Garbage Island

Welcome and thanks for stopping by!

I have been meaning to start a blog about environmental awareness for a while now. Since I’ve finished graduate school I’ve been unemployed, bored, and intellectually stagnant. Now was a good time as any to get in the habit of writing and sharing. So thanks for reading and I hope you can take something away from this. 

So here goes:

Garbage Island

Not too many people are familiar with the details of Garbage Island, a.k.a. Great Pacific Garbage Patch, let alone it’s existence. My understanding was that it was a solid mass of trash the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean. In reality it is more like small random masses of free-floating debris that is spread out with occasional large patches amassed together – not a single solid mass of garbage the size of Texas. One biological oceanographic student from Scripps compared it to “plastic-confetti”. (Read more about it here). And to make matters worse, scientists have also found a garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean! (Atlantic Ocean Garbage Patch).

Source: http://greatpacificgarbagepatch.info/

In any case, it’s disturbing to see the amount of waste humans can generate. We mindlessly discard our empty plastic bottles and other items (purposefully or not) on the beach only to have the tides pick them up and carry them off to sea. Ocean and wind currents gradually catch the garbage in these rotating ocean currents known as ocean gyres, thus creating our garbage patch. Amazingly, about 80% of the trash in the Pacific Garbage Patch is from people on shore (Read more about it here).

Another concern is that plastics undergo photo-degradation, meaning the light from the sun breaks them down into tinier and tinier pieces (Read more about it here). Plastics are special because they are made of polymers, long chains of repeating subunits that are extremely strong when bonded together.

A repeating unit of polypropylene; forms plastics with recycling number 5

Photodegradation of plastics make it easier for our fish and aquatic wildlife to consume them, endangering them and endangering anyone who consumes them. Check out this picture below! How awful must it have been for this albatross and what a painful death it must have suffered after consuming our garbage! You can read more about Charles Moore’s encounter with the garbage patch and how he brought the garbage patch to people’s attention here.

Source: http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm

What can we do about this garbage patch?

It takes about a week to get to the patch by boat, so practicing preventative measures is our best bet. First things first is to be responsible stewards, which of course is much easier said than done, but try we must! Look how cute this kid is in the photo below. Second, we should try to reuse plastics or recycle them as much as possible. Third – spread the word! Let people know how destructive dumping garbage and plastic is to our oceans and their critters. It’s OUR earth; let’s give it a little love.

The best way to stem the growth of the patch is to use less plastic and recycle it more often. Photo courtesy California.gov and Howstufworks.com

* I wanted to give a little update, there is a documentary called 'Plastic Paradise' that is being filmed by Angela Sun. You can check it out here!