WDM, IA - Great Pacific Garbage Patch - the World's Biggest 'Landfill'

So, how many of you have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

And why is the world’s largest landfill actually in the Pacific Ocean?

Well, I didn’t know the answers to these questions until I looked into landfills after our tour yesterday. And, you can get an eyeful by typing ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ into Google. It a great swirling mass of plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic toys, plastic anything that can be found in the middle of the Pacific between America and Japan, north of Hawaii. There is another one growing in the Atlantic. Here’s a picture from a website called Mother Nature Network showing where this garbage patch swirls in the convergence zone amonst the Pacific currents.

How big is it? Well, no one really knows since much of it is beneath the surface but the estimates are as big as Texas or as big as France. One group, called the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition, from the Scripps Institute traveled 1000 miles alongside it. How would you like to be a scientist canoeing in this? When I think of canoeing, I think of clear waters in a river. Certainly not this. 

It has been estimated that over a million sea-birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement.

The world produces 300 billion pounds of plastic each year, about 10% ends up in the ocean, through runoff, dumping overboard from ships and large scows dumping waste whosesale. 70% of this eventually sinks beneath the surface. Because it is right below the surface and hard to see from above, satellites can’t get a real hold on it to estimate with any accuracty how large this garbage patch is. Not even Google. Here’s a picture from under it showing some of its components while the next picture is a boat leaving a wake as it maneuvers through the Garbage Patch.

Plastic doesn't decompose or compost. The plastic that is sitting in the ocean right now will NEVER go away. It slowly breaks down into smaller and smaller particles until it is consumed by small fish and birds. Remember the food chain? One organism consumes the plastic, then a larger organism consumes the smaller one, and then an even larger organism consumes that one, until you get to the top of the food chain. That's us - we're at the top of the food chain. Do you want mustard and ketchup with that plastic?

But there are also other problems:

        birds feed on plastic and starve because they have no room in their stomachs for real food.

        turtles and large fish get caught in it and die

        it emits toxins into our atmosphere.

Yechh. We have heard recently about the debris washing ashore from the tsunami in Japan but it pales incomparison to this large swirling mass of garbage.

Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about this garbage which is already out there but keeping it from getting larger is well within our ability to accomplish.

Let’s keep recycling and only dump into landfills like the one we toured earlier this month.