Recently I was listening to a debate on a current hot-topic here in the UK: plastic bags.
One of the people in the debate casually mentioned that there is an island of plastic, twice the size of Texas in the pacific ocean. The debate continued as though everyone agreed with this simple fact.
I was horrified: I hadn’t heard about this before.
So I Googled around on the topic. From Googling with keywords like [plastic twice size texas] I got plenty of hits but they seemed to differ on many of the key facts; e.g. some describe a “carpet” of plastic, with no significant breaks, others just describe an area “contaminated” with plastic. And crucially, I couldn’t find any large-scale pictures or a map reference (even a rough one).
This seems odd since when a volcanic island (briefly) formed recently, there were plenty of photos and corroborating info.
So what’s The Straight Dope? Is there an island of plastic?
Ah I see. I should have added -hyperbole to my Google search
The situation is alarming, but I suppose mentioning “an area twice the size of texas with a very high concentration of plastic debris” isn’t quite as dramatic as “a floating continent” or “the world’s biggest landfill”.
I suppose in the long run it’s a good thing that such a vortex exists. How cool would it be to build some kind of ‘filtering’ station there, and have the ocean itself doing the work of collecting the trash for us? (obviously this would be incredibly expensive, if possible at all, and people don’t care enough about the problem yet).
I listened to a report about this a few weeks ago on the US National Public Radio where they interviewed a ship’s captain. He mentioned that as you traverse the region, it isn’t obvious unless you look carefully, but once you start looking for it you can see quite a bit of junk. The actual density of trash is relatively small and much of it floats a foot to a couple of feet below the surface. These factors do not diminish the immensity of the mess or the problems it poses to the wildlife in the region.
The low density of the trash also makes it impractical to clean up. Imagine the level of ground litter in London (present but not like in a landfill) spread throughout an area several times the size of the UK. It would be very difficult and costly to pick it all up and, in the sea, impossible to do without having a severe impact on the creatures you are trying to protect.
In reading some of the links I agree with An Gadaí. It’s depressing to me as well and one more indication of the mess we’re making of the planet, even taking Greenpeace’s comments with a large dose of skepticism.
Is the implication that I should’ve memorised all of tSD’s paragraphs?
Or that I should’ve performed a basic search within SD?
Because if it’s the latter, I did, I searched for “plastic island” (remember I didn’t know the name of this phenomenon) and it returned two non-relevant hits.
None of the above. It’s a general comment not directed at anyone in particular on how often it seems Cecil’s column does not get looked to, or appear in searches (for whatever reason). You know, it just seems like the column should end up appearing more than it does as one of several possible answers (mostly, the right one). In this case of course he didn’t talk very much about it, so the other links were better resources for your topic. I apologize if I offended you.
the fact that a current moves it in to a certain area could potentially make long-term filtration and cleanup easier, as a large amount of trash could be cleaned up and filtered out by a (relatively) small system.
Concentrated and easier to clean up? You’ve got to be kidding.
The plastics, while not biodegrading are breaking down into their own polymer strings. Kinda difficult to filter an area the size of Texas to the molecular level.
That attitude reminds me of the old Goon Show joke:
The gyre is discussed in Alan Weisman’s excellent The World Without Us (St. Martin’s Press, 2007), pp. 120-128. In 2005, the gyre was estimated to cover nearly 10m square miles, almost the size of Africa. And there are six other major tropical oceanic gyres around the world. Yikes!
