Just posted this to my blog, but thought you guys would be interested:

One of the things I learned about when I visited the SF Recycling facility (full report soon to follow) was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, the Pacific Trash Vortex, and the Asian Trash Trail.

The GPGP is a floating collection of plastic debris at least the size of Texas (by some accounts twice that size) which has collected at the center of the North Pacific Gyre, where four prevailing ocean currents come together in a huge, clockwise vortex. This area has always acted as a magnet for oceanic debris (and, by extension, for feeding animals), but in the past much of that debris was biodegradable. In the last 60 years however, the massive increase in plastic use has turned the gyre into a polymer graveyard - over 90% of its floating debris is plastic.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the GPGP in the LA Times:
"It moves around like a big animal without a leash," said Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Seattle and leading expert on currents and marine debris. "When it gets close to an island, the garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic."
(there's a picture with my blog post)

Although it takes hundreds of years for plastic to break down into its organic elements, when exposed to UV radiation it quickly degrades into small pellets. We've all heard how larger animals can mistake plastic for food (dead albatross chicks are routinely found with stomachs choked with cigarette lighters and bottle caps), these small fragments of plastic are also consumed - by animals at the bottom of the food chain, like jellyfish.

Feeding on non-nourishing, indigestible plastic can kill an animal. But worse, plastic is acts as a sort of 'chemical sponge' for persistent organic pollutants like dioxins [www.chem.unep.ch/pops/alts02.html]. The more plastic an animal consumes, the higher it's concentration of these toxic pollutants. This concentration increases as you ascend the food chain, so that larger consumers (like us!) are exposed to health-threatening levels.

In addition, the floating plastic acts as a raft for hitchhiking organisms. When carried far from their natural habitats, these can become invasive and disrupt ecosystems.

And while the image of all that trash floating on the surface might be disturbing, it's only the tip of the iceberg - over 70% of plastic waste sinks to the bottom of the ocean and effects marine life there. And we haven't even talked about the mountains of plastic that are accumulating on land.

The LA Times piece notes, "The average American used 223 pounds of plastic in 2001. The plastics industry expects per-capita usage to increase to 326 pounds by the end of the decade." In some places, the amount of plastic in the ocean has increased tenfold every decade.

Plastic is great for packaging and food preserving and creating durable goods, but it just. doesn't. go. away. Even recycling plastic is only so helpful - reprocessed plastics generally only have one or two post-consumer lives. Then they end up as trash. The short moral to this long story is that we're going to be living with that growing island of trash far into the future.

Here's a link to the entire LA Times story:
www.pulitzer.org/year/2007...ans04.html

other sources from which I liberally borrowed:
www.greenpeace.org/internat...sh-vortex
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre