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We Must Clean Up The Patch

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We Must Clean Up the Patch Imagine chicken noodle soup. Delicious, right? With its chunks of chicken, noodles, and carrots all mixed together thanks to a delicious broth. Now, imagine this as the ocean. What should be clear water is now cloudy broth with chunks of plastic, fishing nets and shoes strewn about the mix. This is what Captain Charles Moore saw when he stumbled across the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 1997, Moore took his research vessel through a stretch of the Pacific Ocean called the North Pacific High while traveling from Hawaii to California. He discovered a “thin plastic soup … lightly seasoned with plastic flakes, bulked out here and there with ‘dumplings’: buoys, net clumps, floats, crates, and other ‘macro debris’” (Moore 4). The small plastic pieces are due to photodegradation, which is the process of the sun breaking larger plastics into tinier and tinier pieces (Turgeon). It was estimated in 2014 that there are some 2,000 billion pieces of plastic just on the surface of the North Pacific Ocean, although the true number cannot be calculated (VOX). Moore’s estimation of the weight from the surface plastics he saw in 1997 was some 6.7 million tons, the same amount of trash dumped into the largest landfill at the time in Los Angeles (Moore 18). Moore’s discovery led to a flurry of research on the causes and possible solutions. The most effective solution for cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is to use detainees of American prisons and

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