The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

[Joanne98]

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden
Tuesday, 5 February 2008


A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.


The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html

[kestrel91316]

1. Time to remove disposable plastics from our lives, folks.

Yes, I'm serious.

And when we're done, we need to go after the non-disposables, too.

If your kids need toys, go to Lehman's and buy handmade (by the Amish) wooden toys. Or some such. Maybe sew baby some handmade felt toys.

[DCKit]

2. Lehman's is drastically over-priced.

Unfortunately, you can't find much of the stuff they sell anywhere else.

A plasma furnace could burn all that floating plastic cleanly and provide some entrepreneur with a tidy income. Just saying.

[kestrel91316]

4. Yeah, but who's gonna go out to the pacific gyre and grab it all up and ship

it here for burning??? I don't think there are enough ships on the planet to make a dent in it.

[DCKit]

6. You do realize that plastics are made from oil, right?

They wouldn't even have to pay for drilling, pumping and pipelines. Just imagine huge cargo ships full of oil in solid form. Dry it, pack it, shred it, burn it (at over 1600F to destroy all the nasty chemical compounds).

It there's really so much of it, it'd be like discovering a real El Dorado.

[kestrel91316]

7. ".......It there's really so much of it........"

You've outed yourself by questioning the very existence of something that is scientific fact.
--------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre
The centre of the North Pacific Gyre is relatively stationary region of the Pacific Ocean (the area it occupies is often referred to as the horse latitudes) and the circular rotation around it draws waste material in. This has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris in huge floating 'clouds' of waste which have taken on informal names, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces, still polymers, eventually become individual molecules, which are still not easily digested.<1> Some plastics photodegrade into other pollutants. The floating particles also resemble zooplankton, which can lead to them being consumed by jellyfish, thus entering the ocean food chain. In samples taken from the gyre in 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded that of zooplankton (the dominant animalian life in the area) by a factor of six. Many of these long-lasting pieces end up in the stomachs of marine birds and animals.<2>

For several years ocean researcher Charles Moore has been investigating a concentration of floating plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre. He has reported concentrations of plastics on the order of 3,340,000 pieces/km² with a mean mass of 5.1kg/km² collected using a manta trawl with a rectangular opening of 0.9x0.15m² at the surface. Trawls at depths of 10m found less than half, consisting primarily of monofilament line fouled with diatoms and other plankton.<3>

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Look at the mess we clean up every year in Los Angeles!

http://www.healthebay.org/assets/pdfdocs/ccd/2007/CCD2007_ResultsBook.pdf

At least we are trying to solve the problem and not burying our heads in the sand and denying the magnitude of the problem. And no, it's NOT LEGAL to simply burn the crap. Maybe YOU can invent a clean, safe, efficient process to do so. I personally would prefer we not make the mess in the first place. No wonder you think Lehman's is "too expensive". You don't understand the TRUE cost of our polluting ways.

[Botany]

3. Remember all that crazy stuff in the 1970s?

Biodegradable materials ... and that all these plastics come from underneath
the sands of the mid-east (oil).

Time to start cleaning our mess up.

[bemildred]

5. This was in one of Neal Stevensons books.

The Diamond Age, I think it was. Might have been Snow Crash.