sarah Corbin, the Central California regional manager of the Surfrider Foundation, which helps promote clean shores. “Trash doesn’t just disappear when it leaves your hand. It’s an easy concept to understand but one we need to continue to get out.”
Topping the list of debris found worldwide were cigarette butts, plastic bags and food packaging, which the report notes all come from “human hands” and can be easily disposed of properly.
Santa Cruz County and its dozens of popular beaches are a case in point. More than half of the trash collected locally was ascribed to food products, like wrappers and lids, while cigarette butts made up most of the remainder. “It’s the eating and drinking along the shores there that’s doing a lot of the damage,” Dianne Sherman, director of the International Coastal Cleanup for the Ocean Conservancy, said after looking at data from the September cleanup day.
Read more from the San Jose Mercury News by clicking here.
Bills target ocean waste: Lawmakers again seek to ban foam food containers, unattached bottle caps
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 11, 2009 at 7:06 amFrom the North County Times:
Four bills that aim to slash the amount of plastic waste headed for the Pacific Ocean would phase out foam food containers, force manufacturers to attach caps to beverage bottles and charge a fee for throwaway bags used to bag groceries.
It’s all part of what has become a perennial campaign by state lawmakers and environmental activists to target the plastic that accounts for an estimated two-thirds of all trash in the ocean and 90 percent of its floating debris —- and poses a serious threat to marine life.
Typically, a trickle of the introduced legislation becomes law. And the unsuccessful bills either get discarded or recycled into new bills.
Two of this year’s bills —- the ones that address plastic bags and foam containers —- are repackaged legislation from the last couple of years.
At the same time, Assemblywoman Lori Saldana, D-San Diego, is trying to build on the 1970s success story of replacing the dangerous, sharp-edged, aluminum-can pull tab with one that remains attached to the beverage can. She said it is time to attach the plastic bottle to its lid.
“It may not be a hazard to people, but it definitely has a serious impact on marine life —- birds and mammals,” Saldana said of the caps, in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Read more from the North County Times by clicking here.
Boat made of plastic bottles to make ocean voyage
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 10, 2009 at 4:57 am
From CNN:
Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles through treacherous seas.
This 60-foot sailboat, the Plastiki, is being built from more than 12,000 recycled plastic bottles. You’d have to be crazy, or trying to make a point. David de Rothschild is trying to make a point.
De Rothschild hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, now being built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic.
“It’s all sail power,” he said. “The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish.”
An earlier story in the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned that they were using dry ice. This article explains the construction technique a little more:
The plastic sailboat is taking shape in an old pier building not far from this city’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf. Here, thousands of two-liter soda bottles are being stripped of their labels, washed, filled with dry-ice powder and then resealed. The dry ice sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and pressurizes the bottle, making it rigid.
Read more from CNN by clicking here.
World’s oceans face problem of plastic pollution; Some researchers believe that more than 5 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean has become a soup of plastic confetti
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 14, 2008 at 1:48 pmFrom PBS’s Online News Hour:
JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, the problems created by trash floating in the Pacific Ocean. Spencer Michels has our Science Unit report.
SPENCER MICHELS, NewsHour correspondent: Sixty-one-year-old Charles Moore, former owner of a furniture repair business in Long Beach, California, and an amateur scientist, surprised the scientific world with a discovery he made in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
While sailing his research vessel back from Hawaii in 1997, he ran into what he calls a vast “garbage patch” in a calm part of the sea.
CHARLES MOORE, Ocean Researcher: Every single day for that week that we crossed these doldrums, we saw trash every time we came on deck. I think it’s fair to say that the phenomena exists from just off the coast of China all the way to a few hundred miles from the coast of California. It’s at least one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, approximately 5 million square miles.
SPENCER MICHELS: Using what’s called a manta trawl to skim the water, Moore and his crew found tons of trash in an area called the North Pacific Gyre, that is largely off the main shipping and sailing routes. Among the junk: umbrella handles, cigarette lighters, ropes, thousands of toothbrushes.
These are from Hawaii, huh?
CHARLES MOORE: Yes, they’re from Asia, probably. Like here’s a brand I don’t recognize.
Read more, or watch the video of the broadcast from the Online News Hour by clicking here.
Turning discarded plastic into art: exhibition hopes to focus attention on plastic consumption
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 8, 2008 at 5:59 amFrom the San Diego Union Tribune:
It takes patience and precision to make a rug by hand, especially when the material involves more than 3,400 plastic shopping bags.
On a recent morning, Peggy Ann Jones, an artist and photography instructor at MiraCosta College, put the finishing touches on her creation, a round, 13-foot white plastic carpet speckled with red, blue, yellow and black. With a hot-glue gun in hand, Jones squatted on the floor, fusing several feet of braided plastic bags to form the outer ring.
“You have to let it cool and watch it to make sure it doesn’t separate,” Jones said.
The carpet is the focus of “Vortex Plastique,” an art show with an environmental message that will open Tuesday at MiraCosta College’s Kruglak Gallery. The title is a reference to the swirling mass of plastic debris in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Jones wants visitors to touch and walk on the carpet. “Plastic is seductive,” Jones said. “I hope to get them thinking about how ubiquitous it is, how much we consume.”
Read more from the San Diego Union Tribune by clicking here.
Synthetic sea: We are turning our oceans into a chemical soup – the result being misery and death for billions of organisms, and serious health implications for ourselves
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 30, 2008 at 8:16 amFrom the Permaculture Research Institute:
When we throw things away, we must ask ourselves “where is away?” The clip below [take the link to view it], one of the most frightening I have ever seen, will give you an idea of where at least one of these ‘away’ locations is. Much of our oil-based plastic products end up in our oceans, where they slowly break down into smaller and smaller pieces. Although this may sound like a good thing, in reality all it means is that they are more readily taken up by fish, dolphins, whales, turtles, birds and a myriad other organisms. The plastic molecules never actually disappear. Plastic diminishes in size until in appearance it almost perfectly imitates plankton – resulting in a situation where creatures actually compete with each other to eat it. And, worse, in some parts of the ocean the ratio of plastic to plankton is 6:1, and rising.
Read more of this comprehensive article from the Permaculature Research Institute of the USA by clicking here.
Plastic ocean: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 25, 2008 at 6:10 amFrom BlueFlipper Diving (a scuba diving website):
A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse…
Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.
Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.
The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.
It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.
A comprehensive article that gives a lot of background information on plastic. Read more from Blueflipper Diving by clicking here.
Plastic marine debris destined to worsen, says report
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 21, 2008 at 8:12 amFrom the Los Angeles Times:
It’s long been evident to beachcombers after rainstorms, but now it’s official: Marine debris is getting worse.
A panel of scientists took a hard look at the issue and came to the conclusion that the tonnage of plastic and other debris swirling in the sea is likely to increase throughout this century. Its key recommendation: The United States needs to take a leadership role in cleaning up its own act and coaxing other nations to follow.
“Despite all the regulations and limitations over the last 20 years, there are still large quantities of waste and litter in the oceans,” said Keith R. Criddle, a marine policy professor at University of Alaska in Juneau. He was the chairman of a National Research Council committee asked by Congress to assess how well national and international laws are doing to halt the profusion of trash in the oceans. The answer: not very well.
The committee’s 224-page report breaks down the issue and focuses mostly on how to reduce the trash that is dumped intentionally or inadvertently into the ocean from ships and boats. Although this accounts for roughly one-fifth of plastic debris in the ocean, it’s the easiest problem to solve. The rest of the oceanic trash comes from land, blown by the wind or washed off city streets into streams and rivers, then to the sea. The way to halt this steady flow of garbage involves either weaning society’s addiction to the convenience of products made of plastic — which can take decades or centuries to decompose — or changing human behavior on a massive scale.
Read more from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.
Plastic islands in the sea
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 20, 2008 at 6:48 amFrom the American Chronicle:
While sitting in my dentist´s office last week, I happened to pick up a copy of the October 2007 edition of National Geographic Adventure, ´The Green Edition´. While casually leafing through it I came across an interesting half page article (page 68) concerning plastic islands in the middle of our oceans – floating garbage patches thousands of miles from land covering vast areas.
The subject of the short article was an individual named Charles Moore, a transpacific sailor of note. Moore was and is the Captain of the Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita. It seems that Captain Moore was returning from a transpacific race in 1997 to his homeport of Long Beach, California when he noticed an unusual phenomenon – these islands of plastic – in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an area commonly referred to as ´the doldrums´.
I had previously come across some information on this unnatural occurrence while doing research for other plastic pollution articles. However, I passed it by as not very reliable. This recent browsing happenstance piqued my imagination in that it was prominently featured in a magazine of impeccable credentials. There had to be something there – something I could sink my teeth into. Not many of us are ocean going sailors who might see this abomination up close as did Captain Moore. But apparently these islands exist – huge mid ocean garbage dumps created by plastic and other waste discarded at sea or washed into it from land, driven by wind and currents to mid ocean where they join up to form this mass of pollution.
Read more from the American Chronicle by clicking here.
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