Garbage in the Gyre
VIDEO
Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel
Disposable plastics are a problem.
We’ve been sold on the wonder of plastic. It’s ubiquitous in
our lives and everpresent in our environment.
It comes in any color of the rainbow, it can be made into any shape you want, and unlike wood or glass, it doesn’t break. The problem is, we use it in so many “disposable” products that the plastic will long outlive us.
In the Los Angeles area alone, 10 metric tons of plastic fragments– like grocery bags, straws and soda bottles– are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the North Pacific Gyre off the coast of California and is the largest ocean garbage site in the world. This floating mass of plastic is twice the size of Texas, with plastic pieces outnumbering sea life six to one.
Plastic constitutes approximately 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface, with 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile. 46 percent of plastics float and it can drift for years before eventually concentrating in the ocean gyres.
44 percent of all seabird species, 22 percent of cetaceans, all sea turtle species and a growing list of fish species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies. One million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually from plastic in our oceans.
Consider this:
Plastic chemicals can be absorbed by the body—93 percent of Americans age six or older test positive for BPA (a plastic chemical). Some of these compounds found in plastic have been found to alter hormones or have other potential human health effects.
Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century. 50 percent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away. The vast majority is not recycled or recovered.
What more do we need to see?
Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times. We currently recover only five percent of the plastics we produce.
The average American throws away approximately 185 pounds of plastic per year. Plastic accounts for around 10 percent of the total waste we generate and it takes 500-1,000 years for most plastic to degrade.
Americans throw away 35 billion plastic water bottles every year. Annually, approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide– with more than one million bags used every minute.
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Via Ecowatch, 5 Gyres, Chris Jordan’s Midway, and Vimeo
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