Talking Trash

[TheCopperCowboy]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=512424&in_page_id=1811

Rubbish dump found floating in Pacific Ocean is twice the size of America
Last updated at 00:20am on 6th February 2008

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/02_01/SoupLL0502_468x271.jpg

A rubbish dump twice the size of the United States has been discovered floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The vast expanse of debris, made up of plastic junk including footballs, kayaks, Lego blocks and carrier bags, is kept together by swirling underwater currents.

It stretches from 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

'Plastic soup': The vast expanse of rubbish is kept together by swirling currents. It stretches from 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan

Because the rubbish, which has been called a ?plastic soup? and a ?trash vortex?, is translucent and lies just below the water's surface it cannot be seen in satellite photographs.

American oceanographer Charles Moore discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by chance in 1997 while taking a short cut home from a yacht race.

He said: ?Every time I came on deck there was trash floating by. How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week??

Around a fifth of sea junk is thrown off ships or oil platforms - the rest comes from land
He warned that the rubbish could double in size over the next decade if consumers do not cut back on their use of plastics. More than a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die every year as a result of plastic rubbish.

Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have all been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds.

The rubbish can also be dangerous for humans, because tiny plastic pellets in the sea can attract man-made chemicals which then enter the food chain.

Research director Dr Marcus Eriksen said: ?What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple.?

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer compared the rubbish to a living entity. He said: ?It moves around like a big animal without a leash.? Describing what happens when it reaches land, he said: ?The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic.?

The rubbish dump is made up of two linked areas either side of Hawaii. Around one-fifth of the junk is thrown off ships or oil platforms, while the rest comes from the land.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/02_01/SeaRubbish1_228x346.jpg

[Budman]

Sounds like Greenpeace should be out there cleaning it up...

[OrangeCrush]

Figures its off the coast of California I think we should tax them more!

[Loki]

American oceanographer Charles Moore discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by chance in 1997 while taking a short cut home from a yacht race.


1997??? and we're just hearing about it now? I thought teh interweb worked faster than that, :shrug: If not you should be reading this about 2019.

Because the rubbish, which has been called a ?plastic soup? and a ?trash vortex?, is translucent and lies just below the water's surface it cannot be seen in satellite photographs.

Isn't that convienent???

Yes you can call me skeptical. :rolleyes:

[TheCopperCowboy]

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/travel/167400.php


Published: 02.04.2007

World's trash spoils Hawaii's great beaches
By Chris Welsch
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
On the first day of my vacation on Kauai in December, I went for a walk on the beach near the house that my wife and I had rented.
The spot was everything I'd hoped for: A two-minute walk down a dirt road led to Moloa'a Bay, fringed by an inviting crescent of pale yellow sand, deep and soft under my bare feet.
One unpleasant detail compromised the scene. A baffling display of ugliness sprawled along the tide line: water bottles, milk crates, fishing buoys, netting, plastic bags, a barrel-size clump of orange plastic rope and, scattered everywhere, a fine confetti of broken-up plastic chips.
By any standard, Kauai is remote, thousands of miles from the nearest continent in any direction. Where did this stuff come from?
The answer stunned me. It came all the way from Mexico, the continental United States, Alaska, Taiwan, Japan and China. Some was dumped off recreational and commercial ships, but most of it came from individuals who littered, be it by the side of the road or on the beach. Plastic takes hundreds of years to decompose, meaning that all the plastic ever made still exists somewhere. A lot of it is floating in the Pacific.
"We're at a juncture of convergence zones that create this massive gyre that collects trash," said Paul Tannenbaum. "Some of it ends up on our beaches."
Tannenbaum is a founder of the Kauai chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an international nonprofit group that advocates for clean oceans and public access (both near and dear to surfers).
Marine scientists refer to that gyre Tannenbaum mentioned as the "Great Eastern Garbage Patch" ? a floating dump that's twice the size of Texas, and by one account is awash with 3 million tons of debris. Slowly circulating currents act like a global drain tornado, slowly drawing trash dumped off the coasts toward its center.
The main Hawaiian islands and the chain of small sea islands to their west act like a giant comb at the fringes of the gyre, collecting bits of floating plastic from all over the world, Tannenbaum said.
Depressingly, it wasn't the first time I had encountered unexpected trash in an isolated place. The Sian Kaan Biosphere Reserve, about 120 miles south of Cancun, has miles and miles of undeveloped coastline that is littered with junk that has floated from cruise ships, the Caribbean Islands, South America and Africa. In addition to being unsightly and unhygienic for people, plastic trash kills seabirds, fish and turtles that mistake it for food. In popular areas, beach hotels and resorts clean their beaches each morning, so most travelers never know the extent of the problem.
"Trash travels," said Tom McCann, a spokesman for the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit that advocates for clean seas. "You end up with these enormous floating trash piles that bring garbage to every shore. About 80 percent of it is from land-based sources."
It's tempting to consider the problem somebody else's. But water connects everything, regardless of where we live.
"Drop a cigarette butt out the window, it washes from the street into a sewer, from there into a stream, then a river, then the ocean," McCann said. "The good thing about the problem is that so much of it stems from personal behavior, and that's one of the easiest problems to solve."
What can you do? Aside from the obvious (don't litter, and limit use of disposable plastic items), there are plenty of opportunities to learn more and volunteer:

[ZappBranigan]

Notice the article doesn't say how dense this "rubbish patch" is. They give you the impression that it's like a floating island of garbage but if it's just a very loose collection of debris then you can probably find "rubbish patches" all over the world's oceans. Also, if it's been around for over 10 years and we're only just now hearing about it, it can't be doing too much harm to the environment, can it?

[Pilot]

Sounds like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the rock group Green Day and Al Gore should be out there cleaning it up...


There, fixed it for ya.



:D

[newracer]

It is just a plastic reserve that we can go harvest once all the oil is gone.

[Jeff Mason]

It is just a plastic reserve that we can go harvest once all the oil is gone.

Darn, you beat me to it.

I would like to understand more about this though, without any journalistic sensationalism... I wonder if that is possible.

[DADA_JEEP]

skeptic

[xjluvr]

:D man when did they find that out, if we just found that out that is sad. we should tax cali more, LOL:D