Here is a link to a pretty interesting site, I wasn’t necessarily a rabid oceanophile but I followed this for several days and found myself hooked (Pun recognized and left in intentionally).
Link to Staff Report: Why don’t we ever see pictures of the floating island of garbage? - The Straight Dope
Interesting staff report. Alan Weisman talks about the huge Pacific Ocean debris field in his very good book, The World Without Us: The World Without Us - Wikipedia
I wonder if there couldn’t be an internationally-funded garbage-scooping project someday. I suppose the recycling option wouldn’t be cost-effective.
I can’t imagine the math would not be overwhelmingly against this. Not to mention the conservation implications of the amount of fuel you’d spend trying to cover every inch of many thousands of square miles.
Also, heterogeneous plastic shreds are hardly the most in-demand feedstock for any industrial product. Plastic recycling is of limited utility at the best of times, and this wouldn’t be the best of times.
Not to get into GD territory, but am I the only one who suspects the phrase “garbage island” was not-unintentionally selected to stoke alarm about some foul mat of disgusting refuse literally choking the surface of a huge area of pristine tropical ocean? Because, rightly or wrongly (probably rightly, as a matter of handicapping) the people concerned with it didn’t expect they could get the same visceral reaction from saying “nearly invisible shreds of plastic are in the water, and some animals may suffer harm from ingesting them”)?
I have the same problem with this ‘vast island’ of plastic in the ocean. As quoted in today’s Straight Dope article: “that’s about 11 pounds. The average piece of plastic they found weighed only about 15 milligrams, or about the weight of a grass seed.” That was the amount per square kilometer!!!
And this: “The only way to see a garbage island is by dragging a plankton net through it.” So it’s real but invisible? What today’s article and the previous SD article actually tell you is, No, there is no island of plastic in the Pacific. There IS a large area where the currents concentrate plastic pollution and it is a real problem. But, there is no island.
It is pure alarmism to call this problem an island covering X number of square miles of ocean.
The issue of ocean pollution is very real. Last year the annual beach cleanup in Oregon collected 60,000 lbs of garbage.
Delurking briefly to link to this chilling documentary about the garbage island.
Moderator’s note: I’ve added a link in the OP, to the Staff Report in question. It’s helpful to other readers, keeps us all on the same page, and saves searching time to provide such a link when you start a thread in ref to Cecil’s column or a Staff Report.
Disputes about whether the term garbage “island” are accurate or not aside, this video and the other one posted show what the research papers are talking about - researchers in both display some large chunks they found, but most of the plastic they collect is the little bits that come up in the plankton nets. Similarly, the images of the sea surface in both aren’t showing a large, continuous mass of plastic one could walk upon. It’s that latter misconception I was mostly addressing. In other words, just because something’s invisible, doesn’t mean it isn’t real (like air).
Here’s another documentary film being released featuring the gyre and plastic garbage.
You’ve got to be kidding. The ‘evidence’ in that ‘documentary’ was laughable. I especially like how early on the ‘filmmaker’ says “Captain Moore found plastic bags, bottles, and consumer products as far as the eye can see”, but then can’t manage to get more than a cupfull of debris in any one shot.
Expletive-laced, hyperbolic crap like that does a disservice to environmentalism, IMHO.
I’m not generally known as a kidder, so no, I wasn’t kidding. You are apparently somewhat confused by what I actually wrote. I said in the Staff Report that the North Pacific Gyre does not have large masses of visible plastic forming a clearly-defined garbage island. You only can tell that the plastic accumulation is bad through sampling with plankton nets.
If you watch the videos posted above, that’s just what you see. You say this yourself; where is the disagreement between what you saw and what I said?
If you want to dispute the narration, that’s not my concern. I didn’t write the narration, nor even mention the narration.
Your humple opinion is misdirected.
No, I 'm confused as to why you would cite such a ridiculous crocumentary. Isn’t there any video evidence that doesn’t insult the intelligence of the viewer?
OTOH, Thor Heyerdahl wrote in “The Ra Expiditions” about how they came upon plastic garbage and other debris every day crossing the Atlantic; this in the 70’s, before ubiqutous plastic water bottles, 2-litre pop bottles, plastic shopping bags, six-pack rings and bubble-wrap. The disposable consumer culture had not yet permeated Africa, South America or even southern Europe the way it has today. So don’t minimize the damage from garbage and pollution.
But yes, a few square miles of solid plastic is a lot of plastic. Thor meant randomly seeing a plastic bottle or other garbage in the middle of nowhere, a thousand miles from land; it was proof just how much garbage must be there, if a piece floats by every day. Today things must be a thousand times worse.
OTOH, in the Altlantic that stuff eventually accumulates in the center of the circulation pattern, in the Bermuda triangle. Thus, aliens help keep our oceans clean by scooping all that trash up and teleporting it to another dimension. The Garbage Island of the Pacific is due to the fact that we don’t have any simply triangle there for the aliens to concentrate their garbage collection activities.
I suggest you try again, but turn off your computer speaker and look at what is in front of you. What do you see in the shots of the ocean surface in both videos? A whole lot of water and the occaisional chunk or accumulation of debris. What do you see when they sample from the plankton nets? A lot of really, really tiny plastic bits.
If you would get past your antipathy for the narrators, you’d see they are showing exactly what the studies I cited said they’d show. That the vieographers have an agenda is completely beside the point.
Someone sent me a relevant link to this fascinating if rather sad series of images:
Sad pics there Princhester.
I saw this at the Taos Film Festival last month, and I highly recommend it.
A recent report: TOXIC: Garbage Island - CNN.com
It appears that nature has found a way to remove plastic from the ocean.
Someone has to take environmentalists aside and tell them that exaggerated histrionics hurt their cause, not help it. Yes, plastic in the ocean is a real problem, but suggesting that an “island” of garbage exists is just dishonest, and only causes people to tune them out.
I thought you were joking, but a BBC article today describes a similar garbage patch in the Atlantic and it is, indeed, fairly close to the Bermuda Triangle.