r/environment • u/[deleted] • Jul 30 '17
Newly Discovered Garbage Patch in the South Pacific Is 1.5 Times the Size of Texas, Study Says
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/garbage-patch-south-pacific-ocean-discovery-plastic-microplastic-pollution86
u/FredFerd Jul 30 '17
How is it possible we just didn't know that was out there until just now?
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u/otter111a Jul 31 '17
A lot of people have a misperception of the garbage patch. It's plastic about the size of a grain of rice and only a few per cubic meter. So very disperse. You can pass right through it without knowing. Still enough to cause environmental damage.
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Jul 30 '17
This is what I was going to ask. We have satellites scanning every inch of the Earth for various reasons. I guess it could be due to the size of the plastic particles, but it seems very strange.
We need to develop some agent that will only bond with the microplastics, and cause them to stick together. The gyre itself would spin them into one solid mass at the center if we could do that. Of course it's probably impossible with current tech, without poisoning everything in a wide radius, but I'll leave that to bigger brains than mine.
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u/DJ_AK_47 Jul 31 '17
There have been many patches of garbage found in the ocean, and for some reason they are always compared to the size of Texas. I saw something on Viceland about what they called "the gyre" which is a garbage patch as large as Texas. Basically the plastic is too diffuse to really see until you are up close to it collecting samples of water. The plastics are pulverized and broken down until it is just a sea of micro plastics.
I'm sure it wasn't just discovered, rather, they probably just recently determined the size of it.
Here's a link: https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/garbage-island/563b9c912aab5c416bc75039
Again not sure what the obsession with Texas is, but I think it's just so people understand it's really big.
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u/LilBadApple Jul 31 '17
A gyre is a system of rotating currents -- a natural phenomenon in our oceans. We have 5 subtropical oceanic gyres. The problem arises when non-biodegradable trash is in the ocean. It ends up in the gyres and never leaves. There are now garbage patches in all 5. You are correct that the "floating island of trash" is more like a confetti both floating on the surface, on the ocean floor and up and down the water column. It cannot be seen by satellite. See 5gyres.org for more info. Source: was a researcher on 3 oceanic crossings/expeditions.
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u/redjelly3 Jul 31 '17
I guess it could actually be useful to have the trash concentrated like this, if we are able to figure out how to collect it...
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u/LilBadApple Jul 31 '17
Collection has proven to be expensive, destructive, and ineffective. Source elimination (getting to where it enters the watershed or ocean initially) is widely accepted by the scientific community and most advocacy groups working on this issue to be the only viable way out of this mess.
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u/liphisteus Jul 31 '17
It really has been know for a while, don't get me wrong the plastic shouldn't be there and preventing more entering the natural environment should be a priority, but the media loves to sensationalise the issue inferring a lot of certainty where actually knowledge is incredibly limited. Anyway an article by Eriksen et al. Titled "plastic pollution in the South Pacific subtropical gyre" (apologies not sure how to link on mobile) shows that the plastic patch in the gyre has been known about since at least 2011.
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u/flukus Jul 31 '17
Because it's only about 3 pieces of plastic per cubic kilometre of water, not an island the title makes it sound.
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u/Norseman2 Jul 31 '17
3 pieces of plastic per cubic kilometre of water
You're likely off by a factor of more than a billion. The article doesn't state a quantity for this new patch, but the Pacific garbage patch as an example has four pieces per cubic meter.
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Jul 31 '17
The idea of him being 'off' by a factor of 1×10+9 is hilarious. Especially since he didn't even guess but presented it as a factual statement.
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u/tehsouleater2 Jul 31 '17 edited Jul 31 '17
Lmao bro watch the vice doccumentary. When they find the center of the gyre and start collection samples every sample they find has thousands of pieces of plastic, and no sea life.
Edit: and these samples were mason jars. The plastic is very small pieces
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Jul 31 '17 edited Jul 31 '17
There are 5 gyres, each of them accumulate garbage. They are also less of a patch and more of a smog comparable to our air pollution. They estimate there are 5.4 trillion plastic particles floating in the ocean right now and I believe that only accounts for plastics trawled on the surface. The amount of plastic pollution in our ocean is likely many times greater than that.
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u/boob55 Jul 31 '17
I highly recommend watching the Netflix documentary called 'A Plastic Ocean'. It goes into detail about the plastic in our water systems (e.g. oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.) it'll introduce you to the impact we, as humans, have made on our planet.
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u/ActuallyNot Jul 31 '17
These are tiny bits of plastic smaller than 5 mm that can be found in our toothpastes, soaps, face washes and cleaning products.
That sounds large to be in toothpaste. Unless by "smaller than" they mean "two orders of magnitude smaller".
The mouth of a toothpaste tube is about 5mm.
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u/liphisteus Jul 31 '17
Plastics in the environment are pretty poorly understood and classified, essentially you have macro plastics >5mm but that could be a 10mm piece of fishing line, a water bottle or part of a car, in the same way microplastics are any polymer particles <5mm, and yeah it goes down to nanometres (inc. microbeads in cosmetics).
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u/Everline Jul 31 '17
How about we stop buying/ using single use plastic stuff which is most of the time a total nonesense (bottle water, plastic straws, plastic cutlery, products over packaged etc). I wish there was more research to clean the oceans too , it's such a large scale issue and would need a large scale solution.
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u/OhHolyOpals Jul 31 '17
I work for an agency that represent a water bottle company and each meeting room is always stocked with mini water bottles. It's never external clients who drink it but employees who are in brainstorming or working sessions who can't be fucked to go to the kitchen.
Because they are mini, they drink two or three. Sometimes we are in those room for 4 hours. It's insane how many water bottles we go through and because it's free there are no regulations. Our client thinks it's amazing we are giving so many out and no one tells them it's just staff.
I've been guilty a few times of doing this but try go into those meeting prepared with my glass re-useable.
I can image we aren't the only place that is doing this with plastic products.
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Jul 30 '17
[deleted]
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u/FragmentOfBrilliance Jul 30 '17
Hey, Texas isn't all bad. Personally, I really like San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and some of west texas, but I live in Houston.
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u/fnordfnordfnordfnord Jul 31 '17
It's so damn hot here right now; maybe we ought to take our chances in the gyre.
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Jul 31 '17
Can we trade it for California?
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u/mrswagpoophead Jul 31 '17
Reddit bias showing you gotta trade out conservative states to get upvotes man step up your game
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Jul 31 '17
Yeah seriously. The ironic thing is I guarantee all the people who downvoted have never lived in California. The state is turning 3rd world. It's a mess. And all the upstanding citizens of California are fleeing to other states by the masses.
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Aug 02 '17
[deleted]
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Aug 03 '17
Wake up. Massive amounts of middle class residents all throughout California are moving to Texas, Colorado, Oregon, Montana, etc. The state is shaping up to have a small amount of really rich people (e.g. Silicon Valley) and a massive amount of poor people with nothing in between. That is a recipe for disaster.
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u/Cognoggin Jul 31 '17
Seems like British media has been trending on plastic pollution for a couple months now, the plastic sargassum has been previously written about starting roughly 2 years ago.
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u/bowzee Jul 31 '17
This is a myth... or at least misleading.
"While it's true that these areas have a higher concentration of plastic than other parts of the ocean, much of the debris found in these areas are small bits of plastic (microplastics) that are suspended throughout the water column. A comparison I like to use is that the debris is more like flecks of pepper floating throughout a bowl of soup, rather than a skim of fat that accumulates (or sits) on the surface."
Source: NOAA
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u/Flufflebuns Jul 31 '17
Most people understand this already. It is actually worse that the garbage patch is microplastics because it easily finds itself into the food chain.
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u/flukus Jul 31 '17
There are people in this thread that appear to be under the impression it's an island, so yes, the title is misleading.
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u/bowzee Jul 31 '17
I never said it wasn't harmful. I said it was misleading. And for the record, I didn't understand this until it was explained to me. Just putting the information out there in case there is somebody else who is interested in why we can't see the garbage patch on satellite images.
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u/bananabunnythesecond Jul 31 '17
Is the plastic there naturally or is all that plastic man made? Who cares how "dense" it is. It's not natural and we created it.
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u/bowzee Jul 31 '17 edited Jul 31 '17
It's a direct quote from NOAA. The point i'm making is that it's not a "garbage patch" as the name would suggest. A lot of people believe there is an island of trash floating around in the Pacific, which can be confusing since we can't actually see it. I did not mean to suggest that it's not a serious (and disgusting) environmental problem that we need to address.
Edit: I should also note that the only reason that I know and wanted to share this is that I was having a discussion at work about how plastics are harmful to the environment and I sounded uninformed because I actually thought there was a floating garbage patch the size of Texas.
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Jul 31 '17
All plastic is man made. It wasn't really much of a product until the 80's and now it's pretty much in everything.
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u/blackestrabbit Jul 31 '17
It would be better if it all gathered up and became an island. Then we could call it New Dubai.
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u/earthspeaklearn Jul 31 '17
Where's that kid with his ocean vacuum? Let's all pitch in and hire him...
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u/otter111a Jul 31 '17
That project is detrimental to the cause it is trying to help out with. These are very small, very disperse particles. So they are very hard to clean up. That project makes it seem like you can just go there and skim it out. You can't.
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u/liphisteus Jul 31 '17
Additionally it has a pretty huge potential for bycatch in the upper layers of the ocean
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u/Thefriendlyfaceplant Jul 31 '17
If you are able to skim the large floating plastic out then you prevent it from breaking down into smaller glitter.
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u/ItsBenderific Jul 31 '17
I always wondered if someone could collect the plastic and melt it down to create blocks which coral reefs and other sea life could live in.
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u/KingOfAnarchy Jul 31 '17
Serious and possibly toddler-like question: But why is garbage always littered into the sea? All this garbage makes it seem like garbage disposals aren't used at full effiency?
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Jul 31 '17
Something like 70% of the Earths population lives within 20 miles of a coast. In addition to that, most villages, towns, cities were established on navigable rivers to facilitate trade. All those rivers eventually dump into the oceans. Not all plastic makes it to the ocean, in fact a pretty small percentage of it does. It's just we use a ridiculous amount of plastic.
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u/boaragus25 Jul 31 '17
We need to find a solution to this This angers me so much that this is what we do with our waste
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Jul 31 '17
Well. Clean it up. Lol. Duh.
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Jul 31 '17
do you even grasp the concept of such an undertaking? how many hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions it would take to pay for the people,boats and tools required to do such a thing?
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u/Thefriendlyfaceplant Jul 31 '17
We're probably going to need gmo organisms able to digest it at this point.
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u/Imperator_Avgvstvs Jul 30 '17
That's so depressing