The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is usually imagined as a landfill in the middle of the ocean. However, it is spread out in an area that is roughly two times the size of Texas. It is made mostly of plastic, roughly 80,000 tonnes (1 Tonne=2,204.6lbs). A question may arise, how did this plastic get there? The answer is simple, the ocean’s currents move everything, including the 28,800 bath toys that have been found all over the world. Donovan Hohn wrote a book about this cargo spillage called Moby Duck. It is about the journey of the ducks and other bath toys from start to finish. Hohn follows the stories around the world to see how the toys survived their thousands of miles journey.  Moby Duck is just one of the many examples of trash being spilled into the ocean, purposefully or by accident. 

There are roughly 80,000 tonnes of trash floating around in the currents of the Pacific Ocean. Majority of the trash in the world’s oceans are found in garbage patches. There are multiple garbage patches throughout the world, however, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one of the largest. Garbage patches build up in ocean gyres, which are just large whirlpools in the ocean. There are five gyres in total, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of one of the Pacific Ocean gyres, the Eastern Gyre. Two of the others are found in the Atlantic, and the last is in the Indian Ocean (“Garbage Patches”). The Great Pacific Garbage patch is mostly between Hawaii and California and covers roughly 1.6 million square kilometers. 

To understand why the plastic is moving around in the ocean, you have to understand ocean currents. Ocean currents are simply how the water moves around due to outside factors such as temperature, density, wind, tides and weather. Cold water settles to the bottom, and hot water is pushed up to the surface. As the sun warms the water, it begins to form convection currents which result in the water continuously circulating around like a gyre (“Ocean Currents”). 

Another issue with the pollution in the ocean is that the currents affect where the trash ends up. In the book “Moby Duck” the author tracks the debris of a shipment container spill to every continent, as well as how the currents work and shift through the year. He continues on hHis journey to many harsh places, such as the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a remote island, where the container ship spilled, in the northern Pacific Ocean as well as the wild coast of Alaska, he learns a lot about trash. He also visits China to a plastic factory, and travels into the Atlantic Ocean to see how the Floatees could have traveled through the arctic to wind up in New England. He travels all over the world to follow the currents, which pushed the Floatees. The oceanographers that Hohn learned from explained that tides, which are currents, tend to bring in the most floatsam, or trash when the shore is in a v-shape, or where there are inlets. This causes the trash to be funneled into one spot, which is a trshfinders heaven. With this information, I believe that it should be possible to come up with a way to trap trash, before it reaches the shore. 

The majority of the garbage found in the GPGP are plastics, from micro to mega plastics. The size of the plastic is defined into four different classes: Microplastics (0.05-.05cm), Mesoplastics (.05-5cm), Macroplastics (5-50cm) and Megaplastics (>50cm). Megaplastics account for around 92% of the total mass. Most of the plastics, no matter the size, are usually polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), as well as fishing gear. There are also other classifications for plastics, Type H means the plastic is hard, or a sheet or film. Type N means the plastic is a type of net/ rope. Type P means pre-production plastics like cylinders. Finally, Type F plastics are usually made of foam (“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”). All of these plastics are made from harmful chemicals that do not ever completely degrade, it just gets smaller and smaller. Plastic will always be there, even when it is so small you can’t see it with your naked eye. That is when the plastics can get dangerous.  

    Often times, the plastic and trash pollutes the habitat, or ends up in an animal’s stomach. As it is seen in many popular images, sea turtles will eat plastic bags thinking they are their favorite food, the jellyfish. Once they eat the plastic it can kill them because of the excessive amount of harmful chemicals in the plastic, or the animal dies due to starvation. It is estimated that over 700 marine species come across plastic at telecast once in their life (Henn). Albatrosses, a type of bird feeds their chick plastic resin pellets because they think they are fish eggs, which can cause the chicks organs to rupture or for them to starve. 

“The Laysan albatross is probably the most voracious plastivore on the planet… naturalists recently recovered 252 plastic items from the carcass of a single Laysan albatross chick… Two cigarette lighters and a dozen-odd bottle caps appear to be good as new. Somewhere among those 252 items may be the remains of a Floatee” (pg 72.)

Curtis Ebesmeyer, an oceanographer that helps Hohn through his Floatee journey touches on the dangers of eating plastic, as well as referencing what Hohn is after, a Floatee. Eating the plastic is not the only issue when it comes to plastic in natural ecosystems. Not only does eating the plastic cause issues, once an animal eats the plastic, they have a higher risk of falling ill. Corals, when in contact with plastic are 89% more likely of contracting a disease or dying (Reddy). The Animals don’t eat them, however they are still extremely dangerous, fishing nets in the sea pose an issue for larger swimming animals. They don’t see the nets and swim into them. They can sometimes get stuck and tangled in them. The nets are so heavy that the animals tire themselves out trying to get untangled until they drown. 

    Luckily the United Nations have been trying to reduce the occurrence of ghost netting’s. 

“High-seas drift nets were banned by the United Nations in 1992, they were nets with a mesh size of about four inches, but they were like, fifty miles long. The Japanese would sit there and interweave these for fifty miles. There were something like a thousand drift nets being used every night in the 1980s… Well, they were catching all the large animals, and it clearly could not go on” (pg 42).

The problem with the nets, was that the fishing crews would usually lose half of them each year, and the nets don’t break down for over half a century (pg 43). I think that is is very smart of the UN for banning these nets. If it were to continue, there would be more issues other than just the plastic in the ocean. The nets could cause too much strain on the population of the fish as well as the Japanese could also kill animals that were not intended on being caught. 

Most plastics actually sink to the bottom of the ocean, such as the fishing nets as they break down. The ocean floor below the GPGP is believed to be covered in layers upon layers of plastics and other synthetic materials (Evers). Many problems arise with the sinking plastic, such as how it affects sea life, and bottom life. It’s estimated that 70% of plastic sinks to the bottom of the ocean (McCormick). The sinking plastic is just pollution the sea floor, while building up more and more every year. Due to the plastic sinking, it is also hard to get an exact measurement on how large the GPGP actually is. 

It is important to understand that even though the plastic is on the bottom of the ocean, it is actively impacting humans. Through a process known as bioaccumulation, plastics are inevitably being ingested by humans. Bioacumulation is basically following the food chain from a small prey organisms to humans, and how much plastic is overall being eaten (“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”). For starters, a single zooplankton eats a very small piece of microplastic. Then a small fish such a herring eats zooplankton, as well as some larger bits of microplastics. Now a larger fish such as tuna would eat the herring. Tuna can weigh up to 800 pounds, much of that is fat, which comes from eating herring. Now imagine how much plastic has gone through all of these organisms, leaching harmful chemicals into the skin. You eat the tissue of tuna, and other fish such as salmon. I don’t want to be eating plastic chemicals, do you?

While Moby Duck sprinkles in how container spills affect the ecosystem in the gyres such as the GPGP. The book however gave me a lot of insight on how to track the debris, and how you can fix small issues such as coastal beach pollution by just going out and picking up trash while looking for treasures like Beachcombers do, or by helping to predict where the most trash is going to be by using OSCURS predictions. The book gives a comprehensible example of why human kind as a whole needs to be more careful with its plastic consumption. 

As you can see, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge issue, not just for America, but for the entire world. The oceans currents can shift, and send tons of trash to Japan’s shore, and then could bring it back out and dump it in Hawaii. Thankfully, companies like 4Ocean, and Parley are using plastic from the ocean and turning them into recycled goods. They use their platform to raise awareness while cleaning the ocean. 

Parley is an environment company that not only helps clean the ocean, but is trying to stop the use of one-time-use products such as plastic bags. Parley also helps scientists gather important information on animals that have been impacted with climate change, or ocean pollution. One popular collaboration that parley has done is with Adidas. They have been making shoes, and jerseys that have been worn in the NHL, MLS, and other international soccer league teams have endorsed Parley by wearing jerseys that are made of 100% recycled material such as Real Madrid and FC Bayern. 

4Ocean is another company that is helping clean up animal ecosystems, while also raising awareness. Every month, they feature a different animal with a limited edition bracelet. They donate part of their sales to programs helping that animal, and they also pledge to pick up one pound of trash for every bracelet sold. 4Ocean has designed skimmers that are automatic, and they just float along the surface of the ocean and pick up trash. When they are full, they change the filters, sort through the plastic and recycle them appropriately. 

Companies like Parley, and 4Ocean are great just because they use other companies that have huge followings like adidas and raise awareness of all of the issues. Cleaning Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as well as all of the other ocean pollution is a very ominous project to take on. However, we humans have to think of all of the lives we are affecting, such as the Laysan Albatross, or all of the turtles that are eating plastic bags. Think about all of the innocent animals that die every year because of ghost netting. If we don’t want to think about how we affect other creatures, think about how we can harm ourselves with bioaccumulation. If we hurt the oceans, we end up hurting ourselves. Next time you are throwing something out ask yourself, “can this be recycled”?

Works Cited

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