I often get annoyed when I trip over pieces of Lego left behind by my 9 year old but I would rather have them here in the house than dumped in the sea.
Not just Legos but also kayaks(?), footballs and assorted plastic products have formed a ‘plastic soup of waste’ floating "from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan" report Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden in The world’s rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan (The Independent).
Charles Moore who the article credits with discovering this ocean of waste back in 1997 (by accident) estimates it to be around 100 million tons.
Also mentioned by the writers is Curtis Ebbesmeyer who compares this thing to a living entity and says that "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal
comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the
results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach
covered with this confetti of plastic".
As a result, Charles Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to educate people on the effects of their waste and repair the damage.
How Stuff Works looks at the scientific reasons for its location, "the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of
currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is
an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals" in Why is the world’s biggest landfill in the Pacific Ocean? by Jacob Silverman.
Food for thought on Green Day #16
Previously: Going Green…Start with Plastic Bags…Tax or No Tax?