Ocean’s biggest rubbish heap dwarfs Texas
UNITED STATES: The world’s largest collection of ocean garbage is growing.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of plastic, floating trash located halfway between Hawaii and California, has grown to more than 155 million hectares, a study published yesterday finds. That’s twice the size of Texas.
Winds and converging ocean currents funnelled the garbage into a central location, said study lead author Laurent Lebreton, of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organisation that spearheaded the research.
First discovered in the early 1990s, the trash in the patch comes from countries around the Pacific Rim, including nations in Asia as well as North and South America.
The patch is not a solid mass of plastic. It includes some 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic and weighs 88,000 tonnes – the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets. The new figures are as much as 16 times higher than previous estimates.
The research – the most complete study undertaken of the garbage patch – was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Scientific Reports.
Much of the garbage is rather large. ‘‘We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered,’’ said Julia Reisser, also of the foundation.
‘‘We used to think most of the debris consists of small fragments, but this new analysis shines a new light on the scope of the debris,’’ she said.
The study was based on a threeyear mapping effort conducted by an international team of scientists affiliated with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, six universities and an aerial sensor company.
Sadly, the Pacific patch isn’t alone. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was the largest of five known such trash collections in the ocean, Lebreton said. Scientists are working with the European Space Agency to take photos of them from space.
With no governments stepping up to clean up the trash in the world’s oceans, which are in international waters, it’s up to privately funded groups like the Ocean Cleanup Foundation to take the lead on getting rid of the garbage.
There was a sense of urgency, said Joost Dubois, a spokesman for the foundation. It would be far easier to collect the trash while most of it was rather large, before it could break down into smaller pieces, he said.
‘‘It’s a ticking time bomb of larger material,’’ Dubois said. ‘‘We’ve got to get it before it breaks down into a size that’s too small to collect and also dangerous for marine life.’’
Since plastic has only been around since the 1950s, there’s no way of knowing exactly how long it will last in the ocean. If left alone, the plastic could remain there for decades, centuries or even longer.
‘‘How long plastic may remain in the ocean is a big unknown, but unless we begin to remove it, some would say it may remain there forever,’’ Lebreton said. – TNS