June 03, 2005

Sea of Plastic. "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. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments."

40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet’s surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris. More here and here. (via Barista)

posted by John Hardy 18 years ago
  • Has there been any effort made cleaning up the first link's litter. I thought by now some action would be attempted.
  • This is depressing.
  • Clean up? Are you kidding? The nations of the world can't even start moderating their fishing activities despite clear evidence the ocean is being turned into watery desert - and that's about food! Don't expect them to pick up the litter.
  • How can it possibly be cleaned up? Who would take it on? The oceans have traditionally been viewed as the world's dumping grounds. We fret about terrestrial landfills, but at least the trash is contained. But we just count on the good old oceans to rehabilitate themselves. Not so. Depressing, for sure. And thought provoking. Not sure what I can do to effect a solution.
  • .
  • We sick fucks.
  • depressionfilter
  • It would be interesting to see how life on this planet adapts to things like this. I am guessing that something will adapt to take advantage of this surplus of energy (i.e. plastic garbage). Perhaps a plastic eating bacteria, or a higher vertebrate that could use this detrius for it's nest or something... Interesting to ponder.
  • Depressionfilter is right!! I was on a boat in the Bering Sea for about three months, it was 120'. One night I was looking over the stern and saw one of the crew dumping large, black, plastic bags full of (as I later found out) paint cans, oil cans, galley debri, engine room debri, etc. I was shocked, and obviously naive. I reported them once I was back on shore, but, of course, nothing was done.
  • Bacteria may save our asses after all keep your fingers crossed that something happens with this The little "bugs" are smarter than the big sapiens. Squid: why should some other higher vertebrate except US want to sleep in plastic?
  • Plastics are a menace, but first I'd tackle the great number of major metropolitan cities dumping untreated sewage into the ocean. Check around. I bet many of you would be surprised to find out that your city is doing the same.
  • "Multiplied by the circular area defined by our roughly thousand-mile course through the gyre, the weight of the debris was about 3 million tons" Okay, so the bacteria eat it; so then what do you do with the 3 million tons of plastic-eating bacteria?
  • NPR a couple of days ago had an interesting story about searching for abandoned drift nets and finding them in these areas of the ocean. No transcript, but you can listen.
  • Why do you hate plastics so? Oh. Right - the ah, the pollution thing.
  • For an interesting view on pollution, the role of industry on its creation and disposal plus a view on the possible dangers of human-created, pollutant-eatings 'bugs', Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, while fiction, is still based on the realities of modern society's waste problems.
  • Darshon: Not to necessarily defend what I know very little about (meaning that boat's garbage practices in particular) I thought I'd throw this out there. I lived on a 135' sailing vessel for two months and from an outsider's perspective our garbage dumping habits would be cause for alarm. However, we separated our garbage into discarded foodstuffs, metals, woods, and anything that wasn't plastic or contained no plastic parts, and then a separate bin for plastics and partial plastics. The first bin was dumped overboard every night, off-shore distances allowing, and the second bin would be stowed away to be discarded at our next port stop. We were an oceanographic research vessel so no harm was intended towards the sea. All the metal cans and such would eventually rust down and disintegrate, supposedly doing more good than harm due to the massive iron deficiency in the world's oceans. I have to admit though, every time it was my job on watch to dump the garbage overboard I cringed. And I have no idea if that vessel you saw had the same good intentions. Back on topic, the state of our oceans is definitely a sad sight. Where I live, I know it has a lot to do with awareness, ignorance, and indifference. I see natives and tourist fishermen alike haphazardly tossing things into the ocean, dumping paint and oil and other not-so-nice materials off the docks, using the ocean as one big, convenient trash can, assuming it'll all just go away. The ocean is so big, what's the harm, right? Not so much. I see the harm every day - dolphins with fish-hook sized chunks out of their sides, coral suffocating underneath plastic bags, huge algal growths choking the reefs because the organisms that normally keep the algae in check aren't surviving. I try to do my part when I dive by coming back with pocketsfull of plastic cups and bags, but its such a huge endeavor I don't know if I'm even making a dent. Doesn't stop me from trying though. (and holy crap that's the longest comment I've ever posted...)
  • I remember reading Thor Heyerdahl's The Ra Expedition and he wrote a lot about the incredible increase in floating plastic trash between Kon Tiki (1947)and Ra (1969). The growth of trash had been exponential in those 20 years, and now, almost 40 years later, I bet it's increased many times as much. It's horrifying - the writing has been on the wall for SO long now, but people just will not read it. I don't know what it will take to get people to stop consuming & tossing, consuming & tossing.
  • BARBIE DOLL BUTTS! washing ashore, that is.
  • Bluehorse, hell I don't know, but evolution teaches us that if there is a nitch (i.e. lots and lots of plastic, which could be utilized somehow) that nitch will eventually be filled by some sort of creature. Perhaps it will metabolize plastic and use it as protection, or have a spinnerette like a spider that uses plastic to spin webs/nets. We've fucked with this planet so much that I think there will have to be ecosystems that take advantage of polution. Life is just too diverse and mutates too quickly to not take advantage of what we think of as waste. Look at the plastic and metal eating bacteria mentioned above, or the worms, eels and crabs living off the toxic volcanic fonts on deep sea beds.
  • the problem with other species being able to use the plasic is that the environment is changing so fast that new plastic-philic organisms might not be able to evolve quickly enough. The new species has to evolve from something that already exists, if we kill everything off, nothing new can come from that. One massive change was the oxygenation of the oceans by stromatolites. Oxygen was very poisonous to the creatures that inhabited the early oceans and stromatolites were creating oxygen as a waste product from their biological processes. However, the rate at which they produced their waste was so slow that creatures that could survive in oxygen were able to evolve and grow their populations to sustainable levels before the switch over took place.
  • here are some links to back up my post: 1 more nerdy, but informative
  • I really don't understand the mania for packaging in the industrialized world. Must everything be bubble wrapped and encased in plastic? I usually try to avoid buying things that are elaborately packaged. What is the thinking behind that? I can remember going to the hardware store with Dad, and you could pick widgets or screws out of bins, put them in a sack and take them to the checkout. Now, everything has its own little package and is hanging neatly on racks. It's just such overkill. I sure hope that a system evolves that will manage the trash.
  • There's a bunch of pictures, some of which show the incredible amount of plastic crap on some really remote Kure islands. Also pix of the marine life killed by the plastic blobs. http://www.oceanfutures.org/kure/kure_gallery_index.asp#
  • Kooky: yes, you're right about the gradual process of evolution. I can't see any way out of the mess except for our "helping" this type of bacteria evolve. (although, we have a fine track record for screwing up in that arena) Given the rate at which bacteria multiply, I think we could give it a push, but meanwhile, you'd think the "developed" nations of the world could be civilized in their approach to handling their messes. Cynnbad: It's packaged like that because they can overcharge so much more.
  • Re: plastic eating bacteria. Be careful for what you wish for etc. The whole point of plastic wrapping on food is to keep bacteria out.
  • BTW kids, I am not saying that it will happen overnight, but what we are creating will spawn something new and interesting. I'd love to be able to see it.
  • It's packaged like that because they can overcharge so much more Actually, I'd say it's packaged that way because the true costs have not been counted into the price of the goods. Extraneous packaging, such as big blister packs on tiny gadgets, is largely a measure to reduce labor costs at the store level. However, if the raw materials for plastic (oil) were not priced artificially low, and the environmental cost of dealing with that plastic waste were imposed on the manufacturer, likely much of that packaging would go away and that investment would shift to point-of-sale labor instead.
  • Wellm, now I on\t know what to do
  • I wish more places would use these, like a few local takeouts are doing. I have to get better about remembering my canvas bags.
  • I don't know why there isn't a film of this thing. Or even more pictures. Heck, I think I've only seen like one. Bigger than Texas and no little film?