Plastic & the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
‘I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.’
Charles J. Moore
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is the largest of the five offshore plastic accumulation zones in the world’s oceans. It is located halfway between Hawaii and California.
Our planet has five major ocean gyres:
The Indian Ocean Gyre which contains the Indian Ocean Garbage Patch
North Atlantic Gyre, which contains the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, equal to the North Pacific Garbage Patch
North Pacific Gyre, for more facts about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch..
South Atlantic Gyre
South Pacific Gyre
History
The first reference ever made of this Patch, was in a 1988 report published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The description was based on research made by few Alaska-based researchers in 1988 who measured neustonic plastic in the North Pacific Ocean. To their surprise, what they found was high concentrations of marine debris accumulating in regions governed by ocean currents.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered by marine researcher Charles Moore in 1997 and was named by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. Charles J. Moore, while returning home through the North Pacific Gyre after competing in the Transpacific Yacht Race in 1997, claimed to have come upon an enormous stretch of floating debris.
What is a gyre?
An ocean gyre is a large system of circular ocean currents formed by global wind patterns and forces created by Earth’s rotation. There are three forces that are causing the circulation of a gyre: global wind patterns, Earth’s rotation, and Earth’s landmasses. Wind drags on the ocean surface, causing water to move in the direction the wind is blowing.
A mentioned above, there are five major gyres: the North and South Pacific Subtropical Gyres, the North and South Atlantic Subtropical Gyres, and the Indian Ocean Subtropical Gyre.
Garbage Patches
Through natural wind patterns, ocean gyres circle large areas of stationary, calm water. This way debris drifts into these areas and, due to the region’s lack of movement, they are able to accumulate there for years. These regions are called garbage patches. The Indian Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, and North Pacific Ocean all have significant garbage patches. The garbage patch in the North Pacific Ocean is sometimes also called the Pacific trash vortex or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
These garbage patches are created slowly, through many years. Marine debris makes its way into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for instance, from currents flowing along the west coast of North America and the east coast of Asia. But also many of the debris is dumped there from ocean vessels.
The circular motion of the gyre draws in the debris, mostly small particles of plastic. Eventually, the debris makes its way to the center of the gyre, where it becomes trapped and breaks down into a kind of plastic soup.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world and is located between Hawaii and California. Scientists of The Ocean Cleanup Foundation have conducted the most extensive analysis ever of this area.
Composition
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest and the most well-known one of the world’s five ocean gyres, or systems of circulating ocean currents. The GPGP is in the North Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, 1,200 nautical miles offshore,
The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is created by the interaction of the California, North Equatorial, Kuroshiro, and North Pacific currents. These four currents move in a clockwise direction around an area of 20 million square kilometers.
About 80% of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia. Trash from the coast of North America takes about six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, while trash from Japan and other Asian countries takes about a year.
The remaining 20% of debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from boaters, offshore oil rigs, and large cargo ships that dump or lose debris directly into the water. The majority of this debris—about 79,000 tons—is fishing nets.
Many people can think of a “garbage patch” as a huge island of trash floating on the ocean. But in reality, these patches are almost entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. Most of time is impossible to see microplastics with the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply make the water look like a cloudy soup. This soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes.
The seafloor beneath the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may also be an underwater trash heap. Oceanographers and ecologists recently discovered that about 70% of marine debris actually sinks to the bottom of the ocean
Size
The GPGP covers an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.
It's not an island twice the size of Texas. But it is severely impacting marine life and human health... and incredibly hard to study.
How much plastic?
More than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic are in the patch, that weigh an estimated 80,000 tonnes. These figures are much higher than previous calculations.
The mass of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is estimated to be approximately 80,000 tonnes , which is 4-16 times more than previous calculations. This weight is also equivalent to that of 500 Jumbo Jets.
The center of the GPGP has the highest density and the further boundaries are the least dense. A total of 1.8 trillion plastic pieces are estimated to be floating in the patch - a plastic count that is equivalent to 250 pieces of debris for every human in the world. While 1.8 trillion is a mid-range value for the total count, their calculations estimated that it may be range from 1.1 to up to 3.6 trillion pieces.
The vast majority of plastics retrieved were made of rigid or hard polyethylene (PE) or polypropylene (PP), or derelict fishing gear (nets and ropes particularly). Ranging in size from small fragments to larger objects and meter-sized fishing nets.
That means the overwhelming bulk of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is large pieces of trash. Most are hard plastics — think plastic food containers, bottles, lids, buckets, ropes and lots of fishing nets. Fishing nets made up nearly half the plastic discovered.
Eight million tons of plastic winds up into the world’s oceans every year, much of that accumulating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That 80,000 tons of fishing net, bottles, and other trash has more pieces of plastic than there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And it’s only getting bigger.
Animals
According to reports, at least 800 species worldwide are affected by marine debris, and as much as 80 percent of that litter is plastic. It is estimated that up to 13 million metric tons of plastic ends up in the ocean each year—the equivalent of a rubbish or garbage truck load’s worth every minute. Fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals can become entangled in or ingest plastic debris, causing suffocation, starvation, and drowning. Humans are not immune to this threat: While plastics are estimated to take up to hundreds of years to fully decompose, some of them break down much quicker into tiny particles, which in turn end up in the seafood we eat.
Plastic has acutely affected albatrosses, which roam a wide swath of the northern Pacific Ocean. Albatrosses frequently grab food wherever they can find it, which leads to many of the birds ingesting plastic and other trash, which eventually kills them. On Midway Island, which comes into contact with parts of the Eastern Garbage Patch, albatrosses give birth to 500,000 chicks every year. Two hundred thousand of them die, many of them by consuming plastic fed to them by their parents, who confuse it for food. In total, more than a million birds and marine animals die each year from consuming or becoming caught in plastic and other debris.
Solutions
Because the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so far from any country’s coastline, no nation will take responsibility or provide the funding to clean it up. Charles Moore, the man who discovered the vortex, says cleaning up the garbage patch would “bankrupt any country” that tried it.
Many individuals and international organizations, however, are dedicated to preventing the patch from growing.
The Ocean Clean Up
A $20 million project called, the ocean clean up, has started its journey to collect the 1.8 trillion pieces of trash floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The ocean is big. Cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch using conventional methods - vessels and nets - would take thousands of years and tens of billions of dollars to complete. Our passive systems are estimated to remove half the Great Pacific Garbage patch in just five years.
The Dutch non-profit began to tow its System 001 equipment, which is nicknamed Wilson, to a port in Hawaii for repair on 2 January 2019, after finding a portion of the apparatus "drifting away".
The Ocean Cleanup is designing and developing the first feasible method to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. Every year, millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean. A significant percentage of this plastic drifts into large systems of circulating ocean currents, also known as gyres. Once trapped in a gyre, the plastic will break down into microplastics and become increasingly easier to mistake for food by sea life.
System 001 consists of a 600-meter (almost 2,000-foot) long floater, with a 3-meter (10-foot) deep skirt attached below. The floater is designed to prevent plastics from flowing over the system, while the skirt stops smaller particles from escaping underneath. The setup takes advantage of natural oceanic forces to catch and concentrate the plastic
By deploying a fleet of systems, The Ocean Cleanup has estimated to be able to remove 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just 5 years’ time. The concentrated plastic will be brought back to shore for recycling and sold to B2C companies.
While the organization has ambitious plans and the technology still remains unproven in the open ocean, they are the closest to a solution to cleaning up the garbage patch we have. No other company has a deployable system able to clean up the garbage patch on this scale.
1.8 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 80,000 metric tons are currently afloat in an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - and it is rapidly getting worse. These are the main conclusions of a three year mapping effort conducted by The Ocean Cleanup Research team.
On May 11th 2017, Boyan Slat, Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, the Dutch foundation developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic, announced a design breakthrough allowing for the cleanup of half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just 5 years.
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