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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— April – May 2013
O
NE place you probably might expect
to be about as far from a rubbish tip
as could be imagined is the middle
of the Pacific Ocean. It’s the world’s
largest body of water – and it also has the unwel-
come distinction of being the planet’s biggest
floating dump.
Scientists in recent years have made an aston-
ishing discovery of a gigantic ‘plastic soup’ of
waste, reckoned to consist of around mil-
lion tonnes of mostly plastic debris. This floating
or semi-submerged slurry is estimated to cover
an area of the ocean equivalent to roughly twice
the entire land mass of the US.
The Hawaiian islands are in the middle of
this opaque ‘soup’. Despite its enormous size
and extent, its existence has until quite recently
remained largely undocumented. It does not, for
instance, show up on satellite imagery or aerial
photos. An area known as the north Pacific gyre
was discovered around years ago by American
oceanographer Charles Moore. He was returning
from a yacht race when he strayed off course and
found himself right in the middle of this floating
dump. “Every time I came on deck, there was
trash floating by”, he said. “How could we have
fouled such a huge area? How could this go on
for a week?”.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration now identifies marine debris as
“one of the most pervasive pollution problems fac-
ing the world’s oceans and waterways”.
Globally, around million tonnes of plas-
tic is produced each year, comprising tens of
billions of individual items. Only % of this is
recycled. That leaves a staggering million
tonnes of discarded plastic – over five million
tonnes a week. Of this, around seven million
tonnes finds its way into the sea each year. Over
time, it breaks down into smaller and smaller
pieces, until it forms a difficult-to-spot soupy
mass of almost microscopic fragments.
These tiny pieces are swallowed in huge
quantities by a wide range of marine life, which
mistakes it for food. A recent US study noted
that fish in the North Pacific ingest as much as
, tonnes of plastic mulch a year.
Plastics are for all intents and purposes
john gibbons
environment
Pacific
gyre
Revolting plastic ocean
morass covers an area
twice the size of the USA
caption
indestructible and non-biodegradable. Instead,
the action of sunlight causes plastic to break into
ever smaller particles. As they do so, harmful
chemicals such as Bisphenol A (BPA), styrene and
phthalates are leached into the
water. In humans, these chem-
icals are known carcinogens;
phthalates are also endocrine
disruptors, affecting the onset of
puberty in girls as well as being
linked to breast cancer. Dioxin
is formed in the manufacture
of PVC, and is internationally
classified as a ‘known human
carcinogen’.
These toxic plastic wastes
have been accumulating in the
world’s oceans for many dec-
ades: material discarded since
as far back as the late s
and early s is still bobbing about in the
oceans, trapped in one of the world’s five major
gyres, and being added to daily by mountains
of new waste.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
estimates that plastic debris causes the deaths
of over a million seabirds every year, as well as
more than , marine mammals. Syringes,
cigarette lighters, toothbrushes
and biros have been found inside
the stomachs of hapless seabirds,
which mistake them for food.
Midway Island in the Pacific
is , miles from the near-
est major human settlement.
It is the breeding and nesting
ground for . million alba-
trosses. Scientists surveying
the island found that every alba-
tross chick they examined has
been fed plastic waste, mistaken
by its parents for food. One in
three albatross chicks is now
dying as a result.
Plastic makes up around % per cent of all
rubbish floating in the oceans. Every square mile
of ocean on earth contains, on average, ,
pieces of floating plastic. A study published
in the journal Biology Letters found that plastic
debris in the area popularly known as the ‘Great
Pacific Garbage Patch’ has increased an astonish-
ing -fold over the past years.
Humans are not immune either. Sitting as we
do at the apex of the marine food chain, human
health is threatened by ingesting fish and other
marine foods which have been contaminated by
our plastic wastes.
Charles Moore is depressed that, despite
what we now know, nothing is being done to
stop, let alone, reverse, the avalanche of plastic
and other debris making its way into the world’s
oceans. His solution? “We have to withdraw from
the corporate materialistic economy. You can’t
work within, it doesn’t work. We have to leave it
behind and create local, sustainable communi-
ties that have no need for plastics or packaging”,
he said. We must “shut down the spigot of stuff
we’re making. You don’t bail out an overflowing
bathtub without turning off the tap first”.
John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer
and commentator and is on Twitter @think_or_swim
Around seven
million tonnes of
plastic nds its
way into the sea
each year
The Pacic gyre
Turtle deformed after caught in plastic
