http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html

The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden
Tuesday, 5 February 2008

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.

"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.

Might as well add a map:

I don't see what's so bad about this.

...

Oh wait:

you don't see what's so bad about the death of seabirds and marine mammals?

As long as it's not effecting me, I don't care.

c'mon, be serious.

They're going to die eventually anyways, amirite?

Ok, I'll be serious. I think man should pay a heavy price for the destruction of the ocean environment. That price should be paid in lives, freedom, comfort, security, and whatever else is necessary to completely right the damage we have caused. Humans should be collectively brought to justice for this. Drastic and sweeping measures to rebuild the environment is only the first, and easiest, step towards that justice.

When it comes to the environment and the plant and animal life on this planet, I have no sympathy and even less mercy for man. The only acceptable solution to this problem is for us to fundamentally change as a species or for us to become die off as soon as possible.

Bear in mind that I am not referring to the inevitability of these things if we continue down the path we are on. We will pay the ultimate price in the end, but I am talking about what is right and what we deserve. Assuming that humanity doesn't change, the greatest tragedy of all will be if humans don't go extinct before the rest of the planet does.

So, if we're talking about justice, where is the justice if I am punished for something I didn't do? Sorry, but this "collective justice" thing just doesn't make sense.

Unless you believe in a higher power.

You are not being punished individually any more than you contributed individually. It is humanity as a whole that is responsible, and to the same extent that each member of humanity is responsible is the same extent they should be punished. By taking it personally you are missing the point.

Sorry, but "drastic, sweeping measures" to rebuild the environment inevitably come at a cost to everybody, with no regard for who actually did what to damage it. I don't see how you plan on making sure everybody is punished to the extent that they contributed. It's impossible. There's no justice there at all.

I also question why it would be a tragedy if humans don't go extinct before the rest of the planet. That's just idiocy right there. The reason we should protect the environment is none other than to prolongue our existence as a species.

Such as?

Fascism.

This is pretty deep in the article. Are they still talking about the "trash soup" or the oceans in general?

Because I feel like if that's the latter, that can't possibly be right.

Yeah, it does come at a cost to everybody. The idea isn't corporeal punishment, but the material punishment that would come by adapting as a society to greatly reduce or eliminate our negative impact on the environment. Like I said it isn't a matter or punishing people individually, it is a matter of continents, countries, and communities all helping to reverse the effects they had. America would take one of the biggest hits, since we pollute the most and use the most resources, it would take a ton of effort to fix that and people would feel it sharply. New Zealand, for example, may not have it so hard. Justice would come by us having to give up many of the things we take for granted in the process of rebuilding our environment. Things which were never ours to destroy in the first place.

I mean that, if we continue to destroy the planet, it would be a tragedy if we ruined the planet before we killed ourselves or died. If we change our ways and learn to coexist instead of devouring everything, then we would have as much right to continue existing as other organisms on the planet do. What I think would be true injustice is if we destroyed our planet but moved on into space and survived. I don't think there are words to describe the level of moral offense it would be to destroy worlds in order to sustain a materialistic society and people.

And finally I disagree with your last sentence. We should protect our environment because we are members of that environment and it is not our right to destroy it. In fact, as sentient creatures, I feel it is our responsibility to protect it. The fact that we need it to survive, for now, is at best a selfish and immoral reason to do so. We do it because it is the right thing to do, and we benefit from that by being able to live.

Yes, that is a good question. Obviously I don't know all the answers, and I doubt anyone else does either. But I'm sure we can all think of ways. To start, drastic cuts in paper use, colossal replanting efforts, massive switches to recycling, endless amounts of cleanups and waste processing, and most importantly, policy changes across the board with regard to pollution and habitat preservation. To start with.

That's cute. We (as in Americans) are supposed to stop using plastic and shit.

Dirty little secret.

The vast majority of this shit is from southeast Asia where they are just dumping garbage into the ocean instead of landfills.

That's why this "we as a society need to stop using certain products" is a joke. The same thing applies to carbon... If the United States reduced carbon emissions by 25%, it wouldn't make a dent. People who think the US is bad with emissions should probably visit Beijing during the winter.

I keep telling you, we just need to increase the environment.