Hey everyone! In this post I’ll be continuing the Pacific Garbage Patch mini-series and today, let us discuss about the main type of trash found in it. While there are many kinds of garbage that gets washed into the ocean, a large majority of it is actually plastic! A 2001 study has found that there is about 334,00 pieces of plaster per square kilometre in the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch (Moore, 2001). And this due to 2 major reasons:

  1. Plastic is not biodegradable and would break down into smaller and finer pieces
  2. Plastic is being used ever increasingly due to its low cost and durability.

It was only until the late 19th century when plastic was invented and even then, plastic production only started to have a marked increase from 1950 onwards. It is estimated that 9.2 billion tons of plastic have been produced thus far, of which, approximately 6.9 billion tons becomes waste (Worm et al., 2017). A study by Jenna Jambeck from the University of Georgia found that an estimated 5.3 to 14 million tons of plastic enters the ocean from coastal countries (Jambeck et al., 2015). To get an idea of how much plastic that is, imagine 5 plastic bags full of plastic at 30-centimetre intervals lining the coastline of every coastal country in the world. That is an insane amount of plastic that is being washed out into the ocean!

An important thing to note is that most of the plastic in the Patch are actually microplastics. While they may initially be much larger, over time with exposure to the sun, the plastic trash eventually fragments into increasingly smaller pieces. This process is known as photodegradation and it takes years, even decades. The microplastics we are seeing have indications that they entered the ocean a long time ago(Cózar et al., 2017). This in turn reveals a rather sad truth to us:

The plastics of our pasts are still here to haunt us.

Plastic is a problem for us and our future generations.

 

Reference:

Cózar, A., Martí, E., Duarte, C., García-de-Lomas, J., van Sebille, E., Ballatore, T., Eguíluz, V., González-Gordillo, J., Pedrotti, M., Echevarría, F., Troublè, R. and Irigoien, X., 2017. The Arctic Ocean as a dead end for floating plastics in the North Atlantic branch of the Thermohaline Circulation. Science Advances, 3(4), p.e1600582.

Jambeck, J., Geyer, R., Wilcox, C., Siegler, T., Perryman, M., Andrady, A., Narayan, R. and Law, K., 2015. Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean. Science, 347(6223), pp.768-771.

Moore, C., Moore, S., Leecaster, M. and Weisberg, S., 2001. A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 42(12), pp.1297-1300.

Worm, B., Lotze, H., Jubinville, I., Wilcox, C. and Jambeck, J., 2017. Plastic as a Persistent Marine Pollutant. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 42(1), pp.1-26.