The garbage patch or Pacific Gyre is a spot in the Pacific Ocean, almost directly between Asia and North America where a trash dump has grown to be bigger than Texas. This is not an intentional dump, like a landfill; it has been growing over time because of the way the current moves in a circular pattern in the ocean. All the trash, mostly plastic, is basically trapped in a vortex. Since studies done in the 1990’s the quantity of the plastic has tripled from about 320,000 to 1 million particles per square kilometer.
Imagine being an animal living in or around the water around this area...It would be like living in the city dump buried underneath everybody's trash. Except this isn't just the trash from one city, it is coming from the whole world. The animals in this region are literally eating plastic for meals; it is not just a little bit of plastic that is contaminating their food; it is more like they can find a little bit of food that is contaminating their plastic! These poor animals are dying because they are stuffing themselves full of plastic, leaving no room for food or even water. Scientists Michelle Hester and Hannah Nevins have been doing research on seabirds, and have found such things as fishing line, industrial plastic pellets, and even pacifiers in the stomachs of birds. This doesn’t only affect the birds; the plastic has even been found in phytoplankton and zooplankton. These are the smallest known organisms in the ocean. The bottom of the food chain one might say, meaning that every other animal that preys on the plankton is also eating plastic.
There are so many different aspects of this huge trash pit to think about; how could we, as a society, let our habits become so life threatening? How do we justify this to future generations? Who is to blame, if anyone? How much more of this can the Earth endure? What can we do to help!?
In 1862 Alexander Parkes unveiled the first type of man made plastic at a London exhibition. This was the first time anyone had seen anything of the type, and Parkes claimed that his invention could do anything that rubber could do. Parkes invention spewed a whole line of new inventions that stemmed around plastic. So, plastic was the new thing. And soon enough it became the only thing. Anything you can think of can be packaged in plastic like water, hygiene products and food. Many products are made entirely out of plastic like notebooks, storage items, household appliances, fashion accessories and bags. All of these items have to go somewhere. Plastic is not biodegradable, so where does it go? If plastic is recycled properly, it will be broken down and reused to make other plastics, but if not it ends up in landfills, making them toxic, and now a greater and greater number of them are floating over to the Pacific Gyre.
It may seem like an impossible task to even attempt to clean up this trash pit when more and more plastic products are being created on a daily basis. There has yet to be an attempt to clean up this mess, but I think with enough people and determination this problem can be fixed. I think the bigger problem is that this Great Garbage Patch is not something that is widely known. Once the word is spread, the work can start, the more people the better to clean this up. The one thing I can think of that would be most effective would be to implement a system like the ones used in the fish farming business. Huge nets could be thrown into the water to gather the garbage.
With greater efforts being made to make our cities sustainable, and our societies more environmentally conscious, I believe cleaning up the Pacific Gyre will be a step in the right direction. It will be a huge project, but imagine how many more animals will live!
