The World’s Rubbish Dump: A Garbage Tip That Stretches From Hawaii to Japan
A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris - in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump - is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: “It moves around like a big animal without a leash.” When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic,” he added.
The “soup” is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk - which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags - is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the “North Pacific gyre” - a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.
He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. “Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by,” he said in an interview. “How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?”
Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.
Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was “no reason to doubt” Algalita’s findings.
“After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems.”
Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere,” said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.
Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water’s surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. “You only see it from the bows of ships,” he said.
According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.
Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,
Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles - the raw materials for the plastic industry - are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. “What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple,” said Dr Eriksen.
© 2008 The Independent
Mark this: Soon someone will find value in the re-use of all the trash and we will fight a war for it. Just after the wars coming up over water!
i bet a lot of that rubbish is stuff from bottled water. what a waste
Let’s face it: plastics are now as much a part of the environment as soil is.
I was wondering about this, maybe we ought to be compressing and melting all this plastic garbage stuff into blocks or something? Call them artificial rocks. Use them for construction or even just throwing them away, would it be better if the plastic were in big solid chunks?
I know some plastics are already being reused, but what I mean is ALL the plastic-wrapped trash could either be reused or made into blocks, by consumers and businesses both. No more floating and blowing bags around.
Plastic rocks wouldn’t be so ecological, but, since moutains of plastic ARE part of the ecology now - no matter what - it would be better to neaten them up into something the planet can work with maybe? Face it folks, no matter what, the plastic will be here a LOT longer than we will. It lasts forever and might as well be radioactive waste material, as long as it takes to biodegrade.
George Carlin did a hilarious bit on plastic, btw. Something about how that was our purpose on earth, to make plastic, and, now I’m not really sure he’s wrong. As usual! Future species will surely be using our plastics, that I know.
But anyway, even if it wasn’t a big industry like recycling now, I can’t help but think that’s what should be done with all our plastics. Rocks. Blocks. Chunky and sometimes colorful, with rounded edgegs. I’d even buy a gismo that would make all my plastic trash into something solid, like a common trash compactor. IF it’s not too expensive.
Can I build on it? This could be a great real estate find.
In order to ‘reformulate’ plastic into plastic building/landscaping materials, you’d first have to mandate recycling. Why we haven’t done this already is beyond me - I imagine it has something to do with cost to Coca Cola, et al.
I guarantee that if you made the cost/return high on plastic, glass, etc. you’d have less waste and a way for our impoverished masses to both make $ and clean up the place. How did I eat as a poor college student in Michigan?… At 10-cents a pop, man.
As for plastics, look at disposable diapers, too - neat, plastic pouches of non-biodegrading pee & poo. Disposable producing giants Kimberly Clark & their kind want you to believe cloth diapers are equally detrimental, which is untrue. Since when is a single use product ever more eco-friendly than a reusable one?
If mankind survives long enough for this time to be added to history, it should be known as the Age of Convenience.
There’s no damn reason someone couldn’t innovate the technology to collect this plastic waste in freight ships to then make fuel.
Collect the junk, ship by ship, and fuel the trip with the garbage as you go.
Get it back mainland and recycle/innovate with the rest of it. It’s mainly derived from petrol, no?
Where’s some visionary thinking?
This area was first described in 1988 and was termed “garbage gyre” as part of a study to determine the extent of high seas squid gill net interception of non-target pelagic resources. Much of the marine debris encountered in this area was derelict fishing nets. As the co-author of this report, there was a keen interest in this garbage gyre, but further studies were abandoned. Having spent some time on the Northwest Hawaiian Islands of Kure Atoll and Midway Island, much of this debris ends up on the beaches of these tiny little specks in the ocean. One of my favorite marine debris pieces I found on Kure Atoll is an empty whisky bottle discarded from some vessel with a label aptly named for these times of environmental degradation and declining resources: “Come back Salmon” And that was in 1988.
“I was wondering about this, maybe we ought to be compressing and melting all this plastic garbage stuff into blocks or something? Call them artificial rocks. Use them for construction or even just throwing them away, would it be better if the plastic were in big solid chunks?”
A great idea/invention there (call it something kewl…like maybe “recycling”?).
Maybe it could all self-melt by being combined with heavy nuclear-waste, and that could be dumped in ocean-also! It would at-least ’sink’, and never ’stink’!
Rocks are getting-endangered, anyway (they were once part of something referred to as ‘land’, and “they ain’t making any more of that-stuff”).
“Plas-Nukes” would glow-in-dark, and thus become popular among bi-Coastal Xstasy-Ravers otherwise so-engaged in ‘recycling’ already — they could ‘dance’ with sticks/pacifiers of it hanging out of both-sides-of-mouth (which they are well-familiar with talking out of, already also).
Plastics used to ‘expensively gum-up the works’ at refineries (back when Big-Oil and JDR&friends used to actually invest in those, instead of pretending lack-of-refinement meant “Peak-Oil”) — but then they convinced-others it was ‘valuable-stuff’ (just like “Ethanol from Food”!) so we’d buy-that like we buy everything-else from those Rothschild front-men…
Buy some nuke-waste for your plastic (tons of that-crap, soon to be near-you(!), if Gore’s best/new/’environmentalist’-friend, Baron de Rothschild, has anything to say about it [and, I hear he does, since his family controls 95% of the world’s ‘non-Reservation’ and soon more-profitable Uranium-mines). Shouldn’t be ‘expensive’ in small-quantities (larger-quantities insures visits from ‘interested-Parties’, btw).
Neo-Libs WILL shortly Mandate Recycling (and many-other Interesting-things!).
As a ex/poor college-student in MI, Ms.Granholm may be mandating Ethanol for you, as-we-speak! [Enjoy that 10%-drop in mpg! And the price-hike at local food-co-op, following…and the added-imports for oil to make the ‘oil-substitute/enhancer’]
Have we had to change the shipping lanes because of this problem?
Years ago, I looked through a catolog of recycled plastics. It had park benches and tables and other items. At the time, I thought how neat it would be to have a house built of recycled plastics.
In Oregon, we have mandated recycling, but it is not affective enough.
MeAlsoToo: Is there anything wrong with mandating recycling, or are you one of those types who believe nothing should be mandated and our intrinsic sense of responsibility will guide us to that point?
Rather than cry or explode in rage over this latest travesty to Gaia and her species, the idea of collecting this stuff and recycling it into PRODUCT came to me as this: if the plastic is molten down and then placed into a mold, could it not shape like an igloo? When I passed through India I saw so many families subsisting under cardboard box type liners on the side of roadways. These plastic “igloos” could grant them cover from rain and sun, and perhaps could be sat in when floods came. They could probably float as rafts. Some world health/poverty/charitable organization ought to get behind funding these “domiciles” the way Jimmy Carter put his considerable ideals behind Habitat for Humanity. A home is basic to every living creature. That plastic could make a better home for those who are already at ground zero.
Have some great ideas there, and it already exists,
under the trade names of “Foreverdeck” and “Foreverdock”
http://plasticlumberyard.com/
I built a deck with it, it is a pretty good product, it replaces dimensional lumber, 100% recycled, supposedly lasts 100x longer than wood, drawbacks are it is slick as hell when cold or wet, needs to be painted with grit paint. Other draw back is it is hard as hell to drill through.
But it is not the answer. Plastics being made from petrochemicals, Texas Tea, oil, toxic to people, the environment, and why we are bombing, looting and the rest of it. You don’t want a house made from plastic. It does not breathe like wood, traps moisture and promotes mildew, mould and rot. On the west and east coasts, there is an ecologically friendly source for wood for construction, beach logs. Also fallen dead cedar and standing dead cedar. My present house is 100% biodegradable cob and scavenged fallen dead cedar lumber.
Highly energy intensive in production, is as bad an addiction as petrochemicals themselves.
Lately in the mainstream press are rumblings of the long suppressed dangers of plastics to babies and to the reproductive systems of children (du-uh.) As well as other chemical products used on children like soaps and creams. Seems chemical components in some plastics and chemicals bio-mimic some hormones and do other suppressed harm. News articles mention this like it is something new, and make no mention of alternatives to plastics or to the petrochemical and chemical products lathered on ourselves and children. (there are organic, bio-degradable and natural products available, like Dr Bronner’s soaps:
http://www.drbronner.com/index.html
I sucked on plastic toys throughout my childhood. Fertility rates are way down and childhood diseases have skyrocketed. Reminds me of the fall of Rome when the Caesars were going mad because of lead silverware and their bad habit of whitening their skin with mercury.
The article makes no mention how plastics are disrupting the ocean’s phytoplankton, the lowest and largest staple of life on the planet. Lets hope plastics will be the cigarette in the next decades.
“When you drive a car you’re voting Bush!”
good for you, abe goodman. I also wanted to be environmentally correct and build a deck from recycled plastic. A board costs about $36 at Lowe’s, compared to about $6 for a dead tree board.
What’s up with this? If the store use plastic bags instead of paper because it’s cheaper to make plastic, then why would recycled plastic be so much more expensive?
Bottling companies use plastic instead of recycled glass, the way they used to, as someone pointed out. If it’s cheaper to make plastic and throw it way, then to reuse a bottle, then recycled should be cheaper.
Something is fishy here.
I’m pretty sure, here in Massachusetts anyhow, recycling is mandated, just not enforced. If the waste engineers (formerly known as garbagemen) notice recyclables in your garbage they’re supposed to report you, then you get a fine… It just never happens. I’m not sure exactly how it works, because I always recycle.
I think any recyclables should have a 50¢ deposit, also I feel we should be using refillable glass containers. There is no reason to waste energy melting perfectly good bottles, just because they were used once. Sanitize them and use ‘em again! They do it with soda on P.E.I., and I think the soda tastes better out of a glass bottle anyhow.
http://www.gov.pe.ca/fae/env/retailersguide.php3
Hi Siouxrose - Finding ways to recycle plastics might make a small dent in the environmental impact, but the problem is a bit overwhelming. Polymers don’t biodegrade, but they do fragment into smaller and smaller particles. At every size they are ingested by sea animals. At the size of powder, they are ingested by zooplankton. If they do not kill the plankton, they make their way back up the food chain, along with the DDT and PCBs for which they are magnets. It is impossible to waste plastic. Every speck of it makes it to the sea eventually, in ever increasing accumulations. The North Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 percent plastics - everything from garbage bags and “lost” ballpoint pens to pocket combs to the exfoliants in your toothpaste - more than six times, by weight, than plankton at the ocean’s surface. It is an appropriate comeuppance for a throwaway society that plastics can not be thrown away. Even the Colgate you spit into your sink will be back to visit you later.
What we need are more people. The logic of this is that the more people we have, the more scientific and entrepreneurial genius we will have to solve these problems and the richer everyone can become. How is this theory working out so far?
How to encourage the manufacture of bio-degradable alternatives? How to change recycling behavior and reprocessing by manufacturers? Certainly the costs of making the stuff is going to increase, with the price of oil for basic chemical stocks. If it cannot be recycled and reused, then maybe it should never have been made in the first place.
Maybe the USA should invade and occupy it?
My wife has photos of this taken in the early ’60’s coming back from a Trans Pac race. When they arrived in San Francisco, they reported it to US Customs and had photos of it.
She’s been warning people about this ever since. Nice that science has finally made the discovery.
Why not grind up plastic and use it for road beds?! I understand that’s what they do in England. They also use ground up glass. And they have roads that are a couple of thousand years old.
Think of all the gravel pits that could be saved.
I refuse to insult pigs by comparing humans to them.
I stopped buying Neutrogena facial scrub wash - when I found out they were using latex beads which whales and others would ingest while swallowing similarly sized plankton.
It seems if we could figure out this mess - it would be an advantage - that it is all grouped together in these two bunches. Now it is just - where to put it - and we need to stop making it bigger!
lobster et al - Road beds will end up in the sea. They didn’t put DDT in the sea, they put it on cabbage. But it ended up in the sea. Consider the overwhelming variety of plastic detritus, all UV resistant, all breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, all headed for the sea. I’ve lost fifty pairs of plastic reading glasses in my yard, and I couldn’t find them to recycle them if I tried. They’re gone. They’re on their way to the sea.
I can’t remember the name of the recording artist in the 70s who talked about all the lost ballpoint pens, countless millions of them, all gone somewhere. Someplace, he said, there must be a Sargasso Sea of Missing Ballpoint Pens where they are all floating together in the moonlight. It was a pretty trippy idea. Who would have guessed he was right?
We’re exhuming Permian hydrocarbons and deploying them into our oceans and atmosphere. If we want to think of it as a littering and recycling problem I’d say it is vastly out of control. I did like Peace Czar’s idea of ships that are fueled by floating plastic however, sort of like a car with a huge headlight that attracts and fuels itself on bugs.
Hey Sung, I found that stuff on Kure and Midway in 1953.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing’s going to get better, it’s not!
Perhaps the Lorax was right, but how do we get people to care a whole awful lot? It may take a cultural revolution with a mass media to back it up before things change.
The USA needs to have mandatory recycling NOW!
We Americans have become automaton-junkies of mass consumerism and our corporate media drums self-righteous nonsense into our dear little heads daily.
I am about ready to “recycle” my TV.
How can we boycott plastics without becoming Amish?
I’m surprised that so much stuff floats for so long. The bottom of the sea must be even uglier.
wow… i don’t have time to read all of the responses, but according to this article: we suck. I remember being in elementary school putting on bullshit plays for the student body and our parents urging to consider the three R’s and all that crap.
That was twenty years ago.
There have been some strides in raising awareness, but as far as real change… I don’t see it. I’m guilty - you are guilty - we are all guilty.
It’s been twenty years. 20 years! Two solid decades of BS and back-peddling. 20 years of mass consumerism and rampant waste.
Plastics still end up in the oceans clogging the arteries of this living planet.
I’m 28 this year. I do not see things getting better. I see them getting worse. Many of you seem genuinely concerned, but how many of you participated - either willingly or through pressure - in the bullshit event we know of as Christmas, with all it’s wrapping paper, plastic packages, and smiling faces of children high on that glorious new toy smell? …so much crap that we simply just throw away in a few years…
We are killing everything out of a desire to make others - and ourselves - feel happy. Materialism is the root of all that stinks, all that clogs, all that keeps us in debt and fear and it is what will keep this planet on the road to ruin.
Shame on us! Besides the recycling ideas, one (admittedly small)step would be to buy or make reusable shopping bags. Some cities are already outlawing the flimsy plastic grocery-type bags. And do we have to have everything we buy hermetically sealed inside plastic and more plastic?
There is an interesting chapter in Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us” about the potential effects of PCB’s on plankton. Plastic objects are found in the stomachs of dead sea birds and mammals as well as dissolved into their fatty tissue, as the PCB’s slowly breakdown into smaller components the plankton will ingest these plastics. The effect of that ingestion would most probably result in the same effect that it has on the sea birds and mammals, death. Plankton are at the very bottom of the food chain and are a crucial part it. Without plankton, life would most likely cease to exist.
There are some efforts to create the equivalent of plastics using everything from corn starch to bacteria. The difference is that these “plastics” would be truly biodegradable.
Ya have to carry your cornmeal and molasses home in something. It just won’t stay in a string bag.
We recycle plastic,paper, glass and metal weekly in my town. The garbage man comes by then the recycling man comes.
“He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.”
i say bull pucky. we can triple that in the next five years going at our current rate of consumerism.
BFRIESEN
you took the words right out of my mouth………….and the words of jacques cousteau told us that planet earth has 50, 100, maximum 150 years to go……………………
The very most serious issue here, is what that floating platic is doing to the sea’s life forms. All of the lifes very existance, depends primarily upon a micrscopic plant, one of the ocean’s plankton. PHYTOPLANKTON.
Those “miracle” plants produce most of the planet’s life giving oxygen. Over the past few years, the plants have been dying off at an alarming rate and the scientists who spend their entire adult lives studying such life, don’t know the exact reason, although man made pollution is the primary suspect. Many believe the platic is almost as deadly for plants and animals as the DU which ends up in our oceans. Here is a link which can be read in less than two minutes.
http://www.whyplankton.com
Hi there ~CoCo~ Indeed Costeau did warn us. That was in 1970. That scientist and ocean explorer stated at that time, it was nearly impossible to take an underwater picture in most oceans, whithout having a chunk of plastic float in front of the camer’s lens.
He gave us from 50 to 150 years if we didn’t stop the pollution of our oceans, but he had no idea then of just how bad the pollution would eventually become, nor did he ever dream we’d use depleted uranium for weapons of war and also pollute the oceans with that deadly dust.
Jacques costeau’s wonderful book, “The ocean World” tells it all.
nuclear fusion will give us an astonishing wealth of energy, but its even more important benefit will be the production of extremely high temperatures at very low cost, which among other things will enable us to turn our junk into useful materials.
You might see nuclear fusion in thirty years ~KIORO~, you may never see it, for the theory is not proven as yet to be viable.
We don’t have even 20 years to stop the pollution and clean up that we have alreay created. With a necessary and massive effort, we could have totally clean energy in five years, if we could have the support of our elected. It won’t happen and within a few short years, the global warming will cause the methane gas in the Arctic to “burp” up into the atmosphere and we’ll all die. So will our children and theirs.
Well campers, here’s how it works:
First we get the world to agree that giant garbage vortices the size of the United States are — redundant.
Then we take junk samples to see which of the plastics are common and have some recycling value. Those are the plastics that get cherry-picked and removed from the Pacific.
I wish they could clean everything up but “free” market economics doesn’t work that way. We’d have to see an extremely honest set of world governments to do better than this. As we know, nobody seems to work on building honest governments.
Just a few things to note. It ain’t just American garbage. North Pacific plastic comes from Canada, Russia, Japan, Korea, probably even Australia. It is a global problem.
The wider event is the industrial revolution, which rests on our (human) extraction and use of oil. Everything in today’s environment from transportation to warfare to communication to pocket combs is literally made out of oil. Think of it. Asphalt, car dashboards, nylon stockings, tupperware, eyeglasses, shower curtains. Except for old timey carryovers like cast iron wood stoves, nearly everything familiar to us is oil and its by products. Plastic trash is only part of it. Atmospheric pollution is another part. Running out of it is another. Recycling at this point, though we certainly should do it, might be a feelgood thing.
We don’t know what we have done to the biosphere, just like our parents didn’t know what those Lucky Strikes were doing to their lungs. If beating ourselves up about it will create the gigantic reversal of a 300 year habit that will save us, then ok. But I think it is also to our credit that we are beginning to deconstruct the mindset we inherited from our ancestors and from the culture in which we swim. Maybe it is just a simple tragedy.
“cyon February 5th, 2008 12:02 pm
Let’s face it: plastics are now as much a part of the environment as soil is.”
Except of course for the fact that soil can be used to grow food, or trees. On the other hand nothing can grow in plastic, no creature or bacteria can digest plastic (actually kills off whatever critter is unlucky enough to eat it) and I highly doubt that anyone will pay for it to be cleaned up.
I like what ~Soiuxrose~ posted. You know, we and the Russians, China and Japan etc, have those huge fishing trawlers, whose siene nets can haul in tons of fish in one pass. If the fishermen really wanted to save the oceans fish, they’d be out there netting the garbage and have huge trash compactors aboard to smash it into truck size blocks and then transfer it to a cargo ship, to bring it to a recycle facility. I’d bet a dozen fishing trawlers could clean it all up in less than a year. The UN could fund it, call it the “Pacific Garbage War”. The fishermen aren’t making that much on fish anyway anymore and it would give them something to do.
Kem, the un is primarily funded by the world’s largest economy. That would be the usa, a country that doesn’t like the idea of giving that much cash to the un in the first place, so is behind on its dues (since the Reagan era actually). Moreover that economy isn’t doing that well these days, either a cold or pnemonia up in canada we’ll likely die from the collapse of the us economy.
The usa won’t fund it. The government is too focused on fighting wars to bother with trivialities like the ecosystem. The population of the usa would certainly like to clean up their share of the mess, so too would the populations of the other countries which contribute to the garbage islands (like my own country) unfortunately like your politicians ours too have been bought out by their new corporate overlords.
Until the corporations can make a whopping profit from cleaning up the mess, it ain’t gonna happen.
One simple thing that we could do is ban the direct dumping of plastic trash–preferably of all trash–from ships. Enormous quantities are dumped, on the rationale that one saves fuel from lightening the load, from ships. I wonder what percentage of the total simply came from ships. The “saving” in cost couldn’t be that great, that it would be prohibitive to simply not dump the waste from ships, and send it to landfills once in dock. That simple measure surely would help very significantly in slowing the growth of this trash accumulation.
I recall reading, years ago, that this trash is deliberately being dumped out in the Pacific. It’s not just a matter of debris floating out there in some nebulous manner, it’s companies with large ships taking it out there and dumping it on purpose and being paid to do so.
Seems as if the plankton link went over everyone’s head, or everyone is already aware of the fact, that we will all need to wear tanks of oxygen and masks in a few short years. It’s a very, very important issue.
http://www.whyplankton.com
Yeah ~Skippy~ you’re correct, no one is gonna put out funds to clean it up, especially the UN. “Oh well, I can’t see it, so it’s out of sight out of mind”, is the usual attitude.
Where is Jake?
You heard right ~MIFTIN~ We used to dump it 12 miles out and that ended back up on shorelines and beaches. Now they dump it way out there. __ Insane.
Dumping stuff in the water is always stupid. Crapping in water included.
Beware the beast man,
for he is the devil’s pawn.
Alone among God’s primates,
he kills for sport or lust or greed.
Yea, he will murder his brother
to possess his brother’s land.
Let him not breed in great numbers,
for he will make a desert
of his home and yours.
Shun him.
Drive him back into his jungle lair,
for he is the harbinger of death.
—The Great Ape Lawgiver, 23rd Scroll, Ninth Verse
Those big apes all carried guns and they didn’t have a Geneva convention.
Of course we have one, __ but ignore it.
As for the high cost of recycled plastic boards, I know a guy who developed a plant to produce them. He’s very clever, but the process simply uses a lot of energy. I think the better solution is to develop further the degradable plastic materials. Government could help here, but not under this administration, clearly.
We could put all of that plastic in the cave they built in Nevada to store atomic waste. It isn’t safe to store atomic waste there.
Well, if companies exist that own large ships for the specific purpose of dumping plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, why does this article imply that the trash just gets out there (mostly) by accident? Somebody needs to do real research and start naming names. Maybe this is a subsidiary of KBR or Halliburton. Or better yet, some big mob operation.
A good start would be: SAY NO TO PLASTICS! I guess we’ll stop messing up our planet when we are all dead. Have only ourselves to blame.
HI KEM PATRICK
kinda missed you here and there. how are you doing? here in southern europe we have big recylcling bins: one for glass, one for paper, one for plastic. people seem to use them too…….. do you have these things in the u.s.? (excuse my ignorance but it’s a long time since i was there and can’t remember if they were around then.) as for these rubbish dumps being deliberately fashioned, i cannot comment, but would say that i’ve seen lots of people in other countries throwing their plastic into the sea.
>>>>>>>do you have these things in the u.s.?
Yes. I don’t have stats but I think it is fair to say that most cities here have recycling pickups and drop off centers. This is due to the fact that population is growing and land fills are filling up. There are companies that make some money off of recycling and there are many “green” products being made. But, most can’t afford to live “green”. It’s just like eating healthy. Mosty can’t afford it. I make a decent living at it is still expensive for me to buy fresh veggies. But, when I do shop, I try to always use canvas bags that I own.
I’m trying to hold onto hope that some entrepeneur will think of some use for recycled plastic since I have no hope of us stopping the creation and use and discarding of plastic until we are all choking on it. Sorry, but after 20 years of trying to fight this stuff I’ve realized some aspects of human nature and capitalism that have made me very cynical.
Peace.
Mass-production, convenience and externalizing costs (while internalizing profits)all add up to mass-destruction.
The process also dehumanizes us. Fewer and fewer people produce things that use local resources, physical skills and agility, and, in turn, the earlier time when the artisan and his/her product were appreciated because they both fulfilled a community’s needs and its aesthetic criterion is rapidly disappearing.
Plastic takes the place of clay, wood and other local natural resources when products have to be stored, shipped, transported and shelved by the billions.
When quantity supercedes quality, we have to expect that the resulting world will be a “plastic” world. A world of disposable people, shelter, cities, public buildings cultural products, land, flora, fauna, water and communities.
white goo
WHATS NEW I HAVE BEEN ILMING IT FOR YEARS!
You are all correct about recycling plastic ; plastic is VERY recyclable.
The REASON plastic is not recycled and reused more often is greed - the petrochemical industry makes a lot more money by making NEW plastic rather than re-using the old. [plastic is made from natural gas and crude oil ‘leftovers’ in the refining process]
When this “fossil fuel as our main energy source” madness ends, we probably WILL be going to the dumps and collecting plastic to use it again, but the plastic in the oceans is likely “un-reuseable”. Other sources of energy are being ignored, just as recycling plastic is ignored, in favour of fossil fuel use. Renewable energy will help us in many ways.
“You might see nuclear fusion in thirty years ~KIORO~, you may never see it, for the theory is not proven as yet to be viable.”
Phytoplankton isn’t “over heads” just ‘beneath-contempt’, so far…
But don’t expect ‘betterment’ soon (and for the same-reason we have these multiple ‘Issues’ now, and that Fusion is ‘deliberately-ignored’ by Western-Governments).
The ‘Interests that Be’ want to continue exploiting the Myths that have been enriching them for generations…and will do-so for many-more years WHILE they ALSO enrich themselves with those-parts of these ‘environmental-hoaxes’ that will result in Carbon-taxation on CO2 (which is a natural/needed component of ‘good atmosphere’ — NOT a deadly ‘greenhouse-gas’).
If you want the ‘Truth’ you have to re-examine all you think you know about ‘Peak-Oil’, ‘Scarcity’, ‘Global-Warming’ (actually caused by above-ground nuke-testing over years, AND HAARP — not ‘man-made’ from our ‘deliberately inefficient engines/plants’), Food-based-Ethanol, or ALL/Many other Myths and Scams the same lying-bastards on both-sides of the ‘political spectrum’ are using for enriching-the-already-rich of the ‘privatized’ & monopolistic Big-Oil/Big-Utility/Big-Ag/Big-Defense and Big-Manufacturing ‘Interests’ colluding/conspiring-together (with their purchased-Governments).
It ain’t ‘rocket-science’ — just a Big-FRAUD begun by JDR and his-’backers’ (before&since).
[Click My Name — Wake Up!]
Click your name, and you have our e-mail address, __ that right ~MeAlsoToo~? What do you mean by writing, “plankton is beneath contempt”?
The ocean’s phytoplankton, produce MOST of our necessary oxygen. It also may very well be the “fountain of youth” Ponce DeLeon was searchng for. It was right there, beneath the keels of his ships, __ free for the taking.
We humans are killing off the ocean’s plant life, the vital to all life, phytoplankton, which gives us and our planet life.
Edit?
“A Garbage Tip That Stretches From Hawaii to Japan”:
Yet another kind of climate-change… There are many kinds out there, waiting for US to (re-)discover what we’re doing and have done.
MEALSOTOO
maybe you should think about turning your site into a book……??
Think it would be a best seller Coco? Maybe if it’s printed on T-paper.
MeAlsoToo (Ward): I commend you for your excellent web-site. So much important writing and work you’ve done - the hypertexting to sources and meticulous foot-notes not least. I envy you the stamina you’ve demonstrated in collecting all that information and working it into a coherent whole. A readable story bringing out some truth. You’re a good example to the rest of US. Keep it up - don’t let anyone bring you down, pls.
KEM PATRICK
i was being serious actually. like ullern says, it’s a very well documented piece and must have taken a long time to put together. that’s why i thought it might be better (and easier to read) as a book.
Sorry, COCO I was joking. I do wonder about his comment about the plankton?
Beware the beast man,
For he knows not what to do with his trash.
You would think that our very own intelligence would go beyond just burying it or washing it down the drain. We make these complicated machines that make complicated objects that are made out of complicated ingredients, yet once we use it once, we have know idea, no intelligence, to know what the heck to do with it. So we just throw it away.
Our culture of abundance and consumerism has taken away our own ability to know how to make things for ourselves. We no longer use that part of the brian that can invent or create. We have become weak and useless and the only thing we know how to do is earn a paycheck, drive to the store, and buy what we think we need, and then later on throw it away.
What will happen when all the oil runs out? Everything we depend on, our food, clothes, shelter, transportation, production, shipping, etc… all depends on oil. I find it interesting that we throw away so much plastic, so much oil. Shouldn’t we be saving as much oil as we possibly can? No one is planning for the future, for when the oil does run out. We should be transitioning into alternative and renewable energy right now, but unfortunately that is not happening fast enough. The oil is getting used up at such a fast rate. I fear we will run out before we have our renewable/alternative energy in place. This means that we are going to hit hard times. Economies are going to collapse and life is going to be pretty bleak.
Unfortunately my 7 year old daughter may have to bare the burden of this reality. I think it is really important that we all start using our brains again and start learning how to make things, and how to be clever at reusing things instead of throwing them away. We must teach our children to do this so that they can survive a potentially bleak future. Our children will need to be smart, clever, creative and handy. They will also need to be compassionate and caring so that they can help others who are having trouble. Unfortunately too many children on a daily basis are being subjected to T.V., computers, video games, ipods, and cell phones, not to mention plastic toys. All they learn from that stuff is how to be a consumer and tune-out the rest of the world. They will grow up with no compassion or empathy for others, they will be indifferent to nature, and they will have no ability to make anything because they will have no skills. We are raising our children to have no imagination which is something they will need in order to solve problems and find creative solutions. We are doing a huge disservice to our children and the survival of the future.
A previous poster asked, “How can we boycott plastics without becoming Amish?”
All I can say is, the Amish will have a much easier time with it than we will.
KEM PATRICK
well, i think he meant that it’s ‘beneath contempt’ because although significant in the scheme of life giving/sustaining properties, it’s such a non-visible entity (to humans anyway) and brainless to boot, that it’s neglected and dismissed. (so far)
Oh, okay, thanks CoCo.
The Amish and similar groups are much nicer and kinder to the earth than most people. They are more generous too.
everybody needs a hemp sack. and a sack of hemp while we’re at it!
ohh goody now we can put cheney/bush somewhere they fit in.
Why don’t we get together and actually do something? posting comments is theraputic, but nothing will happen.
If you folks think it’s bad now just give it few years so that India and China can match our consumerism habits. Oh yea, think about that the next time you take your SUV full of soccer kids to Walmart.