Great Pacific Garbage Patch Researchers Find Even More Plastic than Expected
September 4, 2009 · Print This Article
Scientists with ‘Project Kaisei’, who spent three weeks gathering plastic debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, returned to the Bay Area this week with a rather horrifying sample of the trash that can be found floating in the ocean.
Chunks of styrofoam, cracked patio chairs, bleach bottles, tangled nets and old toys were among the junk they brought back – but the bigger concern is the amount of tiny, “confetti-like” pieces of broken plastic floating in the garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California.
From Mercury News:
“Marine debris is the new man-made epidemic. It’s that serious,” said Andrea Neal, principal investigator on the Kaisei, a 151-foot research ship on the trip.
Neal, a Santa Barbara researcher who has a doctorate in molecular genetics and biochemistry, said crews on the three-week voyage discovered tiny jellyfish eating bits of the plastic debris. The jellyfish are, in turn, eaten by fish like salmon or tuna, which people eat.
Because the plastic pieces contain toxic chemicals — and are believed to be able to absorb now-banned chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, which can persist in the environment for decades — state toxicologists have taken hundreds of the objects, along with more than 300 fish, to an environmental chemistry lab in Berkeley to see if any chemicals are moving up the food chain.
“Every day, every night, we’d pull up samples and pour the water through a sieve. It would be completely clogged with tiny pieces of plastic,” said Margy Gassel, a research scientist with the California Environmental Protection Agency. “It was so disturbing.”
The garbage patch is estimated to be twice the size of Texas, and scientists believe that the trash comes from storm drains and rivers in places like Japan and the Bay Area. It accumulates in a slow-moving zone in the Pacific Ocean. Most of the plastic fragments that make it up are too small to be visible from the air or from satellites.
Doug Woodring, one of the founders of Project Kaisei, believes that two possible solutions to keeping the problem from getting worse could be biodegradable plastics and specially designed storm drains that filter plastic debris from ocean-bound streams of water.
Stopping its spread is essential, but scientists aren’t even sure how to begin cleaning up what’s already collected in the garbage patch. The use of fine nets would likely result in the accidental killing of marine life. Hopefully, now that scientists are taking a closer look at the problem, a solution will be found soon.
Link [Mercury News]
- Awareness of the great Pacific garbage patch!
- Ocean Taskforce: Toxic Plastics Killing Marine Life
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Shocking the amount of plastic products dumped into the environment. We should all be ashamed of the damage we are doing to environment. The amount of chemicals that some of these plastics must be leaching must be phenomenal. They don’t only absorb DDT and PCB’s but some also release bisphenol A and nonlyphenol into the environment which are known endocrine disruptors.
Studies like this show us again that our planet has limits – the seemingly endless Pacific Ocean cannot swallow up all our plastic garbage without repercussions. We are working to raise awareness about the wastefulness of bottled water and the growing problem of plastic pollution by sharing our educational video with schools who run Back2Tap campaigns across the country.