Image courtesy of Joel Pashal/ Algalita Marine Research Foundation
How trash makes its way to the garbage patch is pretty straightforward. When a plastic cup gets blown off the beach in, say, San Francisco, it gets caught in the California Current, which makes its way down the coast toward Central America. Somewhere off the coast of Mexico it most likely meets the North Equatorial Current, which flows toward Asia. Off the coast of Japan, the Kuroshio Current might swoop it up and yank it eastward again, until the North Pacific Current takes over and carries it past Hawaii to the garbage patch. These are the currents that make up the North Pacific Gyre. Moore says it takes a year for material to reach the Eastern Garbage Patch from Asia and several years for it to get there from the United States. Now multiply that one cup by billions of plastic items over years and years—actually about 60 years, starting after World War II, when we really began to make plastic products en masse.
Marcus Eriksen, Algalita’s director of research and education, has studied that connection between the increasing amount of plastic found in the ocean and the increasing amount of plastic produced: In 1999 there was 0.002 gram of plastic per square meter of ocean in the Eastern Garbage Patch, and as of 2005 there was 0.004 gram per square meter in the same place. In that same period plastic production in North America alone experienced double-digit growth, topping 113 billion pounds in 2006, according to the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council in Arlington, Virginia.
Beyond plastic degradation and its toxic ramifications, other refuse issues ensue. Twenty-mile castaway fishnets snare sea turtles, dolphins, and other animals, endangering their populations; birds mistake trash for food, eat it, and die; jellyfish get sick; gnarly junk washes back to shore—some of it hazardous waste. The Eastern Garbage Patch isn’t just a problem for those living in the middle of the ocean; it’s a problem for those of us who are landbound as well.
Moore likens the patch to a cemetery and the trash heading toward it to a series of funeral processions. “There are bigger particles in the processions because they haven’t degraded as much yet,” he says. But inside the patch, where trash has been disintegrating for years—even decades—the particles are much finer. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reports that 70 percent of marine litter sinks. So who knows what is also building up on the ocean floor?
To be sure, the Eastern Garbage Patch isn’t a lone phenomenon. Off the coast of Japan there is a Western Garbage Patch. And each of the other oceans has its own, albeit smaller, floating patches of debris. Even so, the Eastern Garbage Patch—rooted square between California and Hawaii—is most intriguing and draws the greatest attention because of its size and the fact that it lies closest to the biggest trashmonger on the planet, the United States.
The Alguita’s journey last winter was closely followed by the many who had become aware of the floating garbage dump. Crew members kept a ship-to-shore blog, writing: “We know this plastic trash is a problem.... But in order to get the world to pay attention and start making changes, we need to prove it. We need accurate data and real hard numbers, so we can bring this information to governments, industries, and the public and show them just how serious this issue has become.”
Blog responses came from all over the world, from grade-school children to the elderly, scientists to laypeople.
One asked, “Do we have an answer to the question ‘Yeah, it’s gross, but why should I put it high on my list of world problems that need our immediate attention?’?” It is a good question because marine pollution is one of the most underreported stories today. One glaring answer to the question is this: Around 2.5 billion people rely upon fish for at least 20 percent of their animal protein. When fisheries get polluted, so does the food we eat. (See “Ocean Reflux,” page 28.)
