Forget giant pandas displaced by deforestation, or carbon-spewing Chinese sneaker factories. The latest environmental outrage is about good old-fashioned trash.
Scientists have known about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, sometimes called the “trash vortex,” since 1998. An oceanographer taking a shortcut from Hawaii to Los Angeles found that in the Pacific Ocean, in the calm waters north of the Hawaiian islands, the trash that makes it out to sea is held in place by the winds and currents that frame the area. They outline a circular patch in the ocean called the North Pacific Gyre, where the garbage accumulates in an area that’s been estimated to be as big as the size of Texas at minimum, but potentially as large as the entire United States.
An Invisible Island
The world produces about 260 million tons of plastic every year, and only 5 percent of that is recycled. Eighty percent of the trash in the oceans is composed of plastic, and although some trash is spilled (or dumped) from ships, the overwhelming majority comes from those of us who live on land. When someone in China or Seattle uses a trash bag or a plastic bottle and doesn’t dispose of it properly, it gets washed down the sewer and out to sea with the other wastewater, where currents carry it to the northern Pacific. Some experts estimate that the garbage patch contains one hundred million tons of trash or more.
When laypeople hear about the garbage patch, they often envision it as an island made of trash. To be sure, some pieces of the patch are large—barrels, balls, nets, and wrappers—but it’s not as solid as a landmass. The majority of the plastic breaks down into tiny bits, ranging from microscopic to the size of a fingernail, and these pieces of plastic become suspended in the top several hundred feet of water, forming a “plastic soup.” Because much of the debris hangs below the water’s surface, we can’t see it on satellites, but scientists and sailors traveling through the area have witnessed it. The small size of the particles is one reason it’s so hard to determine exactly how big the patch is—there’s no way to accurately measure its area.
