Pacific Plastic Patch
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a marine plastic soup that may be twice the size of France, is contaminating the Pacific Ocean and its ecosystem. It is an environmental catastrophe that has received limited political or media attention because of the billions of dollars the plastic industry ─ and its petroleum based oil producing supporters ─ have spent in the form of political campaign contributions and media advertising.
The Pacific Plastic patch was first discovered in 1997 by California sailor, surfer and volunteer environmentalist Charles Moore who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii on his catamaran. For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take the short-cut across the edge of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a region seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense, slowly spiraling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coast of Southeast Asia and North America. In the 1950s, nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. Today it is 90 percent plastic.
Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 meters, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, swirling like snow-flakes or fish food. The world’s navies and commercial fishing fleets make a significant contribution, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day. Eighty percent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land according to a variety of studies. The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and dumps, trucks and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Beaches are also a major source.
Plastic does not biodegrade. In other words, no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous Pacific Plastic Patch and most beaches and seashores. On most beaches today, even Hawaii’s pristine beaches, there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until one digs at least a foot down. I experienced this first hand on the pristine beaches of Palau when a chemical engineer, working for a Taiwanese businessman trying to set up a plastic factory there, who was drunk and heartbroken and couldn’t bear the thought of how polluted Palau would become ─ and at the risk of getting fired ─ educated me in the basics of plastics and their long term devastation of the environment. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans according to a U.N. report.
Worldwide, plastic is killing one million seabirds a year and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles according to the United Nations Environment Program. Many chicks die every year from eating pieces of plastic their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.
The Pacific Plastic patch was first discovered in 1997 by California sailor, surfer and volunteer environmentalist Charles Moore who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii on his catamaran. For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take the short-cut across the edge of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a region seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense, slowly spiraling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coast of Southeast Asia and North America. In the 1950s, nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. Today it is 90 percent plastic.
Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 meters, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, swirling like snow-flakes or fish food. The world’s navies and commercial fishing fleets make a significant contribution, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day. Eighty percent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land according to a variety of studies. The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and dumps, trucks and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Beaches are also a major source.
Plastic does not biodegrade. In other words, no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous Pacific Plastic Patch and most beaches and seashores. On most beaches today, even Hawaii’s pristine beaches, there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until one digs at least a foot down. I experienced this first hand on the pristine beaches of Palau when a chemical engineer, working for a Taiwanese businessman trying to set up a plastic factory there, who was drunk and heartbroken and couldn’t bear the thought of how polluted Palau would become ─ and at the risk of getting fired ─ educated me in the basics of plastics and their long term devastation of the environment. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans according to a U.N. report.
Worldwide, plastic is killing one million seabirds a year and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles according to the United Nations Environment Program. Many chicks die every year from eating pieces of plastic their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.
posted by Peter de Krassel's Custom Maid Politics at 1:28 AM
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