What+is+the+Great+Pacific+Garbage+Patch.jpg' alt='Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' title='Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' />A simple explanation of bioplastics and biodegradable plastics, their benefits for the environment and drawbacks. Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' title='Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' />Young Inventor Offers Fix for Oceans Plastic Problem But Will It Work Henderson Island an uninhabited atoll in the South Pacific, halfway between New Zealand and Chile should be one of the most pristine places on Earth. Its about as isolated as an island can be. But today, the UNESCO World Heritage sites white sand beaches are coated in 3. The garbage isnt just an eyesore. Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' title='Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' />A planet drowning in plastic A floating Pacific garbage patch the size of Wales. As Captain Moore points out, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Richard Grant reports on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and a new expedition that aims to make us reassess our relationship with plastic. Illustrations. Runners have long debated the difference between training on a treadmill and training on solid ground. Belt turnover is commonly cited as a factor that helps to. Our seas and oceans are badly contaminated, especially with plastic waste, which affects animals and plants in the waters. Jeremy wrote in The Great Pacific Garbage. Scientists worry it could harm marine life and even humans. Not only do animals get tangled in fishing lines and other large debris, but they ingest smaller bits of plastic as well, which then release toxic chemicals, like mercury. Predators absorb the chemicals consumed by their prey, allowing those chemicals to move up the food chain until they reach you and me. Garbage in the oceans could truly wreak havoc on your health. But theres a ray of hope. One ambitious foundation, which raised 3. North Pacific as early as 2. Hundreds of other projects are attacking the problem across the world. Experts agree that it will take an army to clean up the plastic junk, but they are hopeful it will be done. Drowning in Plastic We currently live in what some scientists call the Age of Plastic. Long clear sheets of plastic are wrapped around food in your fridge. We drink out of plastic and carry our groceries in plastic. Its probably covering the screen youre reading this story on. It has blanketed the Earth so much so that scientists think there will be visible layers of plastic in Earths sediment millions of years from now. A child collects valuable goods from the garbage carried in by the sea at Muara Angke fishing village in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2. Barcroft Media via Getty Images About 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year enough to fill five plastic grocery bags for every foot of coastline in the world. The problem is so bad its impossible to find a pristine beach or region in the ocean, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Whenever we go out somewhere to measure plastic, we are almost sure to find it, he says. But the problem isnt as obvious as you think. Thanks to the oceans currents, a significant portion of trash ends up in huge systems of rotating currents called gyres, or simply garbage patches. There are five main garbage patches one each in the Indian Ocean, the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, the South Atlantic, and the South Pacific. Related Scientists Have Wild Ideas for Getting Rid of Space Junk Although garbage patches have captured peoples attention, Nancy Wallace, director of the marine debris program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says they arent easy to spot. You can sail through these garbage patches and you wouldnt even know youre in it sometimes, she says. Because a lot of the time the plastic, or the debris, is so small, that you wouldnt see it. Its also distributed throughout the water column or its on the bottom. Although the garbage patches dont resemble Henderson Island, theyre still chock full of rubbish. We have to be absolutely ashamed as a society that we have been so careless with our waste and our plastic, van Sebille says. A Fools Errand The garbage certainly haunted Boyan Slat a young Dutch inventor who noticed the problem while diving off the coast of Greece in 2. I came across more plastic bags than fish, he says. And I then asked myself the question, Well why dont we clean this up At the time, Slat was only 1. He dropped out of college and founded The Ocean Cleanup foundation with the hope of cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The essential idea behind Ocean Cleanup is to use the same currents that created the garbage patch and let them push plastic into a curved network of large floating barriers. The trash would the ultimately be funneled toward a central tank where it can be collected once a month. Slat plans to deploy the project next year and thinks that the North Pacific will be garbage free by the 2. But Ocean Cleanup has been hit hard with criticism as large parts of the scientific community think it will be ineffective. They are going at the problem from the wrong side, van Sebille says. It makes no sense to clean up the garbage at the end of its journey, he adds, not when you can stop it earlier and prevent it from interacting with marine life. A computer rendering shows the Ocean Cleanup system with a support vessel. Erwin Zwart The Ocean Cleanup Wallace thinks cleanup projects should target trash before it becomes a problem. We want to focus on preventing new sources of debris rather than trying to do the open ocean cleanup because its just more challenging, she says. She quotes another marine biologist who once said, If your bathroom is flooding because the sink is pouring out water, you dont start mopping up the water, you turn off the faucet, she says. Thats a great way to look at it. We cant just keep pouring more and more in and hope that we can mop it up. We have to turn that faucet off. Slat, however, thinks scientists need to attack the problem from both ends prevent garbage from ending up in the oceans, and clean up whats collecting in garbage patches. Boyan Slat, 2. 2, dropped out of university to start the Ocean Cleanup. Pierre Augier The Ocean Cleanup In a way, cleanup is prevention, Slat says. Because if the oceans will be polluted forever, if we have to forget whats already in there and the best thing we can do is not make it worse, I think that will be a very uninspiring message So now that weve shown that there is a path in which we can make the ocean clean again, I think that will actually help to motivate people to work on that prevention side as well. Turning Toward the Future But prevention will be a chore. The really scary statistic is that in the five years we will be producing as much plastic as in all of the 2. Sebille says. If you dont plug the holes, if you dont stop the wave getting into the ocean, the amounts were seeing now are minuscule compared to whats coming. So we need to act fast. Change has already begun. Corporation Bank Form A1 Downloads. A law enacted in 2. Designed to exfoliate your skin, the beads easily slip through sewage treatment plants and are carried into rivers, lakes, and oceans. The law came shortly after a study estimated that 8. We cant just keep pouring more and more in and hope that we can mop it up. We have to turn that faucet off. But its unlikely that were going to stop using plastic entirely. And van Sebille doesnt think we have to. In fact, he says it promising that the use of plastic doesnt always come hand in hand with litter. I am hopeful that its not like carbon dioxide, where the carbon dioxide that we emit is an inherent part of the burning of fossil fuels, he says. Here, the use of plastics doesnt mean it has to end up in the ocean. Instead of halting the production of plastic, experts argue we need to target areas where the problem is easiest to tackle. And that varies throughout the world. Take the U. S. and China. Although America generates nearly twice as much waste per person per day as China does, China tops the list of plastic polluters. Thats because the U. S. has the proper infrastructure to get rid of waste, whereas in rural China, its rare to have a system for trash collection. Related What Lies Ahead for Earths Shifting Continents Many projects in China are trying to develop the proper infrastructure from the ground up.