COME SEE OUR GIANT TOXIC STEW!
By Mark Morford
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, October 26, 2007
Original LinkBecause nothing makes you feel better about being a living, breathing, plastic-licking human on this planet today than the thought of a massive, eternal, slowly swirling vortex of noxious garbage the size of a continent and the shape of death itself, just floating out there in the middle of the Pacific ocean, mocking life, humanity, God. Mmm, gloomy.
Have you heard? Did you see? It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or Pacific Trash Vortex, among other awesome nicknames) and it's a staggering phenomenon indeed and after reading up on it, I fully believe we must now revise our master list. Because surely this thing must be one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the grand sociocultural melting pot of our time. Except for the fact that it's, you know, revolting.
Is it not true? Is there anything more impressive than the idea that you can, say, toss away your little Calistoga bottle or your plastic Safeway bag or your meth syringe or old iPod case or cigarette lighter or DVD wrapper here, and it will somehow, through a miraculous combination of time and wind and wastefulness and the flow of nature's beautiful eternal pulsing rhythms, wend its way 1,000 miles out to sea and then, well, just swirl around, slowly breaking apart and poisoning all life surrounding it and joining with the mountains of other plastic crap spewed out from our friends and enemies and neighboring nations worldwide? Is this not, in its way, profoundly moving? You bet it is.
But oh holy hell, it certainly is impressive. At least 1,500 miles wide (give or take, could be much larger, no one's quite sure because it's a bit difficult to measure), 30 meters deep, 80 percent plastic, and 100 percent appalling. Truly, there is nothing else quite like it on Earth.
Oh sure, we've all heard about the epic heaps of garbage we pack away on land, those reeking gaseous toxic rat-infested landfills the size of the Grand Canyon that dot our landscape like the devil's own acne, so poisonous and so foul and so deadly to all life that we have to find holes miles away from human life just to make it bearable.
We're also apparently totally OK with the notion that there's a giant ribbon of garbage spinning around our little planet out there in space, all our old satellites and communication equipment and rocketry crap and the remnants of all the UFOs we've destroyed and hidden away in secret bunkers and then shot back out there on the Space Shuttle and dumped.
But there's something magical about the GPGP, humanity's own Giant Gyre of Junk, sitting out there like a churning liquid wasteland in the most rarely-visited part of the ocean. It has aura. It has power. It is like the world's biggest nuclear warhead, exploding very, very slowly.
Let us think upon this stunning phenomenon for a moment. Because, unlike the obvious intimations of death and decay coming at us from the likes of our landfills and our SUVs and cell phones and Dick Cheney's sidelong sneer, the GPGP might just be one of the greatest examples of ironic poetic justice of our time. Can you see it?
The poetry goes something like this: Plastic bottle is tossed away. Plastic bottle, along with millions just like it, escapes out to sea, drifts and wanders and ultimately joins giant toxic stew of other plastic garbage sitting like a massive island in middle of impartial but increasingly wary ocean.
Time passes. Life churns. Sea birds and other large marine life ingest (and then die from) some of the billions of bits of brightly-colored plastic floating about, as the sun slowly breaks down the rest of the plastic bottle into its fundamental, ultra-toxic polymer molecules. Stew thickens.
And then, the magic happens. Nature's most efficient organic filters, the sea jellies, absorb those tiny plastic molecules into their bodies. Small fish eat the jellies. Larger fish eat the smaller fish. Slowly, the deadly plastics, which never completely biodegrade, amble their way back up the food chain and back into the stomachs and bloodstreams and ecosystems of larger and larger animals until, voila, there again is your plastic bottle, right there on your dinner plate. Neat!
In short: Your plastic bottle, once full of life-giving water imported all the way from Fiji or France, has come back around to poison you at last. Isn't irony fun?
Perhaps now is when your inner cynic pops up and says, well, if that's the way it happens, why not just skip the middleman entirely? Why not protect the jellies and save some sea birds and clean the ocean and cut right to the chase and, well, simply eat the plastic bottle yourself, on the spot, when you're finished drinking that two-cents worth of water for which you paid $3? I can see the Greenpeace campaign now.
Hey, it's a start. But while eating our own garbage might slow the flow of plastic toxins to the Vortex, the happy fatalists of the world tell us that, in truth, nothing can really be done about the enormous continent of crap that's already out there. All we can do is minimize its growth.
There is, apparently, no giant sieve. There is no massive hand of God that will reach down and dip into the ocean and yank out a big stinking wad of used condoms and hair scrunchies and Doritos bags and PS2 carcasses as if pulling a nasty hair clog from an enormous drain.
Officially speaking, cleaning up the GPGP would reportedly require a massive global effort, billions of dollars and unprecedented international cooperation and widespread admissions of pollutive guilt. In other words: utterly impossible.
Ah, but perhaps we are not thinking ingeniously enough. Perhaps we should consider simply turning the garbage patch into a giant Disney tourist attraction, add some platforms and some floating rides and Starbucks kiosks and funny T-shirt stands for the kiddies. You think?
Families from all over the world could float out to the GPGP on special garbage-plowing cruise ships outfitted with little detachable pontoon boats, which the kids could hop into and float out among the stew, armed with cool little nets (plastic, natch) with which they could spend all day fishing around, scooping out all sorts of magical, mysterious goodies from all over the world. Imagine! It's like the world's biggest claw vending machine! Only, once again, utterly revolting.
Funny ashtrays from Indonesia. Cheap plastic watches from Japan. Weird European food wrappers and skanky soccer balls and giant drums of mysterious chemicals, plastic coat hangers and old bottles of bleach and rancid flip-flops and free leftover Nike cross trainers for Mom and, oh my God, Timmy, isn't that your old "Doom II" game cartridge? It's yours to keep! Or, you know, just throw it back. What fun!
Yes indeed. So fun, in fact, that if you think about it too long, it can actually make you weep.
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CONTINENT-SIZE TOXIC STEW OF PLASTIC TRASH FOULING SWATH OF PACIFIC OCEAN
By Justin Berto
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, October 19, 2007
Original LinkAt the start of the Academy Award-winning movie "American Beauty," a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life's unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a "most beautiful thing."
To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.
In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.
The enormous stew of trash -- which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.
"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said. "There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."
The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.
Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans".
The report found that 80 percent of the oceans' litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.
That's what makes a potentially toxic swamp like the Garbage Patch entirely preventable, Parry said.
"At this point, cleaning it up isn't an option," Parry said. "It's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. ... The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits."
Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren't wrapped in plastics is another.
After the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the use of plastic grocery bags earlier this year with the problem of ocean debris in mind, a slew of state bills were written to limit bag production, said Sarah Christie, a legislative director with the California Coastal Commission.
But many of the bills failed after meeting strong opposition from plastics industry lobbyists, she said.
Meanwhile, the stew in the ocean continues to grow.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.
Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.
"These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs," Chabot said. "It doesn't pass, and they literally starve to death."
The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.
Chabot said if environmentalists wanted to remove the ocean dump site, it would take a massive international effort that would cost billions.
But that is unlikely, he added, because no one country is likely to step forward and claim the issue as its own responsibility.
Instead, cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is left to the landlubbers.
"What we can do is ban plastic fast food packaging," Chabot said, "or require the substitution of biodegradable materials, increase recycling programs and improve enforcement of litter laws.
"Otherwise, this ever-growing floating continent of trash will be with us for the foreseeable future."
How to help
You can help to limit the ever-growing patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. Here are some ways to help:
- Limit your use of plastics when possible. Plastic doesn't easily degrade and can kill sea life.
- Use a reusable bag when shopping. Throwaway bags can easily blow into the ocean.
- Take your trash with you when you leave the beach.
- Make sure your trash bins are securely closed. Keep all trash in closed bags.
- Trash is also a problem in parts of San Francisco Bay. For an interactive map showing some of the worst locations, go to:
http://www.savesfbay.org/baytrash
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