We have all heard the myths of the giant island of floating trash in the Pacific Ocean. When I was a kid, I had always thought how cool it would be to live on an island made of trash (ignore safety concerns) where I could find mysterious lost treasures and make cool inventions. However, now I recognize that this “garbage patch” is a testament to how poorly we are treating the Earth.
I was wasting time today scrolling through Instagram, as per usual, and I came across a post about the pacific garbage patch. It was something along the lines of a map showing the extent and density of the pacific garbage patch between California and Hawaii. And when I first saw it, I thought that there is no shot that it is actually that big. The post said that the garbage patch was bigger than two Texas’s (funny American unit of measurement.
This amount of trash is obscene to think about, let alone that it is in our ocean. My second thought was “Is this visible from outer space?” Well, no.
National Geographic helped debunk the myth. 94% of the patch is made out of microplastics, but they only account for 8% of the 79,000 metric tons. Most of the trash is actually discarded fishing gear. While this information relieved me a bit, it is still shocking that 79,000 metric tons of trash are in the garbage patch, not to mention all the other garbage in the oceans.
It doesn’t take a lot of thinking to realize how much of a problem this is. This is a serious amount of pollution in the ocean, and even though we might not encounter it, that doesn’t make it not an issue. There are several cleanup projects that I have come across while researching for this blog post. Here is one from USA Today that details some passive trash collection, that is hoped to be able to clean up half of the trash at its final design. What is neat about this design is that it can collect trash, without interfering with marine life (to an extent). Here is a more detailed and dense analysis of ocean cleanup.
My thoughts on this situation are probably pretty predictable, based on my previous posts and my other posts. This is a problem. Similar levels of pollution can be seen in the water by Rio de Janeiro. There should be no occasion where it is acceptable for us to pollute our only home to this extent. However, it was a little comforting to see cleanup efforts.
Microplastics are a big problem in the ocean. This is because they can build up through bioaccumulation and by the time we’re looking at large organisms, they have huge amounts of microplastics inside of them. But I think it is easier to ignore than things like global warming because unless they can see the effects and the pollutants themselves, people tend to care less. But I have seen a trend in which social media can make a change. With the “VISCO Girl” trend, although the save the turtles sentiment became a joke, it did make a lot of people more conscientious of the plastic, disposable cutlery they use. Another example of this is the Glass Half Full organization, which became viral on social media and now recycles glass into sand. I hope more initiatives and trends allow us to make changes for the environment!