The Pacific Ocean is a Plastic Garbage Dump 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).

Pacific Ocean. It is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, stretching 10 million miles from

Ocean currents corral trillions of decomposing plastic items and other trash into gigantic, swirling garbage patches (Pacific Trash Vortex)

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.

More than 750,000 pieces of microplastic can be found in just one square kilometer of it. Approximately 80 percent of its debris comes from land, 10 percent is made up of over 700,000 tons of commercial fishing nets, and the remaining 10 percent consists miscellaneous objects discarded by recreational and commercial ships. What is it? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The garbage patch lies in the Pacific Ocean between the west coasts of America and the East coasts of Asia. Because the effects on marine life caused by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are detrimental to their habitat, diet, and

Marine debris is more than ugly, it kills. There are two proposed plans to cleanup the North Pacific Garbage Island. An island that is made of garbage, primarily plastic. It is over 100 kilometers wide. That is an unbelievable amount of trash. That trash island is floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and California. It has been spun together over time by currents, and the atmospheric pressure in the middle of the ocean is stronger than average. The island’s plastic has melted together, creating a bed of plastic for the rest of the trash to lie on. A a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a

In 1988, it was determined that the United States alone, was producing 30 million tonnes of plastic per year (Derraik, J.G.B., 2002). This can be compared with the global and annual production of 260 million tonnes of plastic as of 2012 (Pearson, E., 2014). Plastics are lightweight, durable, and cheap to make. This makes them incredibly easy to sell and manufacture. However, these attributes are many of the reasons why plastics are the most prominent type of marine debris, and why they are a serious hazard to various ecosystems and the organisms that live within them (Derraik, J.G.B.,

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]

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

The ocean’s vast marine life is dying more and more each year due to plastic. Over 100,000 marine animals die each year from plastic entanglement and ingestion says Gianna Andrews, author of the 2012 “Plastic in our Oceans Affecting Human Health” on ser.carlton. Chemicals in the plastic are also intoxicating the marine life. Reducing the use of plastic could save thousands of sea animals and make our ocean a cleaner place. There are many questions concerning our ocean, like how much plastic is in our ocean? What are the effects? How do we stop it? These questions will be answered by explaining and describing our ocean’s plastic.

In this book, Newman discusses debris in the ocean, specifically the North Pacific Central Gyre. She describes how vast and calm the gyre is and states how it almost appears a “liquid desert” (pp.15). Newman explains how people expect this gyre to be a patch of floating garbage, but in reality, it looks clean since the plastic floats just below the surface. She mentions how the debris rarely escape the gyre due to strong currents. Lastly, Newman states how the debris is mostly plastic pieces that have “broken down into pieces no bigger than a kernel of unpopped popcorn”

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.

of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the exact size remains unknown. In addition, Doucette warns us that this patch contains more than ten million tons of waste. She describes the area to be a “fetid swamp of debris where tiny bits of decaying plastic outweigh zooplankton- one of the most prolific and abundant organisms on the planet- by a ration of six-to-one”(Doucette). It is now apparent that the amount of plastic particles residing in our oceans is damaging the natural habit and this trash is not going anywhere. Due to the currents in the ocean, plastic particles are

Plastic debris pollution in the marine environment is greatest in oceanographic convergences and eddies, where plastic bits accumulate (Day 1986). Gyres make up a large proportion, approximately seventy-five percent, of what we refer to as the open ocean, or the area of the ocean that does not consist of coastal areas. Gyres are an area of junction that forces plastic into a central area with little to no wind and current influence. In oceanography, a subtropical gyre is a connected system of ocean currents rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern. Typically they form in large open ocean areas. A large volume of high-pressure air