"Waiter...There's A Fly In My Plastic Soup"
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 03. 8.08
No one to blame for this but ourselves. Four fifths of the plastic detritus floating over 2.5 million square miles of ocean surface arrives there from land-based run off: from stormwater, in other words. Litter. Who thinks of littering this way? We should.
Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up, according to Charles Moore. The oceanographer returned February 23 from a five-week odyssey in the Pacific Ocean with samples showing 48 parts plastic for every part of plankton."We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic," said Moore, who has spent more than a decade investigating Pacific plastic pollution. "There's no evidence it will end in a millennium."... A plastic "graveyard" double the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii.
See also: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: "Out of Sight, Out of Mind ...
Via::CNET, "No tech cure for oceans 'damned' by plastic", Image credits::Algalita Marine Research Foundation, various images of plastic residue from gyre samples
Should I eat them "good" fish caught in the ocean?
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Something i've noticed in the movie John Rambo...
Without even looking at it; one of the guy on the boat tosses a beer bottle into the river.
Sensless producer; what impact is that on poeple who noticed it (its soo obvious) ? It's cool to have guns, drink and trow beer bottle in the river.
Ok we are talking about plastic. But what if he was drinking water from a bottle? I say: it's the same.
...
That stat of 48 parts plastic to one part plankton is amazing and depressing.
Plastic is so insidious....We could do so much with simple changes & requests of others, although some may find change hard or even annoying! But I'm the type to risk waiters' aggravated glances by asking for no straws or asking hotel staff at the breakfast buffet for china rather than plastic! `
=== author's response follows ===
Glad you saw the metaphor:- 'we are the fly in our own soup'
Agree that this is the cost externality that is ignored in the debate over recycling, use of re-usable vs non-returnable utensils, plastic shrink wrap, added expenses of biodegradable plastics in general, and so on.
Where this needs to go next is to partition some of these plastics to see what is degrading and what is lasting for a near eternity, by type.
So how do we solve this? Using less plastics and making sure they don't end up in the oceans are the obvious answers. But how do we get rid of the stuff?
hundreds of barges driving around the patch equipped with plasma converters
http://startech.net/
Can't this stuff somehow or another be harvested and converted back into oil? Or a fuel source?
=== authors' response follows ===
The opening shot shows a catchment method in place before the flotsam goes seaward. Does no good to clean up the ocean if the influx continues. Must control source first in other words.
In the gyre areas, the invisible particulate fraction - plankton sized as it were - is obviously impractical to go after with harvest equipment. The energy cost to capture the large chunks would need to be evaluated up front.
What concerns me is the vast numbers of people who are NOT aware of this floating debris zone. And also the ones who are aware who feel detached from it...ie: folks on the east coast who might say: my plastic trash is going to our landfill and it wasn't us who put it out there." I think this issue needs a great deal more attention. Please editors, keep this issue, and others like it, at the forefront rather than the shallow entertainment type pieces that seem to keep being published on Treehugger.
I'd like to see an article which describes the sources where this debris originates.
Also agree that we must stop the material from entering the water stream first.
Any evidence of similar debris floating in the great lakes/other?
I wonder if the physical properties of plastic can lead to a solution?
I know that filtering the ocean is not a viable option, as we would pull up all the sea life mixed in with the plastic peices.
Can loose plastic be collected in a manner similar to how metal flakes can be collected by a magnet? I know static electricity can affect plastics, but the water in the ocean would obviously not allow for that...
Are there physical/chemical bonding properties found in plastics that could be utilized?
== author's response follows ===
Too much turbulence out there in the waves to bring the equipment to bear. And it would take soooo much fuel. JL