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Plastic Pulp Fiction

Turning and Turning in a Widening Gyre*

In the North Pacific Gyre, north of Hawaii, there is now more plastic, by weight, than plankton. It’s a huge region of circling currents that concentrate the debris, thousands of miles from land. If you haven’t already watched this, here’s a recap.

Effects of The Plastic Island

* There is no plastic island; all of water mass is polluted with tiny bits of plastic, which arrives back on the shores. We are now surrounded less by nature and more a synthetic environment.

* Plastics are being broken down into polymers; from what they were originally created from. They are attaching and absorbing with organic polluters creating floating chemically induced and harmful plastics.

* In the Gyre, plastics are being mistaken for jelly fish and sea-creatures, and now over taking the amount of plankton six times over, in a 6:1 plastic to plankton ratio. Plastics are becoming the new sea creatures!

* Plastic is not easily biodegradable, so can remain in the water for 20 years. Plastic is changing the composition of ocean water, more plastic than actual marine life.

* Animals eat the brightly coloured plastic thinking it is food; absorb the chemicals in the plastic.

* Male fish are producing female eggs due to the chemicals affecting reproductive organs and other defects. Population drops in actual males, a forced evolution because of plastic.

* Chemicals are starting to affect humans. Eskimo women are producing toxic milk; they have to use formula (They eat mammals which have a high fat content thus absorb chemicals from plastic). We're eating our own trash.

* Women are being affected by the chemicals, some women who experience miscarriages are found with high concentrates of the particular chemicals found in the ocean caused by the plastic.

* Marine Life is evolving to the current conditions with the plastic, as habitat, or food, but a lot are dying found with plastic in their stomach. While some evolve, other races that could die out.

Additional information

* Project Kaisei consists of two beautiful vessels called the Kaisei and the New Horizon. A team of innovators, scientists, environmentalists, ocean lovers, sailors, and sports enthusiasts have come together with a common purpose: to study the North Pacific Gyre and the marine debris that has collected in this oceanic region, to determine how to capture the debris and to study the possible retrieval and processing techniques that could be potentially employed to detoxify and recycle these materials into diesel fuel.

* A “plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

* The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan

* Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

* The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

* Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

* Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

* Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere,"

* According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

* Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

* Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.

* Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs.