Our oceans are turning into plastic -- Are we?

[phusion]

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

More...

[snagglepuss]

1. Oh my god. Unbelieveable. Thanks for posting.

Bookmarking

[snappyturtle]

2. If oil prices keep going up maybe the amount of plastic will go down.

I hardly remember a time before plastic....yeah, I'm old. I always liked glass millk bottles...I think milk stayed colder longer.

edit: sorry I got off topic a bit. This is deplorable....chemical companies love selling all that plasticizer! Nasty stuff.

[Lorien]

3. Ugh. Horrible.

there was a debate on DU about those cheap grocery shopping bags vs. taking your own bag to the market. A shocking number of DUers were AGAINST bringing their own bag; one even went so far as to call those who wanted others to carry their own bags "liberal fascists". Those bags break down but it takes 1,000 years for them to decompose.

And this is a reminder to ALWAYS cut plastic rings and six pack holders-even before they go in the recycle bin:

[Dogmudgeon]

14. 1000 years? Certainly not! (Fortunately!)

I don't mean to be harsh about this, but plastic shopping bags start to decay in a matter of months. The misinformation about the longevity of plastic is motivated from concern, but fortunately, the danger is not as long-lasting as many of us believe.

When I moved in 1989, I packed all my stuff in those bags, my own gesture of recycling. I left some of the stuff it storage, and by my next move in 1992, the bags were already breaking down. I found several last winter that had been used to pack clothes, and the bags were reduced to a shallow pile of plastic flakes.

Exposed to elements like seawater and equatorial sunlight, they break down much faster.

This does NOT excuse the utter disregard we treat Nature with. Even during their brief life of a few months, they can cause considerable environmental damage and wildlife deaths. But the thousand-year figure is just not accurate -- fortunately.

The molecular plastic getting into the ecosystem is also a concern, but most of them do break down fairly fast. But PFOA, a chemical used in producing Teflon and other non-stick plastics, is a notorious pseudohormone.

I'd also like to thank you for posting that picture of the turtle. I'm a little compulsive about cutting up plastic binding material, but we should be lobbying for wildlife-friendly packaging in general. There was a deer in my area two years ago that I often saw with a beer six-pack ring stuck on its foreleg. The deer was in no visible distress, but it was an obscenity none the less.

--p!

[poverlay]

4. Thank you for posting this. People will, sooner or later, make the right

choice if they are aware of the facts.

[GliderGuider]

10. Do you really think so?

I see no sign of it. A few individuals will make the right choices, but the vast majority of people will not. A few individuals taking cloth bags to the grocery store can't save the planet.

[Warpy]

5. Plastic trash will be mined at some point in the future

because thermal depolymerization will turn it back into the light, sweet crude oil it originally arose from. It's a fantastic process that could turn stinking landfills and the polluted Pacific Gyre into cash cows.

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. Agreed. I have often thought we would end up mining our landfills

[emmadoggy]

7. "Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes."

Yup, that pretty much sums it up. God, we are like a massive plague of locusts on this earth. Eating, ravaging, destroying, and covering everything in our path. (No disrespect to locusts intended.)

:cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

[Vogon_Glory]

8. Isn't That The Garbage Collector Area?

As I recall, that part of the Pacific already has the unhappily well-deserved nickname of "The Garbage Collector." That is the part of the Pacific Ocean where stray gill nets end up, along with heaven knows what else. If anyone is interested in re-creating a sustainable fishing industry again some time in the future, those nets ought to be gathered in and removed from the water, along with any other plastic trash that happens to be in the area. Of course, the US probably won't lend a hand, not with George HW's and Barbara Mater's Beamish Boy in the White House or environmentally-irresponsible Republican Party politicos in the House and Senate still packing clout even after the 2006 elections.

[Nihil]

9. Please read the article, it is much more than that ...

... as if minor facts like this aren't bad enough ...

> The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.


The worrying bits (to me) were about the absorption and widespread
presence of the small particles:

> But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only
> the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and
> far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he
> discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye,
> swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers
> parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following
> conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much
> plastic as it does plankton.

...

> “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100
> industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.”

...

> ... another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are
> discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion
> pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly
> every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these
> plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing
> them through our skin every single day.


And with respect to your comment
> that part of the Pacific already has the unhappily well-deserved
> nickname of "The Garbage Collector."

... I'll let him have the last word:

> The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in
> the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and
> South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own
> version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents.
> Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to
> a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our
> planet is a toilet that never flushes.”

[Lorien]

11. Kick

This is an important story, but we'll never see the likes of it on the MSM while people like Paris Hilton have the vapid in this Nation glued to their screens!

After reading this I went to www.reusablebags.com and bought several hemp grocery bags. I'm going to do whatever I can to use as little plastic as possible from now on!

[ArmchairMeme]

12. Prefer to bring my own bag

The stores that I shop at give me a 5 cent rebate each for bringing my own bags. It saves me from having to recycle their bags.

I sort my mail before I leave the post office and leave any junk mail in the waste basket there. I want to save my energy to recycle other things beside the junk mail.

I save glass containers and find them far superior for left over food than the plastic container.

When I was a kid my Mom used canning jars as drinking cups - it was cool.

[Lorien]

13. kick