A giant patch of garbage is in the middle of the ocean!
Dean Jensen
“Have you heard about this fucking giant floating plastic patch in the Pacific?” This is how I first came to hear about the Great Pacific Plastic Patch.
“No,” I answered, “What’s the story?” My friend explained what he’d recently come across while sailing on the mighty Internet, which after some research on my own later that night that confirmed: there is a giant patch of floating plastic garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between San Francisco and Honolulu which is growing larger and more toxic every day. Did I mention this thing is giant? Accounts of just how giant it is range from “larger than the state of Texas” to approximately two times that size, and the non-biodegradable stew sinks to as deep as 30 metres down from the surface. And what’s the best part about it?
It is entirely our fault.
Makes you feel great, doesn’t it? Not only does this thing sit there, slowly accumulating more and more garbage, but worse is the fact that animals feed off this mess! The plastic never breaks down, or at least will never break down within the reasonable length of time we can expect human life to continue on this festering garbage dump of a world we’ve polluted.
The plastic eventually does break down into smaller bits of plastic, which then sit and wash to and fro. From there, the toxins that those bits of plastic are ripe with after stewing under the hot sun in the middle of the ocean for anywhere from 10 days to 50 years, make their way up the food chain to “numero uno” — in other words you and I — as well as into every hapless cursed beast along the way. The list of such toxins is long, disturbing, and hard to spell; and I have never been great at chemistry to begin with. I advise you look them up for yourselves.
I admit that looking into this plastic patch business has shaken me profoundly. Everywhere I look now, I see snowdrifts of plastic pellets instead of snow. I look at the frozen river and my thoughts drift towards summer. Quickly, they are hijacked, and the river I see burps foul gasses, and black smeared grocery bags of rotting crap float by, attracting diseased flies. Gulls circle above by the dozen. I also admit that I am far from a rabidly zealous eco consumer, but this goddamn patch business has shaken me, I tell you! How the hell did it come to this?
Every piece of cheap plastic we’ve ever made that has not yet been incinerated is still on Earth, or, more likely, in our waterways and oceans. Even worse, incinerating the plastic releases its toxic mass into the atmosphere, where eventually it will fall back with rainfall into the ocean. According to marine biologist Charles Moore, “In fact, it would be more difficult [to attempt to clean up this growing international mess] than vacuuming up every square inch of the entire United States.” On top of that, there’d be no one willing to foot the multi-billion dollar bill such an operation would cost. Moore continues, stating that “Only elimination of the source of the problem can result in an ocean nearly free from plastic.”
When my friend had finished his explanation of the toxic floating continent (as he described it), I asked said, “Jesus Christ, man, how did you find out about this thing?
“Just Google it when you get home,” he said. “Search Pacific plastic patch.”
Dean Jensen is a second-year student who has nightmares about Styrofoam.
