When I first heard of the Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean, I thought of it as a rather solid dense, floating island… something that one could walk on, because it was so thick. Come to find out that idea was way wrong, I also heard it was about the size of Texas. That may have been true at one point, but it is no longer.
Now, only a few years later, it’s being talked about as twice the size of Texas. So, what is it? The ocean is seven miles deep in some places. As the 12.7 million tons of plastic are reaching the oceans YEARLY, I ask, where is it all going? It’s talked about in the sense that it’s continually on the move.
There are five major gyres, or circular pattern of currents. The plastic is ending up swirling slowly around and around in these giant current systems, as there is no “throwing it out” or “sending it away”. We live on a single planet called earth, yet ocean reigns supreme with 3/4 of the surface covered by water.
As the plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, the major gyres are now becoming a mixture of water and plastic. Can you imagine that at some point this man-made material will be quite massive a presence in the oceans. Shockingly, it seems there are more pieces of plastic than there are fish in the world.
Some stats:
• 5.2 trillion pieces of plastic are in our oceans.
• Again, annually, 12.7 million tons of plastic material is being “dumped” into the oceans.
• 35% of fish being caught has plastic in its stomach.
Marine life is impacted, as plastic is undigestible, it doesn’t break down and ultimately fills space in the stomach where food would normally be. Hence the sea-life slowly starves to death with a belly full of plastic.
Who might be speaking up for the birds, turtles, fish and whales, and other animals that eat from the sea?
Sea life matters.
Contemplate on that.