The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a large area, twice the size of Texas, in the ocean, forever swirling with a very high amount of debris. If you don’t already know about it, you might be imagining something like this:
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not look like this. Most of the debris in the Garbage Patch is made up of small pieces of floating plastic. Many may be too small to see from a ship or satellite, or they may be floating just below the surface. They come in all sizes, colors, and types—plastics from soda bottles and take-out food containers to polyester clothing and toothbrushes.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t larger pieces of trash floating in the Patch. There are, but these larger pieces of garbage eventually degrade into smaller pieces of plastic, some of which break into microscopic sizes. Very few actually revert back to their base elements; they are simply super small pieces of plastic. The few plastics that are biodegradable were designed to break down on land, exposed to air and sunlight. Water hinders that process.
Nobody knows exactly how much garbage is actually in the ocean, or precisely where. Estimates have been based on skimming the surface, but wind and currents drive plastic deeper than we once thought. There have been large areas of garbage, like the Pacific Garbage Patch, identified in numerous locations around the world, but they tend to move, following currents and wind changes.
What can be agreed upon is that there is too much garbage in our oceans. Just Google “garbage in our oceans” and you’ll get countless articles, websites, and images of trash polluting beaches and affecting wildlife.
We don’t have a fool-proof solution yet for this problem, and there’s not much you can do about the tons of garbage already in the ocean, but there are ways you can keep more trash from joining the rest. Recycle your plastics or use more glass. Clean up our environment by picking up pieces of trash you see on the ground. Organize a service project to clear up a nearby area. Do something, anything to help, big or small.
You can even do something right now. Watch this “mockumentary” about the life of a plastic bag and share it with your friends. Five minutes can make a difference to our oceans.
Picture source: water pollution: garbage covers a river in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photograph. Britannica Online for Kids. Web.16 May 2012. <http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-109541>.You can learn more about the Pacific Garbage Patch here
