It All Goes Down to the Sea: The Plastic Vortex
Every year over 260 million tons of plastic is produced, much of it for one-time use and less than 5% of the world’s plastics are recycled. National Geographic estimates that over 85 million plastic bottles are used every three minutes. In many cases, plastic waste that is not incinerated or land-filled makes its way to the oceans.
[[Quote from the Project Kaisei Web site.]]
There is a huge accidental collection of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. This will not be any surprise to those that visit Digg or SlashDot. This topic features on one or the other of these sites every few months or so. This garbage dump—in the middle of the world’s biggest ocean—has been nicknamed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, the “Pacific Garbage Island”, and the “Plastic Vortex”—which is my favourite. It is so well known and documented that it even has an entry being maintained by a number of people on Wikipedia.
What is the Plastic Vortex?
It is a huge unintentional suspended garbage dump of things that float, mostly plastics, that have concentrated in a particular part of the Pacific Ocean after 40 plus years of being washed down to the sea. The estimated surface area of this suspended garbage dump is the size of Alaska. Based on sampling of the Plastic Vortex done in 2008 by the Richard Sundance Owen cleanup project the dump was then estimated to contain 100 million tons of suspended debris. The debris goes down to a depth of about 10 meters.
How did it come about?
What happens is any rubbish that floats, that is left lying around, sooner or later ends up in one of the oceans. It may take some time for it to wash downhill into the storm water drainage systems or other water-ways, but the lowest this floating rubbish can be washed—in the fullness of time—is the ocean. Once in the ocean, and in this case the Pacific Ocean, the plastic flotsam is slowly herded into a relatively calm centre of the Pacific Ocean, known as the North Pacific Convergence Zone or North Pacific Gyre, by the never ending surface currents. And there it stays—trapped in the Plastic Vortex. Every day another 60,000 tons of debris joins the vortex.
Why is it a problem?
This massive floating plastic island:
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Is a hazard to shipping due to fouling of propellers and rudders. Changing shipping routes to avoid the Plastic Vortex can add 100s, sometimes 1000s, of kilometres; thereby increasing time and fuel costs.
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Is a hazard to marine life.
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Is increasing in size. Even if all such mainland debris was to cease tomorrow (which is impossible to achieve), the plastics currently in the oceans would continue contributing to the Plastic Vortex for years to come.
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Causes fish caught for human consumption to be poisoned. As the plastic perishes in the salty water and from exposure to sunlight fish mistake the semi-submerged floating shards of plastic for food. This causes the fish flesh to become toxic.
What is being done?
In March of this year (2009) Project Kaisei (kay-see) was launched. This is a joint project comprising both commercial and scientific resources. The first phase of the project is to research and study the Plastic Vortex, and to look at commercially viable ways of tackling the problem. This phase is likely to take two to three years to complete. For more information about Project Kaisei go to the project’s Web site (here). The plan is that Project Kaisei will come up with a commercially attractive solution to solving the problem in which case the project will move into the second phase of planning how to implement it.
Other Links Relating to the Plastic Vortex
•· Greenpeace page.
•· Nine MSN News.
•· Following the route of the sailing ship Kaisei. Requires Google Earth plug-in which will link automatically if you do not have it. Requires Flash player (but everyone has that J). At a number of way-points along the route there are small videos and pictures that can be viewed.
Barry.