Fighting a floating patch of garbage in the ocean
Another cleanup effort begins, but experts say focus should be on prevention
Experts say when it comes to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — which includes 1.8 trillion pieces of trash — the focus should be on prevention.
The water bottle could be from Los Angeles, the food container from Manila, the plastic bag from Shanghai.
But whatever its source, almost all of the trash in the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from countries around the Pacific Rim.
Concerned about the millions of tons of garbage in the patch – a floating blob halfway between California and Hawaii that’s twice the size of Texas – the Ocean Cleanup project is sending out a giant floating trash collector to try to scoop it up. The first of its cleanup systems launches Saturday near San Francisco.
It’s a daunting task: The patch includes about 1.8 trillion pieces of trash and weighs 88,000 tons – the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets.
And while many scientists say it’s great that people are trying to clean up the patch, others say most of the efforts should instead go toward stopping the out-of-control flow of plastic garbage into the ocean.
Try putting 95 percent of the efforts on stopping plastic from entering the ocean and only 5 percent on cleanup, said Richard Thompson, head of the International Marine Litter Research Unit at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.
Thompson said a global-scale effort
is needed to combat the problem, including contributions from individuals, policymakers and industry. “The way we use plastics – from design to use to disposal – must be done more efficiently and in a more environmentally friendly manner.”
First discovered in the early 1990s, the garbage patch’s trash comes mostly from nations in Asia and North and South America, said Laurent Lebreton of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation.
But specifically, scientists say, the bulk of the trash comes from China and other Asian countries.
This shouldn’t be a surprise: Overall, worldwide, most of the plastic trash in the ocean comes from Asia. In fact, the top six countries for ocean garbage are China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand, according to a 2015 study in the journal Science.
The United States contributes as much as 242 million pounds of plastic trash to the oceans every year, according to that study.
China has begun to take steps to stem the tide of trash floating from its shores. The country recently banned the import of most plastic waste, according to a study published in June in Science Advances.
China has imported about 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste since 1992 for recycling, the study found. In the U.S. alone, nearly 4,000 shipping containers full of plastic recyclables a day had been shipped to Chinese recycling plants.
Now where will all that waste go? “It’s hard to predict what will happen to the plastic waste that was once destined for Chinese processing facilities,” said Jenna Jambeck, associate professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering and co-author of the study. “Some of it could be diverted to other countries, but most of them lack the infrastructure to manage their own waste, let alone the waste produced by the rest of the world.”
That decision means the U.S. and other industrialized countries that have been exporting their plastic waste to China for recycling will need to find new ways to handle the disposal of their trash because much of it is already starting to pile up in landfills.
The trash in the ocean could be around for a very long time: “Most plastics don’t biodegrade in any meaningful sense, so the plastic waste humans have generated could be with us for hundreds or even thousands of years,” Jambeck said.
Because plastic has been around only 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, Jambeck said.
And we’re talking a lot of trash. Every year, an estimated 8 million to 12 million metric tons of plastics enter the oceans on top of the estimated 150 million metric tons already in our marine environments, according to the Ocean Conservancy.
That’s like dumping one New York City garbage truck full of plastic into the ocean every minute of every day for an entire year.