Voyage to the centre of the 'Plastic Vortex'
May 25, 2009 by Guy Newey
Doug Woodring, an entrepreneur and conservationist, shows rubbish on a beach on the south side of Hong Kong which has been left uncleaned. The United Nations Environment Programme says around 13,000 pieces of plastic litter are found in every square kilometre of sea.
A group of conservationists and scientists is due to set sail for an obscure corner of the Pacific Ocean in the coming months to explore a vast swirl of waste known as the "Plastic Vortex."
The giant gloop -- which some scientists estimate is twice the size of Texas -- has been gradually building over the last 60 years as Asia and the United States tossed their unwanted goods into the ocean.
Everything from flip-flops to plastic bags have been slowly broken down by the sun's rays into small particles, and ocean tides have meant much of it has settled in a spiralling pattern just below the ocean surface between Hawaii and the mainland United States.
After only coming to scientific attention in recent years, little remains known about the vortex, also known as the "Eastern Garbage Patch," so the expedition hopes to find out if the plastic can be fished out of the sea -- and what can be done with it.
Jim Dufour, a senior engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, who is advising the trip, said establishing the extent of the problem was vital for the future health of the oceans.
"Importance is an understatement, it's imperative. It will take many years to understand and fix the problem," he told AFP.
The United Nations Environment Programme says around 13,000 pieces of plastic litter are found in every square kilometre of sea, but the problem is worst in five ocean gyres, or spiralling ocean currents, the worst of which is in the North Pacific.
The plastic has become so small most of it cannot be seen by satellite pictures, but the volume means the poisonous soup is being unknowingly vacuumed up by marine life and birds, and much of it is heavy with toxic chemicals, organisers of the trip say.
"That means the little piece of plastic the fish eats is actually a little toxic bomb," said Doug Woodring, an entrepreneur and conservationist who lives in Hong Kong and will lead the expedition.
As a result, a lot of the toxins could be getting into the human food chain.
Woodring said the location of the swirl -- more than 500 nautical miles from the west coast of the United States -- meant it remains a mystery for scientists.
"It is like going to outer space," he told AFP.
The 50-day voyage will head from San Francisco to Hawaii and back, passing through the vortex twice.
It will be led by a 150-foot-tall (45-metre-tall) ship, the "Kaisei" -- which means Ocean Planet in Japanese. Accompanying will be a fishing trawler, which will be trying out techniques to catch the waste without destroying too much marine life.
"You have to have netting that is small enough to catch a lot but big enough to let plankton go through it," said Woodring.
Ocean scientists and a documentary crew will be on the trip, which also hopes to examine whether the waste can be recycled or even used to create fuel.
The mission -- which is still looking for funding to meet its two million US dollar budget -- has received the backing of the United Nations Environment Programme and sponsorship from water company Brita.
But the swirl's location in international waters meant it was difficult to get any government support to clean it up.
"There is no jurisdiction, no government who is entirely responsible, so there has been no push to clean it up. The world doesn't know it is out there," said Woodring.
Several other trips have either made or planned journeys to the vortex, but Dufour says this will be the most scientific-focused venture.
"It will be the first scientific endeavour studying sea surface pollutants, impact to organisms at intermediate depths, bottom sediments, and the impacts to organisms caused by the leaching of chemical constituents in discarded plastic," he said.
But for everyone involved in the project, the phenomenon only highlights the wider issue of reducing waste.
"The real fix is back on land. We need to provide the means, globally, to care for our disposable waste," said Dufour.
(c) 2009 AFP
Oct 22, 2007 |
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Progress, lots of kids and money is all that matters!!
Be happy and consume!
Stop talking about it and fix it. I'm so sick of this environmentalist foolishness. I do more for the environment than these groups.
Just clean it up? Did you actually read this article?
This is an area twice the size of Texas, and the stuff is drifting.
As for the "environmentalist foolishness", only a real fool would shoot the messenger. This is an international problem.
Did you actually read this article and think about what they are doing and not doing? Velanarris did!
This Junket that they want to spend two million dollars on so that they can cruise from California to Hawaii and back is absurd. Give me the two million and I will rent a trawler and go clean up the worst of it while at the same time seeing what works and what doesn't.
And I won't be cruising on to Hawaii for a vacation either!!!!
furthermore, we know full well that bacteria and more uv radiation will continue to break down the plastic over a time span. could be ten years, ten thousand years, or ten million. but we know that will happen , and we also know there is no feasible and economic means to clean up the mess we made. if there were plastic eating microbes out there that could clean up the mess faster, theyd already be doing it, so theres no point in thinking we can engineer them.
Portable generator that turns trash into electricity
http://www.physor...820.html
*They are "going there and not cleaning it up" because it isn't just a simple matter of scooping out old bottles and plastic bags and then dumping them -- Where exactly do you propose to dump a pile of garbage 2X the size of Texas? How do you capture it without killing off a mother lode of sea creatures? How do you ship it to a dumping ground, assuming one can be found, once it has been captured? These (and other questions you could come up with if you bothered to think it through for 5 minutes) are some of the logistical problems they need to figure out.
* Bacteria and UV radiation will break down the trash to sizes which are perfect for killing plankton, which cannot digest plastics. Dead plankton spells trouble for everyone.
*Anybody who says a mess twice the size of Texas can be cleaned up for $2 million or less is either (a) being disingenuous (b)willfully ignorant of just exactly how big Texas is, or (c) not actually interested in seeing anyone take action of any sort to clean up the mess.
Good heavens! Who could have imagined that a great site like Physorg would end up hosting so many trolls?
I have and it's a lot of hard work, some of it quite dangerous -- a single misstep when deploying an instrument and one can easily be lost overboard.
I've had the honor of knowing a great number of oceanographers in my time and virtually every one is a dedicated scientist interested in nothing other than making the planet a better place for all.
Disclosure: I work for the University of California, San Diego, of which Scripps Institution of Oceanography is a part. I am, however, not acquainted with the scientist in question and am currently not working in oceanography.
"Occupies an area twice the size of texas" does not mean "it's enough trash to cover texas twice!"
If I put a plastic bottle at each corner of a 1 sq mile plot the plastics I've strewn about could be considered to be "occupying an area the size of a square mile". The reflectivity of a pile of trash that immense would be detectable via satellite. Since the trash "heap" is not detectable via satellite, it must be spread more thinly than the article leads one to believe.
Now, I'm sure it's a lot of trash, but, last I checked greenpeace had a fleet of boats. The whale wars guy has a few ships. The UN has a Navy. Not that hard to rent a container ship when the oil companies will want the credit for loaning them for such purposes and go out there with a dredger.
And like I said, the majority of the trash out there is recyclable. It'd be a good thing to generate that many jobs. Who cares if it's an international problem? I don't, I see it as a resource, like oil, coal, gems, gold, etc. Go get it and repurpose it. After all, this solution would satify both ecos, economists and ecologists.
Anyone saying otherwise is trying to profiteer off continuing the problem, not in finding the solution.
Most of the plastic is in the form of microscopic plastic fragments with a mean mass of 5.1 mg per square metre.
We shouldn't jump to the conclusion that this is all man made waste or that it is needs to be cleaned. The earth is full of lifeforms that eat nearly anything possible to continue their lifecycle. Study it take samples and keep them under every imaginable condition and see if there are changes to the plastic content. I also like how no one seems to have noticed that the plastic bottles that we were told would be around unchanged for tens of thousands of years, have been transformed into a soup of plastic chemicals by natural ocean processes in far less then the 10k years we were presented with.
Aye no worries eh, I'm sure fish will evolve to eat toxic plastic soup. Isn't the sun only breaking it up into smaller peices and not necesarrily degrading it? This toxic soup could be around for 10k years I expect, growing in size as our retarded (or greedy?) goverments allow the use of toxic materials for everyday uses. Shame they couldn't ban plastic as easily as they can drugs or speeding!
From a AGW view, couldn't this plastic soup be insulating and helping warm up the ocean? Wonder if they account for that in thier climate models...
No, but your skull might be insulating and overheating your brain.
Its a case of who really cares.
Get righteous if you want and make subjective uninformed comments (also into the trash) but in the end ...
... the vast majority dont care.
So what? The ocean is an outlet for our sewerage and a place for inedible and stuffed up genetic throwbacks (except if your from a desperate water edge community).
You do more than these environmentalists do, which is why you leave not a single clue of how you do it. Good job.
It's not their job to clean it up. It's their job to find out how drastically or minimally it could affect the water/the area/the planet.
You want it cleaned up so bad, why don't YOU go clean it up?
For the record, I'm abhorred by the way our country has gone from the pilgrims who made use of absolutely everything and generated very little waste, to a nation of consumers where everything sold is in a container which is immediately torn open and discarded upon purchase. I constantly berate my mother to stop buying water by the case, we have tap water (which is actually subject to much more strict regulations than any bottled water company is) which she just throws the bottles out after use, she doesn't even re-use them.
Well if they want to tell me what to do, they should be leading by example. You want me to be a "sheppard of the earth" you sure as hell better be doing the job.
I honestly don't care if it's cleaned up. I want people to stop talking about it and DO something.
If you believe that, you're utterly insane.
Truth is, the deep ocean is rather devoid of life.
Agreed, it must be cleaned up. My disagreement is in how dangerous the clean up process will be to existing life in the area. I'm betting there isn't much, except for the trash island effect.
Well, Like I said, and BrianH incorrectly disagrees with, the deep ocean is pretty barren when it comes to macrolife, and there's not much we can do to the microlife as long as we're removing the junk and not letting it slowly poison everything.
Not if we jsut open our foreign trade to all countries equally and begin sanctioning for failure to follow anti-pollution accords. If we made that change, not only would it satisfy economists and revitalize US trade and manufacturing, it would also serve to bring technology to areas that need it, food to the hungry, but it would also assist us in re-entering world diplomacy with a far stronger stance.
One planet will be teeming with life, the air and water will be pure. On the other, there will be never-ending debates about which industry is most responsible for cleaning the choking pollution, and which faction of the GOP made the stupidest mistakes, and they'll say (somewhat like my mother who died of lung cancer caused by smoking) "We'd rather live fewer, but more productive years."
In that future happy solar system, you "productive" people will have only yourselves to blame for your miserable existence.
http://news.bbc.c...6441.stm
If a cleanup project is what you want, maybe the plastic trash is a blessing in disguise. It represents an opportunity to clean up toxins that would otherwise be difficult to separate from seawater.
http://search.jap...2x1.html
"Chemicals like PCBs and DDE are very hydrophobic. That means they have a very high affinity for oily materials. Basically, plastics are solid oil. Therefore, plastic pellets accumulate hydrophobic pollutants with a concentration factor that's almost 1 million times (compared to the overall concentration of the chemicals in seawater)."
Well, if YOU would stop hanging around here there would be one less troll!!
In the mean time? Go for a run to boost your immune system and cardiovascular system, to better deal with this air/water/you name it pollution. Heh heh.
In a "we can fix it" world, one could imagine it being fixed by adding a material to these gyres that would attach to the plastic, making it:
* heavier so it would sink to the bottom where it wouldn't interfere with photoplankton
* stick to other plastic things so eventually we could come by and pick up a giant floating ball of plastic
* more UV sensitive so it would break up faster/smaller
* magnetic (ferrous more accurately) so trawlers could come by with magnetic booms and pick it up (this was someone else's idea, I liked the whimsical nature of it)
Also, since these things are gyres, so they aren't going anywhere - they spin more or less on an axis. If these scientists need to do periodic tests, I suggest they drop a buoy there with the necessary instrumentation. It'll stay in the gyre and probably cost less than 2 million a season.