Garbage Patch Essay

Every day, many people around the world dump trash into rivers or off of boats. To them it’s “out of sight, out of mind”, but it’s not that easy for inhabitants of the ocean. As the garbage flows from rivers into the oceans, it eventually combines with the garbage already floating in the ocean and results in garbage patches, which all

This is a combination of currents and wind that perform a circular vortex motion that collects trash. The vortex motion pulls trash in, while the middle is very calm, so it stays in one place. Most people think of an island filled with trash when they hear the words Garbage Patch. But in reality, these patches are made of small pieces of plastic, called micro plastics that cannot always be seen by the naked eye. The satellite images do not show what we think would be a giant patch of garbage. (National Geographic) “The patch is not an island like most people envision, you can’t walk on it but is more of a plastic soup.” (Moore). According to the website, “¬How Stuff Works”, 90% of this debris is plastic. That is over 3.5 million pounds of plastic. The patch is a gathering place for all the junk dumped in our oceans. Some of the most harmful items, such as expanded Styrofoam, polypropylene, and P.E.T. (polyethylene terephthalate), found in plant fertilizer, has been located in this patch. The plastic is not biodegradable but is photodegradable. In other words, the larger pieces break down into smaller pieces, so the patch just gets bigger every day. Approximately 80 percent of the trash is from the people here on land and the other 20 percent is dumped from ships, fisherman, oil rigs and spilled containers (How stuff works).

More than six million tons of garbage finds it’s way into the oceans. Due to the currents, the garbage ends up in two different locations. Several hundred miles off the coast of Japan lies the Western Garbage Patch, and close to California lies the second patch, known as the Eastern Garbage Patch. Together these two patches of garbage mix to form the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

In the article When the Mermaids Cry” The Great Plastic Tide by Claire Le Guern Lytle, she wrote “For more than 50 years, global production and consumption of plastics have continued to rise. An estimated 299 million tons of plastics were produced in 2013, representing a 4 percent increase over 2012, and confirming and upward trend over the past years” This means that more and more trash is added to the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the ocean. Almost everything around us is made out of plastic, this is later misused and ending in the wrong place. The Center for Biological Diversity wrote “In the first decade of this century, we made more plastic than all the plastic in history up to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of plastic end up in the world’s oceans. Most ocean pollution starts out on land and is carried by wind and rain to the sea. Once in the water, there is a near-continuous accumulation of waste.” Our plastic is misplaced and it escalates from there. However, plastic pollution hurts us as well. “Trash in the water compromises the health of humans, wildlife and the livelihoods that depend on a healthy ocean;” wrote a non-profit group called Ocean Conservation. If our oceans are covered in trash, everyone that relies on the ocean is going to suffer. The effect is not just in our health, it also affects our economy. Ocean Conservation also

In the article, "Plastic in Our Oceans", Kimberly Amaral discusses the everyday uses of plastic and how it can be beneficial to humans, but harmful to marine life. As fishermen casually dump waste overboard, animals mistake it for food sources, such as a turtle mistaking a plastic grocery bag for a jellyfish. From the trash brought out to sea, gyres, large circulations of water, carry the garbage through currents, spreading it to all over the ocean, specifically to the central gyre. Amaral notes common ways for marine life to die from plastic, which include entanglement by plastic rings, consumption of plastic bags and pellets which stuff the intestines and lead to health problems, and suffocation. As researchers today work hard to discover

The great pacific garbage patch, or garbage island, as many refer to it, is a region made up entirely of waste. It is around 20 million square kilometers (7.7 square miles) in size. This is the result of careless sailors and beachgoers constantly throwing what they do not want to hold on to into the ocean. The litter gets carried through a variety of currents moving in a clockwise direction into the north pacific subtropical gyre. There, it all adds up to form a pile of garbage twice the size of texas.[8]

Over the few years, humans have discarded millions of tons of garbage into the oceans. Ever wonder where the cup you threw out this morning will end up? Or the plastic spoon you used for lunch? How about the cap of a water bottle? The calamitous plastic ends up in the water, taking thousands of years to decompose. The consumption of plastic by the marine life is perilous and the leading cause of death for life on shore.

Currently, 300 million tons of plastic are manufactured to supply the world demand and between 5 and 13 million tons are found in the ocean (Katsnelson, 2015). Based on current trends, by 2050, 2,000 million tons of plastic will be manufactured to supply the worlds demand for plastic, meaning more pollution in the oceans (Vaughan, 2016, May 23). As Richard Thompson has stated, “While some of the plastic floats at the surface, the heavier pieces sink to the ocean floor making it hard to clean up the waste” (Katsnelson, 2015). Some of the waste comes from fishing materials or cargo ships. For example, fishing nets, buoys and other debris that is left behind from fishermen lead to the

One of the issues that is currently harming the ocean is the presence of pollution. Studies have shown that over the past thirty years, people have increased their use of plastics and synthetic materials and recently it has become even more abundant (Laist). The amount of plastic debris that has entered the ocean is partially due to people 's inability to properly dispose of plastic and waste. This has immeasurable effects on the physical ecosystem, as well as the creatures who inhabit it. While plastic is very buoyant, it takes a very long time to degrade, and it is usually eaten by

Plastic comes in innumerable shapes and sizes; it is used for various purposes. We use it to bag our groceries, pay with it, drink from it, occasionally eat off it or unwrap it to get to food, etc. The functionality of plastic is continual and surrounds us, so what is the con of plastic? When plastic cups, bottles, and bags are abandoned in the street, the wind transports and the rain seizes them into storm gutters, tributaries and eventually the ocean. When rubbish and plastic originate from terrestrial territory and enters the sea it is swept away by an eddy vortex called the North Pacific Gyre. Charles Moore discovered the North Pacific Gyre, or also known as “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in 1997. This garbage patch stretches hundreds of miles off the shoreline of California and Hawaii. Scientists estimated its size to be twofold the size of Texas or maybe even more substantial. This garbage patch contains some ten million tons of litter. According to Lindsey Blomberg, who wrote the article titled The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, writes, “What is known for certain is that the marine debris in the North Pacific Gyre is 80% plastic and it's mostly coming from land.” (1) Although the trash is in the ocean, it not only affects us but, wildlife on land or in sea too. Furthermost of the waste in the ocean consists of "microplastics" which according to Kitt Doucette, who wrote the article titled An Ocean Of Plastic is, “Larger chunks of waste that have been reduced to tiny

In the documentary “Inside the Garbage of the World”, the main social problem being explained is that there has been a great influx of plastic and other type of garbage in oceans and their beaches. This buildup of pollution has largely affected the wildlife population ranging from animals on the beaches to the creatures of the ocean. In oceans, what is called ‘garbage patches’, a large buildup of garbage that flow to one area in the oceans, are being created. Approximately 50 percent of all plastic sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor but about 2 times that much is actually already on the ocean floor. In fact, according to the documentary, there is a garbage patch that is to the left of California that is the size of half of the United States. Each year, about 4.7 million tons of plastic goes in the ocean a year and it is estimated that by 2050, there will be another 33 billion tons of plastic added to the present amount. Eighty percent of the current pollution comes from the land. According to marine researchers, twice as much plastic debris is one the ocean floor than it was 10 years ago. In the futures, plastic will break down into smaller pieces of plastic, creating a bigger problem from the habitat. This plastic pollution is one of the leading cause for beach and ocean inhabiting creatures be extinct because animals are mistaking these plastic pieces for food. When scientist began to dissect beach animals such as birds, they discovered that at least fifteen pounds of

Recycling and going green has been at the forefront of everyone's mind for the last 10 years. It has become a major concern to able to preserve the planet and reverse some of the damage that society has been inflicting over the last two hundred years. Everyone's concerned with emissions and electric cars but the world is in fact over two-thirds water. So naturally what society should be concerned about should be the oceans in the pollution and negative human impact that people have placed on them. Part of the problem as an initial estimate of the amount of plastic is not accurate. Not to mention incredible environmental and ecological effects the plastic has on marine life. Ocean plastic has reached a critical level where human intervention needs to take place.

The oceans of the world seem to be under attack from mankind and nature itself. Global warming is causing the melting of the polar ice causing the level of the oceans to rise. Garbage patches of plastic particles are floating in huge areas with some settling to the ocean floor. Acidification of the ocean water from fertilizer use is causing large so called dead zones where oxygen deprivation kills off plant and aquatic life. Many areas of the ocean have been dumping grounds for garbage, whether sludge like, solid, or chemical in nature. This paper will concentrate on the dead zones of the oceans, their causes, and the possible solutions to this problem.

In “Better Planet Garbage Patch”, Thomas Kostigen tells his experience of traveling to the Eastern Garbage Patch to witness this growing problem first-hand. Kostigen describes this area to be one and a half times the United States with a depth of 100 feet or more (Krostigen). The size of this garbage patch is so massive, encompassing around ten million square miles of the North Pacific Gyre. On the other hand, according to “An Ocean of Plastic”, Doucette claims that nobody knows its exact size or if it has any boundaries at all. (Doucette). Although there have been many estimations on the size

Oceans make up seventy percent of earth's surface, and are the largest place to sustain and accumulate various species. However, humans' wastes, such as oil spill, industrial toxic wastewater, and