‘Pacific Garbage Patch’ Expedition Finds Plastic, Plastic Everywhere
September 2nd, 2009Via: San Jose Mercury News:
Scientists who returned to the Bay Area this week after an expedition to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” brought piles of plastic debris they pulled out of the ocean — soda bottles, cracked patio chairs, Styrofoam chunks, old toys, discarded fishing floats and tangled nets.
But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confettilike pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.
“Marine debris is the new man-made epidemic. It’s that serious,” said Andrea Neal, principal investigator on the Kaisei, a 151-foot research ship on the trip.
Neal, a Santa Barbara researcher who has a doctorate in molecular genetics and biochemistry, said crews on the three-week voyage discovered tiny jellyfish eating bits of the plastic debris. The jellyfish are, in turn, eaten by fish like salmon or tuna, which people eat.
Because the plastic pieces contain toxic chemicals — and are believed to be able to absorb now-banned chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, which can persist in the environment for decades — state toxicologists have taken hundreds of the objects, along with more than 300 fish, to an environmental chemistry lab in Berkeley to see if any chemicals are moving up the food chain.
“Every day, every night, we’d pull up samples and pour the water through a sieve. It would be completely clogged with tiny pieces of plastic,” said Margy Gassel, a research scientist with the California Environmental Protection Agency. “It was so disturbing.”
The research was the most extensive look yet at the garbage patch, a collection of mostly plastic debris located 1,000 miles north of Hawaii. The bobbing debris field, where currents swirl everything from discarded fishing line to plastic bottles into one soupy mess, was discovered in the mid-1990s.
Not much is known about it, including when it began forming or even its exact boundaries. It cannot be seen from the air or from satellites because most of the plastic has broken down into billions of tiny, confettilike pieces that float just below the surface.
Scientists believe the trash washes down storm drains and rivers from places such as the Bay Area or Japan, eventually drifting into several large ocean vortices where currents swirl together.
This may sound a little far out: What a tremendous source of hydrocarbon fuel! If we can effectively “mine” this huge concentration of plastic, we may be able to generate enough power to offset the use of billions of gallons of crude oil.
I’m sure researchers could tell us more, but these summary articles aren’t providing information necessary to solve the problem. They generally imply that littering near the beach, and trash flowing down stormdrains into rivers is the problem, and reusable bags are the solution. It could be (and you should use them anyway), but the patch is twice the size of Texas.
First, could they describe the language on labels of nondegraded items? Secondly, municipal trash dumping at sea is implied by the sheer scale. There were a lot of trash scows in the 30s-70s, and a friend claims that a garbage boat heads out to sea from San Francisco Bay every day. Indonesia doesn’t have public services, but I bet their trash goes into a different gyre. So, maybe the plastics from all this dumping was floating away, and this is what needs to stop.
I’ll bet this is polymer material from chemtrail aerosols that has broken down in the ocean water.
@mondocratic
Chemtrails didn’t form the shampoo bottles and patio furniture, etc that haven’t broken down yet.
Maybe these guys could make a ton of money
[b]Transforming Waste Plastic Into $10/Barrel Fuel[/b]
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/09/16/new-envion-facility-turns-plastic-waste-into-10barrel-fuel/