June 6th, 2008 · No Comments

“But from their standpoint, it’s: Don’t factor in this 500-mile floating plastic mass in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If you haven’t heard about that, do a Google search of ‘Pacific Gyre’,” he says.

Once Googling, you’ll discover that even Wikipedia has a page on it: “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known variously as the Plastic soup, the Eastern Garbage Patch, or the Pacific Trash Vortex, is an area of marine debris in the North Pacific Gyre in the central North Pacific Ocean,” it says in its summary. “Size estimates vary from an area equivalent to the state of Texas to double that of the continental United States. …”

The site goes on to say that the floating dump was inadvertently created by a natural phenomenon in that part of the ocean, a vortex-like pull, that “draws waste material in and has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris, so much so that the plastic debris gathers in concentrations of one million pieces of plastic per square mile in some areas. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photo-degrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces, still polymers, eventually become individual molecules, which are still not easily digested. Some plastics photo-degrade into other pollutants.”

(For a first-hand account of the floating dump, go to sailboat racer Charles Moore’s encounter with the Gyre.)

Westlund believes that upon these types of facts, environmentalists should be able to rest their case in claiming that Styrofoam must be phased out all together.

“The Pacific Gyre - that alone says there should be no debate that our oceans are totally polluted with plastics,” he adds.

But the plastics gyre’s existence leads to an obvious and scary question: How pervasive is Styrofoam? Not
just in restaurants and truck stops and coffee shops, or at picnics or barbecues, but in general?

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