North Island, South Island... now welcome to trash island
A floating ‘‘island’’ of plastic larger than Greenland has been discovered in the South Pacific, and much of the waste is believed to have originated in New Zealand.
The discovery was made by researchers led by Charles Moore, and is vital to understanding the extent of plastic waste, he says.
Moore spent 180 days at sea – finally docking in California last week – trawling a fine mesh net to discover the edges of the 2.5 million square-kilometre plastic patch, which drifts around Easter Island and Robinson Crusoe Island and made up of small, ricesized pellets, and small fibres.
‘‘This area is enormous, it’s heavily polluted with plastic fragments,’’ he said.
Full analysis had not been completed, but Moore said the pollution was as bad as he witnessed in the North Atlantic a decade ago.
Oceanographer Dr Erik van Sebille used data from thousands of drifting buoys to show how New Zealand’s plastics added to the plastic patch, findings which were reinforced by the discovery of a fishing crate from a New Zealand company found floating in the area.
Van Sebille, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said the voyage filled a massive knowledge gap adding the real issue was how the problem would expand in the future.
‘‘On current trends, in the next five years we will be putting more plastic in the ocean than all of the twentieth century,’’ he said.
‘‘There’s this tsunami of plastic coming our way, unless we stop the leakage, and close the gaps in our global waste system.’’
In May, 38 million pieces of plastic were found on Henderson Island, which is part of the remote Pitcairn group, 5500kms east of New Zealand.
A study recently estimated nine billion tonnes of plastic had been produced globally since 1950, with only two billion of that actually in use. The rest was either in landfill, or sitting discarded in the land or sea.
The Government has been facing mounting pressure to take action on single use plastic bag use, and Sebille said it was an important step, because of the speed they broke up, and how easily they were mistaken for food by turtles.
It was recently revealed that a third of turtles and seabirds found dead on New Zealand’s shores had ingested plastic.
‘‘If you tally everything up, and combine all the data that’s out there, you get something like there’s 250,000 metric tonnes [floating in the ocean]. But the total amount of plastic going into the ocean is something like five million metric tonnes per year. So every year there’s something like 20 times more plastic going into the ocean than is on the surface right now,’’ Sebille said.
‘‘That means we have 95 per cent of the plastic that we just don’t know where it is.’’