Plastic Trash in our Oceans

The Earth Day Network has given 2018 the theme to “End Plastic Pollution.”  With all this attention on plastic in our oceans we’ve all heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the only garbage patch the in the oceans, it’s just the most famous. Garbage patches exist all over the earth’s oceans and are large concentrations of marine debris formed by rotating ocean currents formed by the Earth’s wind patterns and rotation called gyres that suck in the debris and concentrate it. The area in the center of a gyre tends to calm and stable. The circular motion of the gyre draws debris into this stable center, where it becomes trapped.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. It is actually composed of two garbage patches, one located near Japan, and the other garbage patch, located between the Hawaii and California. The “garbage patch” is not an island of trash floating on the ocean. These patches are almost entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. Microplastics can’t always be seen by the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage floating in the ocean. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch simply make the water look cloudy, but their damage to the planet and marine life is clear.

As microplastics and other trash collect on or near the surface of the ocean, they block sunlight from reaching plankton and algae below. If algae and plankton communities are threatened, the entire food web may change. Animals that feed on algae and plankton, such as fish and turtles, will have less food. If populations of those animals decrease, there will be less food for predator fish such as tuna, sharks, and whales.

A 2015 study by Jambeck et al. estimated that approximately eight million metric tons of plastic end up in our ocean every year. We use plastic for so many things and unfortunately, many of these are used only once. Single-use plastics are a major issue, as they’re often used for an extremely brief amount of time before being discarded. And way too much of that discarded plastic is making its way into our oceans. Some trash is dumped directly into the oceans from ships and boats, some is from litter on the shoreline, but a large amount is carried by rain and wind to our streams and rivers and makes it way to the ocean.

Plastic is durable and is designed to last. This can be a really useful characteristic that can serve some really important purposes; however, plastic’s durability is also one of the characteristics that make plastic debris so damaging. Plastic items don’t biodegrade like many other items do and never truly go away. Instead, as they’re exposed to elements like the sun and saltwater, they break into smaller and smaller pieces. Once they’re less than five millimeters in size, we call them “microplastics.” Microplastics may include small plastic pieces resulting from larger items breaking apart, “microbeads” coming from personal care products, or even “microfibers” resulting from people washing synthetic clothing. Unfortunately, once they’re in our waters, microplastics are really difficult to remove.

According to Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany today 10 rivers carry 93 % of that trash that ends up in the oceans. They are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea.

from Scientific American

Scientists estimated that 8,300 million metric tons of virgin plastics have been produced since the dawn of the age of plastics, so we have a large hand in the trash that exists in the oceans today and need to participate in the solution preventing marine debris. The United States is better than many at managing waste, today; but we are particularly bad at recycling our plastic and we still generate too much litter and storm carried trash. Year after year volunteers clean our roadways, streams, rivers, and streambeds of trash that started as litter and carried along by stormwater and wind into our waterways and parks. The volunteers also remove items that were illegally dumped in the woods or carried by off by storms.

We all need to participate in the solution, remember that the eastern portion of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is between California and Hawaii. Follow and teach your children to follow the “4Rs”— Refuse unnecessary single-use items, Reduce the amount of waste you produce by choosing products with less packaging; Reuse items and choose reusable items over disposable ones; and Recycle as much as possible— learn how to properly recycle your trash.