Lubbock Left

Our ocean is turning into plastic soup.

Circular Pacific gyre subsurface currents are creating two continent-sized floating dumps of mostly plastic (80% of 3.5 million tons according to this article). These plastic soups don’t quite float and don’t quite sink either. Wind and sun break the plastic down into smaller bits that continue to hang around near the surface. Within these floating continents of trash, plastic particles are more prevalent than plankton. Oxygen levels are too low to support most ocean life.

Brave New Leaf offers some facts about ocean plastic:

1. Plastic is made of oil, a diminishing resource.
2. It *never* goes away. It just breaks into smaller and smaller plastic pieces.
3. 20% of the plastic in the ocean fell off boats. The rest washed in from land.
4. Much of the ocean’s plastic is the little pellets that plastic things eventually get made out of. When you buy plastic things, you support these pellets being shipped across oceans, and dropped into them.
5. When you throw plastic away, some will seep out of the landfill and find its way back to the ocean.
6. The average sea-bird has thirty pieces of plastic in their stomach.
7. Plastic cups have been found scattered amongst the wreck of the Titanic.

We’ve known about the effects of plastic trash on ocean life for years; what is less obvious but becoming more apparent is the effect of oceanic plastic waste on us. As all this plastic breaks down (it never goes away), one wonders what effect it’s having on human health. Little bits of plastic enter our food chain starting with the birds and fish that eat this stuff. Over time, human bodies will contain more and more plastic, possibly leading to obesity, infertility, and worse.

Our throwaway lifestyle is to blame for this mess.

So, what can be done? There’s no realistic way to clean up all this trash right now. What we can do is each do our part to prevent these trash continents from growing. Use less plastic in your life; for starters, take reusable bags with you when you shop. If you end up with plastic bags around the house, you can find ways to reuse them without throwing them away as well.

Just as important as our individual efforts to reduce our reliance on disposable plastics is a society-wide effort to reduce disposable plastics. This will require social pressure as well as supply-side regulations. In other words, disposable plastic has to become uncool before it becomes illegal.

Let’s do our part.