Plastic Soup?

Resulting from large-scale wind patterns and forces produced due to the Earth’s rotation, specifically the Coriolis effect, ocean gyres are large systems of circulating ocean currents. There are five major gyres globally—the Indian Ocean Gyre, the North Atlantic Gyre, the South Atlantic Gyre, the North Pacific Gyre, and the South Pacific Gyre. The thermohaline circulation is driven by the movement of these gyres and is important in distributing and maintaining the temperature and salinity of the oceans.

You may wonder, why am I going on about ocean gyres, especially after weeks of droning on about marine plastic pollution? Well, the reality is that plastic pollution in the oceans is so widespread that the large areas of calm water bounded by ocean gyres are now widely known as ocean garbage patches. Oftentimes, when we hear about ocean garbage patches, we think about plastic bottles and other larger forms of plastics. However, these ocean garbage patches are instead mainly populated by microplastics, whether it is microplastics already found in products like cosmetics, or microplastics that were broken down from plastics of larger sizes.

Majority of these plastic waste is originally from waste on land and have found their way into the oceans and eventually are trapped in the garbage patches because of the winds and ocean currents. Since the garbage patches are characterized by stationary water, these plastic debris has and will continue to accumulate over the years, breaking down into smaller fragments. As Parker from the NOAA Marine Debris Program describes it, the ocean garbage patches are “almost akin to a peppery soup, with scattered larger items, fishing gear, those kind of items swirling around” (NOAA, n.d., p. 8).

Precisely because these ocean garbage patches are populated by microplastics, there is still no way of determining just how much plastic waste is in the center of these gyres. It is also not easy to clean up these garbage patches, requiring a lot of time, effort, and money. As these gyres are found in the middle of the ocean, far away from any country’s coasts, few are willing to clean up the mess, especially since it is difficult to trace and hold the individual countries accountable given that these plastic waste are nonpoint source pollution.