(upbeat music) (chalk scratching board)
- Quick, where's the world's biggest garbage dump?
Did you say in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Well that's the right answer.
It turns out that there's something called the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch and they call it that because it is
an enormous amount of trash floating in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean.
So the name works.
See the rotation of the Earth and some of the global winds
form what are called gyeres.
These are massive rotating ocean currents found
around the world but the bulk of the world's trash
ends up in the North Pacific Gyre which is home
to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Now the GP squared, that's what I'm gonna call it
from now on okay,
is actually two smaller garbage patches.
There's one between Japan and Hawaii and there's
another bigger one the size of Texas between
Hawaii and California.
And they're considered one large garbage patch because
there's a six thousand mile Subtropical Convergence Zone
that connects the two and acts like basically
a highway of trash.
Isn't that delightful sounding?
Now who knows how long this thing has been there,
but in 1997, a racing boat captain named Charles Moore
who very much likely wears Ascots all the time,
found the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
And a lot of people say that the amount
of trash there is inestimable.
While we don't know exactly how much it is,
the good people in Hawaii can tell you it's a lot.
There's some beaches in America's most beautiful state
that have trash piled 10 feet deep.
That's a lot of trash and it's coming from the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Now 80 percent of all ocean going trash is plastic
which doesn't quite make sense because while we use two
hundred billion pounds of plastic a year,
just 10 percent of it ends up in the ocean.
So why is so much ocean going trash plastic?
Well, that's because plastic takes so long to break down.
Researchers estimate it takes about five hundred years
for plastic to degrade and it doesn't biodegrade which means
it would break down into it's original components
instead it photodegrades which means that exposure
to the sun breaks the plastic down into smaller and smaller
versions of its original self.
These smaller and smaller versions out in the ocean
are called nurdles or mermaid tears.
And despite their astoundingly cute names,
their actually have a very insidious nature.
That's because nurdles not only contain the original
chemicals used to make the plastic,
they also have the terrible capability of attracting
other pollutants in the ocean like oil slicks
and condensing and concentrating it
turning nurdles into toxic powerhouses and then even
worse, nurdles are eaten
by sea life.
That's because these little nurdles floating in places
like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
co-mingle with phytoplankton, tiny organisms
that are supposed to be there.
And sea animals eat phytoplankton (teeth crunch)
and when they do,
they can't help but also ingest some of the nurdles
which means they've entered the food chain
which is not good.
When a larger animal eats the animal that ate the nurdle,
it also ingests the chemicals and so on and so on
up the food chain which very frequently ends with you,
the human grocery shopper at the seafood case.
So what do we do about all this?
Well, it turns out that cleaning up the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch and other gyres isn't much of an option.
It would take 67 trawlers a full year just
to clean up one percent of the GP squared.
Instead, the better alternative is to control the plastics
on land that end up as ocean going trash.
We can find alternatives to plastic
that actually biodegrade.
We can expand plastic (ping)
recycling programs to include
more types of plastic and of course there's reducing
and reusing the amount of plastic.
So, where do you stand on ocean going trash?
Are you for it?
Are you against it?
Let us know in the comments below.
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