In the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, hundreds of miles from any major city, plastic bottles, children’s toys, broken electronics, abandoned fishing nets and millions more fragments of debris are floating in the water — at least 87,000 tons’ worth, researchers said Thursday. In recent years, this notorious mess has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling oceanic graveyard where everyday objects get deposited by the currents. The plastics eventually disintegrate into tiny particles that often get eaten by fish and may ultimately enter our food chain.  A study published recently in the journal Scientific Reports quantified the full extent of the so-called garbage patch: It is four to 16 times bigger than previously thought, occupying an area roughly four times the size of California and comprising an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of rubbish. While the patch was once thought to be more akin to a soup of nearly invisible microplastics, scientists now think most of the trash consists of larger pieces. And, they say, it is growing “exponentially.” “It’s just quite alarming, because you are so far from the mainland,” said Laurent Lebreton, the lead author of the study and an oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a nonprofit that is developing systems to remove ocean trash and which funded the study. “There’s no one around and you still see those common objects, like crates and bottles.” Just one word: plastics In the late summer of 2015, Mr. Lebreton and his colleagues measured the amount of plastic debris in the patch by trawling it with nets and flying overhead to take aerial photographs. Though they also found glass, rubber and wood, 99.9 percent of what the researchers pulled out of the ocean was plastic. They also recovered a startling number of abandoned plastic fishing nets, Mr. Lebreton said. These “ghost nets” made up almost half of the total weight of the debris. (One explanation is the patch’s proximity to fishing grounds; another is that fishing material is designed to be resilient at sea and stays intact longer than other objects.) “We found a few unexpected objects,” Mr. Lebreton said. “Among them were plastic toys, which I found really sad, as some of them may have come from the tsunami in Japan,” he added, referring to the 2011 disaster that sent millions of tons of debris into the ocean.  The researchers also fished out a ’90s-era Game Boy cover, construction-site helmets and a toilet seat, as well as a number of objects with Japanese and Chinese inscriptions. Other objects, Mr. Lebreton said, had “little bite marks from fish.” Some sea turtles caught near the patch were eating so much plastic that it made up around three-quarters of their diet, according to the foundation. The garbage patch is not exactly a “patch”After its discovery in the late ’90s, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch took on an image in the popular imagination akin to an island or even a seventh continent made of trash. That myth was debunked, and the patch became understood as more like a region that looked like the rest of the ocean to the naked eye, but was polluted with tiny microplastics. However the new study says that the microplastics, while still a problem, account for just 8 percent of the mass of the patch. Until now, most of the sampling used an ocean trawl designed to pick up small particles, and therefore, Mr. Lebreton said, underestimated the number of larger pieces of debris floating in the sea, like bottles, buoys and fishing nets. “Most of the mass is actually large debris, ready to decompose into microplastic,” Mr. Lebreton said. Still, “it’s not an island,” Mr. Lebreton said. “It’s very scattered.” (A visual model, however, shows how the debris is condensed in one area in the ocean.)  "I think the name ‘patch’ is a little bit confusing,” said Nancy Wallace, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program, who was not involved in the study. Describing it that way, she said, gave the wrong impression that it “would be easy to go pick it up.” There may still be time to act The worry is that, within a few decades, the larger pieces of debris could break up into microplastics, which are much harder to remove from the ocean. “It’s like a ticking time bomb,” said Joost Dubois, a spokesman for the Ocean Cleanup Foundation. The foundation says it would be almost impossible to remove the plastic already in the patch by traditional methods, like nets attached to boats. Instead, the group has developed a mechanical system that floats through the water and concentrates the plastics into denser areas that can then be collected by boats and taken back to shore to be recycled. The foundation plans to launch the first such system this summer from Alameda, Calif.  | |
| Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. Photo: Lindsey Hoshaw for The New York Times @majikphil on instagram Does the First Amendment Protect Littering of Neighborhoods with Free Newspapers? Probably not. The litterer (or publisher) would need to actually meet the person and hand them their newspaper or pamphlet for it to be legal. Billions of these "newspapers" which are essentially advertisements that become litter end up in our waterways every year. Write your legislator and tell them to Stop the Litter-ature! |
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| Estimated decomposition rates of common marine debris items. Plastics? 400 years + |
Billions of Acres of Trash Floating
in the Worlds Ocean
Plus one Boeing 777
in the Worlds Ocean
Plus one Boeing 777
Likely the infamous plane (MH370) is in the Indian Ocean, is just one more debris field among billions of acres of trash floating in the world's oceans.
Environmentalists have long warned that human abuse of the planet's oceans causes major problems for sea life and people that depend on it.
With the world's eyes now scouring the Indian Ocean for any trace of a plane that was more than 240 feet long and weighed more than 700,000 pounds, the magnitude of the ocean debris problem has become evident.
Two objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean, including one nearly 80 feet long, initially were called the best lead to date when a satellite detected them last week.
So far, though, search planes have yet to find them or any other plane debris, with speculation mounting that the larger item was a shipping container lost at sea.
No definitive records exist, but estimates for how many cargo containers go overboard range from about 700 to as many as 10,000 of the roughly 100 million that the World Shipping Council says get shipped each year.
Lost containers are only a minor part of the problem. While ship waste also adds to ocean pollution, most of the garbage comes from land.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
More than a third of the world's 7 billion people live within 60 miles of an ocean coast, and their waste inevitably reaches the water — either deliberately or indirectly.
Discarded plastics including countless bags like the kind routinely provided by retail stores and fast food restaurants — form huge, churning garbage fields in the rotating currents of ocean gyres. One in the north Pacific, nicknamed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is estimated to be at least 270,000 square miles, or an area larger than Texas.
The name “Pacific Garbage Patch” has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter —akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. While higher concentrations of litter items can be found in this area, along with other debris such as derelict fishing nets, much of the debris is actually small pieces of floating plastic that are not immediately evident to the naked eye.
The debris is continuously mixed by wind and wave action and widely dispersed both over huge surface areas and throughout the top portion of the water column. It is possible to sail through the “garbage patch” area and see very little or no debris on the water’s surface. It is also difficult to estimate the size of these “patches,” because the borders and content constantly change with ocean currents and winds. Regardless of the exact size, mass, and location of the “garbage patch,” manmade debris does not belong in our oceans and waterways and must be addressed.
Millions of sea turtles die from the ingestion of plastics each year, and one in 10 small bait fish has plastic in its stomach.
This happens in the same waters that provide roughly 15% of the animal protein consumed by people.
The world's toilet
The world uses the ocean as its toilet, and then expects that toilet to feed it.
Many island nations and coastal cities lack infrastructure sophisticated enough to deal with the waste produced. In addition, much of that waste — such as plastics — is now so durable that it lasts for decades or longer in any environment.
Dhaka, Bangladesh, for example is considered one of the fastest growing cities in the world, the capital of 15 million people could expand to more than 20 million people in the next decade, according to the United Nations. The UN Population Division projects a world population of 9 billion in 2043 and 10 billion in 2083.
This continuing, rapid expansion of the human footprint on what has increasingly come to seem a small planet, has serious implications for nearly all aspects of life on the planet.
Such growth far exceeds the capacity to deal with the garbage and sewage. All that waste in an over populated, flood prone, low-lying country periodically flushes directly into the Indian Ocean.
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| Beach combing on West Coast USA in search of Japanese tsunami flotsam. On The West Coast, Looking for Flotsam of a Disaster |
By MALIA WOLLAN, The New York Times, March 13, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — John Anderson, a plumber by trade and a beachcomber by passion, has been trolling the shores of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State for more than three decades, and along the way has discovered almost every kind of flotsam one can imagine: toys, refrigerators, even the occasional message in a bottle.
But in recent months, Mr. Anderson has been making a new, and somewhat surprising, find: dozens of buoys marked with Japanese writing, set adrift, he believes, by last year’s catastrophic tsunami.
“That wave wiped out whole towns, I’m thinking just about anything could show up here,” said Mr. Anderson, 58, of Forks, Wash. “I’ve heard people talking about floating safes full of Japanese money.”
The tsunami — which struck after a massive offshore earthquake last March 11 — sent a wall of water sweeping across much of Japan’s eastern coastline and generated more than 20 million tons of debris, a jumbled mass of houses, cars, boats and belongings. And while it’s not clear what percentage of that wreckage was sucked back out to sea and what remains afloat, what is certain is that some of it is slowly making its way to American shores.
Computer models run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and by researchers from the University of Hawaii predict that debris has moved eastward from the coast of Japan, driven by currents and wind. The models predict that bits of detritus will begin washing up on the northwestern Hawaiian Islands this spring and along the western coast of the United States and Canada in early 2013.
“We don’t think there is a massive debris field out there,” said Nancy Wallace, director of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program. “It will come up in little spurts here and there, a small trickle over years.”
Researchers think most of it will never reach shore and will instead get caught up and broken apart in the “great Pacific garbage patch” a swirling gyre of currents in the middle of the Pacific Ocean known to collect and recirculate floating garbage.
But beachcombers say the debris has already begun to reach land.
“I feel like Paul Revere running through town, saying ‘The British are coming!’ and no lights are coming on,” said a retired oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer. “The tsunami debris is here, but no one is listening.”
Co-author of “Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession With Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science,” Mr. Ebbesmeyer, 69, also publishes Beachcombers’ Alert, a newsletter on all things flotsam and jetsam. He counts some 10,000 people in the loose-knit network of serious beachcombers who read his newsletter and report their seashore findings to him.
Mr. Ebbesmeyer said he had received more than 400 documented sightings of large black plastic and white Styrofoam buoys found between Kodiak, Alaska, and Humboldt County, Calif. Many of the buoys are marked with Japanese characters, including the names of oyster companies destroyed by the tsunami. The buoys corroborate computer modeling by Mr. Ebbesmeyer and an oceanographer colleague that predicted debris would begin landing as early as last fall.
Despite a rise in interest and reported sightings, officials have not confirmed that any of the items found along the West Coast originated in Japan. “There is debris from Asia that comes to shore all the time, and it’s not necessary tsunami-related,” Ms. Wallace said.
Thus far, only two tsunami debris clusters have been confirmed, a wrecked Japanese fishing boat spotted by a Russian ship that was en route from Honolulu to Vladivostok, Russia, and another vessel located by the United States Coast Guard nearer to Japan.
Finding flotsam over some 5,000 miles of open ocean is not easy. A month after the disaster, the debris was no longer visible in NOAA’s satellite images. To assist in the search, officials have requested higher-resolution satellite images from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which runs satellite-based mapping and monitoring for the Defense Department. In recent months, NOAA reached out to the commercial shipping and fishing groups, asking boats to report any large debris sightings in the water.
NOAA has also called on a growing cadre of beachcombers to keep a lookout.
Since January, the number of e-mails NOAA has received reporting tsunami debris has increased threefold. The Web page answering frequently asked questions about the tsunami gets more visitors than any of the program’s other pages. NOAA also has a smartphone app for tracking debris found on beaches.
Whether tsunami-related or not, officials encourage beachgoers to pick up and properly dispose of any garbage they find. “Radioactivity is extremely unlikely,” Ms. Wallace said, in part because the damaged Fukushima reactor did not begin leaking radioactive material until after the tsunami wave retreated.
Tom Baty, an avid fisherman and a retiree, spends up to three hours a day walking the beaches of Point Reyes National Seashore in California, where he picks up trash and sometimes tracks the location of plastic debris with a GPS device. Mr. Baty, 54, regularly finds tidbits of junk marked with Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters, which makes him skeptical of the reports of tsunami debris up the West Coast.
Still, he said he was curiously awaiting the arrival of any floating evidence of that violent event. Mr. Baty is one of a ragtag army of unofficial seaside detectives who provide useful information on the patterns and whereabouts of ocean garbage to government officials and environmental groups. “You walk up to something on the tide line,” he said, “and you scratch your head and think, ‘Now where did that come from?’ ”
Flotsam and Jetsam Defined
In maritime law, flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict are specific kinds of shipwreck. The words have specific nautical meanings, with legal consequences in thelaw of admiralty and marine salvage:Flotsam is floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo
Jetsam is part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo that is purposely cast overboard or jettisoned to lighten the load in time of distress and that sinks or is washed ashore
Lagan (also called ligan) is cargo that is lying on the bottom of the ocean, sometimes marked by a buoy, which can be reclaimed
Derelict is cargo that is also on the bottom of the ocean, but which no one has any hope of reclaiming (in other maritime contexts, derelict may also refer to a drifting abandoned ship)
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| Photo: @BrianSkerry for @Natgeo Yellow Gobi in an aluminum can on the bottom of Suruga Bay off the coast of Japan. Check out Brian Skerry at www.brianskerry.com |
Paraphrased from Elisabeth Rosenthal
"Is It Time to Bag the Plastic?" for The New York Times
Published: May 18, 2013
In my New York City apartment, the kitchen drawers, the coat closet, even the wine rack are overflowing with a type of waste that is rapidly disappearing elsewhere—the used plastic shopping bag.
Many countries and a handful of American cities have more or less done away with this supposed convenience item, by discouraging its use through plastic-bag taxes at checkout counters or outright bans. Walk down the streets of Dublin or Seattle or San Francisco and there is barely a bag in sight. Life continues.
“It didn’t take people very long to accommodate at all,” said Dick Lilly, manager for waste prevention in Seattle, where a plastic-bag ban took effect last summer. “Basically overnight those grocery and drugstore bags were gone.”
“Plastic shopping bags are an enormous problem for New York City,” said Ron Gonen, the deputy commissioner of sanitation for recycling and waste reduction, noting that the city pays $10 million annually to send 100,000 tons of plastic bags that are tossed in the general trash to landfills in South Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. That, he points out, “is amazing to think of, because a plastic bag doesn’t weigh much at all.”
All across the country, plastic bags are the bane of recycling programs. When carelessly placed into recycling bins for general plastic — which they often are — the bags jam and damage expensive sorting machines, which cost huge amounts to repair.
“We have to get people to start carrying reusable bags,” Mr. Gonen said. “We’re going to do what we can to start moving the needle.”
“The question,” he continued, “is do we use a carrot or a stick to change behavior?”
So far New York has used carrots, to little effect. (More about that later.) Unfortunately, most experts believe it will take a stiff stick to break a habit as ingrained as this one is in the United States. (In many European countries, like France and Italy, the plastic bag thing never fully caught on.)
In my case, I know I should bring a cloth bag along for shopping trips. And I do — when I remember. But experience shows that even environmentally conscious people need prodding and incentives to change their behavior permanently.
Where they exist, bans and charges or taxes (when set high enough) have been extremely successful and often raise revenue for other environmental projects. Unfortunately, these tactics are deeply unpopular in most of the nation.
After Austin, Tex., passed a bag ban earlier this year and with Dallas considering one, State Representative Drew Springer, a Republican, introduced the Shopping Bag Freedom Act in the Legislature. That act essentially bans bag bans, protecting the right of merchants to provide bags of any material to customers.
Businesses often fight hard against plastic-bag laws. When in 2007, Seattle first tried to impose a fee of 20 cents for each plastic bag, the American Chemistry Council financed a popular referendum that voted down the “bag tax,” before it even took effect, Mr. Lilly said.
It took several more years for the city to regroup and impose its current ban. Plastic shopping bags are forbidden in stores, and though paper bags may be used, each one costs the shopper 5 cents. (There are exemptions, however: restaurants managed to secure one for takeout food, for example.)
A number of states are considering some form of statewide bans or taxes. And last month, Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia, introduced a bill to create a national 5-cent tax on all disposable plastic or paper bags provided by stores to customers. Some of the revenue would be used to create a Disposable Carryout Bag Trust Fund and to maintain national parks.
Actually, the idea of a bag tax may not seem so foreign to federal lawmakers: for the past three years, Washington has had its own 5-cent tax. Although bag use there dropped sharply, many experts feel that the charge should be even higher. In Ireland, for example, the bag tax is about 30 cents per bag.
By any measure, New Yorkers are laggards on the issue. In 2008, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg tried unsuccessfully to pass a bag tax of 6 cents. More recently, New York State has preferred to attack the problem with soft diplomacy. Since 2009, large stores throughout the state providing plastic bags have been required to take them back for recycling. But there is not much enforcement, Mr. Gonen said, and the program “hasn’t put a dent” in the numbers.
Frank Convery, an economist at University College, Dublin, who has studied the effects of Ireland’s 10-year-old bag tax — the first in the world — is skeptical: “As regards the plastic bag issue, whatever is done has to be mandatory,” he said. “The New York model is designed to fail.”
Mr. Gonen said cities got a lot of complaints about plastic bags. So why wouldn’t that inspire more of them to take action? It is another paradox of environmental politics — just as when New Yorkers show strong support for a bike-sharing plan but protest when bike-sharing racks appear on their sidewalk.
In a city where dog owners are forced to pick up their pets’ waste and are precluded from smoking in parks, why is it so hard to get people to employ reusable bags for shopping?
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A sample of microbeads and other tiny plastic particles taken from Lake Ontario. The Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 sailed through Congress in an age when most legislation plods.
Photo: ©Brendan Bannon/Polaris, via Newscom
Microbeads
The Great Lakes are being threatened by an invasion of tiny plastic orbs called microbeads, but lawmakers from one state that depends on this huge freshwater ecosystem have failed to do anything about it. That stat is, of course, New York, where lawmakers this year sat on a good bill to ban these unnecessary bits of plastic.
The beads and other bits of tiny "microplastic" debris slip through wastewater treatment plants and have been found in waterbodies the world over. Antipollution activists argue that limiting the use of cosmetics, which can have hundreds of thousands of beads in a bottle, can help limit environmental risk.
Photo: ©Lloyd DeGrane, Alliance for the Great Lakes
Plastic is the main contaminant in the huge garbage gyres that pollute all the world's oceans. Now researchers have found a stunning amount of plastic in the largest freshwater ecosystem on earth, the Great Lakes. And an increasing amount of it consists of the tiny plastic orbs used as abrasives in products like toothpaste and anti-acne lotions.
Plastic debris washed up on a beach in Azores, Portugal, could have originated anywhere in the world and traveled for years to get here.
Photo: ©Marcus Eriksen
Ultimately, the only sure way to slow the pollution of oceans will be to cap population growth. That is a subject that no one wants to talk about.