Garbage In The Sea

A group of environmentalists and scientists are on a mission to sail to the middle of Pacific Ocean from the west coast of the United States to explore a vast swirl of waste known as Garbage Patch. The target destination area is located somewhere between Hawaii and the mainland United States and the entire mission is expected to cost about US$2mil. The massive swirl, about the size of two state of Texas combined, have been gradually building over the past 60 years as Asia and the United States dumped their wastes into the ocean. The garbage have been slowly broken down by the sun’s rays into small particles while the ocean tides have resulted in much of it settled below the ocean’s surface in a pattern just like spiral.

As scientists only got to know about this Garbage Patch in recent years, little is known about it. And so, the expedition hopes to find out in what way the garbage especially plastics can be fished out from the sea. Jim Dufour, the advisor of this expedition, who is also a senior engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography based in California, has said that finding out the extent of this problem is very important for the future health of our oceans. It will take many years to fully understand the entire problem and how we can get it fixed.

United Nations Environment Programme asserts that around 13,000 pieces of plastic waste are found in every square kilometer of the ocean. As the plastics are being broken down gradually by sun’s ray, most have become so small that they cannot be seen by the satellite. However, the tremendous volume of these small particles is being unknowingly consumed by marine life as well as birds and much of it contains toxic chemicals. As a result, a lot of toxins could end up in our human food chain.

The 50-day expenditure will head from San Francisco to Hawaii and back, passing through the Pacific Garbage Patch twice, in a 45 meter tall ship named the KaiSei –which means Ocean Planet in Japanese. Followed with it is a fish trawler which is trying out various techniques on how the waste could be fished without harming marine life.

This is the first scientific study being conducted on sea surface pollutants and their impact on organism at intermediate depth, bottom sediments, and other marine life affected by the leaching of chemicals from these plastics into the sea.

The entire mission only highlights the need for reducing the waste from our ocean, but ultimately the real fix is still back on land. We need to really learn to know how to care for our disposable waste, globally.