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The Garbage Patch

The sheer volume of plastic we produce on Earth is astounding: more than 381 million tonnes are
produced each year. Not surprisingly, plastic pollution is a serious problem. Much of plastic ends
up in landfills, but a large amount also makes its way to the ocean. Each year, an estimated 8
million tonnes of plastic is released into marine environments. About 80 percent of this ocean
plastic comes from land-based sources, such as mismanaged landfills and litter. The remaining 20
percent comes from ocean-based sources such as discarded fishing nets, spilled shipping
containers and abandoned boats (Ritchie 2018).

Plastics degrade incredibly slowly, so most of the plastic released into the oceans over the last 60
years has simply accumulated there (Andrady, 2015). Most plastic floats and is readily transported
long distances, spreading out around the globe via circular ocean currents called gyres. Much of
the floating plastic is concentrated in five major garbage patches corresponding to the five main
ocean gyres (Jambeck et al. 2015).

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 The body of an albatross chick that was fed plastic debris by its parents who apparently mistook it
for food illustrates one of the many facets of the problem of pollution in our oceans
Source: Duncan Wright / Public domain

Grow Your Understanding

Captain Charles Moore is an oceanographer and boat captain who has helped to
focus the world's attention on ocean garbage patches. He first encountered a garbage
  patch returning from a sailing race across the Pacific Ocean in 1997 and made the
following two observations:

"As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine
ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It
seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross
the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was
floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments." 

"Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest.” (Moore, 2009)

Moore's first observation describes the scale of the problem, and the second
observation identifies the source of the problem. Human activities consume resources
and turn them into waste. In nature, waste does not accumulate because the wastes of
one organism generally become the nutrients for another organism. In contrast, we
humans are producing an increasing amount of waste that can't be digested. Can you
answer the following questions?
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1. How does plastic get from a parking lot at Humber College to the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean?
2. What are some of the ways that we can reduce the accumulation of garbage?
3. What threshold do we need to reach so that zero waste accumulates?

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