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Chapter 8:Where the currents take our trash
The Eastern Garbage Patch, Pacific Ocean
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean drifts a garbage patch twice the size of Texas. The circular rotation around it draws in trash like a vortex. Flotsam and other debris combine to form huge floating clouds of waste. This waste comes from cargo ships: eighty thousand pairs of Nike sneakers, tens of thousands of rubber duckies — yes, rubber duckies, bobbing around since a cargo spill in 1992 — the odd, or should I say odder, disgorge of hockey equipment from yet another spill. All this mashed together with plastic bottles, tops, six-pack holders, and other litter that degrades into smaller and smaller fragments as it is exposed to the elements; bite-sized pieces for birds and fish that eventually die from ingesting them.
The Eastern Garbage Patch is a lethal marine habitat that has grown and expanded over decades.
It isn’t just cargo ship mishaps that cause these vast waves of waste in the North Pacific Gyre. We contribute to it too. Around 60 billion tons of plastic are produced each year, about 10 percent of which ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land. In other words, about 80 percent of the trash that ends up in the ocean comes from onshore. The wind carries it, sewage pipes spill it, even our garbage disposals make ways for waste to enter storm water drains and to eventually flow out into the ocean.
Take a walk along the beach anywhere in the world and you’ll find plastic bags, bottles, and containers. Along with traffic cones, disposable lighters, old tires, and toothbrushes, these items have been casually tossed away. From the shore, they get carried by wind and tide to the sea. Currents bring them here, to the largest dumpsite in the world, where they join the mass of plastic, paper, oil, rubber, wood, rope, fishnets, and virtually every other type of material on the planet.
We’ve already seen how pollutants from local landfills contaminate air, soil, and groundwater. But the oceans are vast. And when toxins pollute the sea, there is potential for even greater environmental hazard. Oceans occupy 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and are home to over 90 percent of all life on the planet. Seafood is the primary source of protein for many coastal peoples. Worldwide, nearly a billion people rely on fish for a big source of their daily food protein. When we pollute the water, we pollute the fish.
The Eastern Garbage Patch through which I am sailing off the coast of Hawaii is contributing to the ocean’s demise. Rivers, streams, and sewage pipes propel waste out to sea, and it eventually ends up here. This is the place about which we sometimes wonder: “Where does all the sewage go that’s pumped out into the ocean?” In this area there are about a million pieces of garbage within every square mile, according to some estimates. Currents pull and drag garbage in this direction, not far from where pirates, I’m told, used to search for bodies fallen overboard. They understood the movement of the currents, and knew where to find drifting loot and corpses. This is also near where the first Hawaiians are said to have landed from Polynesia.
Hawaii acts as a comb for the Garbage Patch. Nineteen islands and atolls comprise the Hawaiian Islands. They sit smack between North America and Asia in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and are the most remote islands on Earth. The Eastern Garbage Patch is estimated to float between the coast of California and the Hawaiian Islands; and there’s a “superhighway” from there to another ocean garbage patch just south of Japan, the Western Garbage Patch. That patch collects trash from Asia, Russia, India, and the Malaysian Peninsula and deposits tons of trash on the south coast of Japan; its concentration of debris is said to be even higher than what I am seeing here.
The superhighway acts like a funnel connecting the two garbage patches. It’s how whiskey bottles from Japan, pill bottles from India, Korean detergent containers, and oil cartons from Guatemala make their way to the Hawaiian shores. Those are things I saw firsthand.
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“Usually, you go in a straight line and you don’t go through the Garbage Patch. But there was an El Niño in ’97, and a lot of debris had floated south, so I noticed it.” He relates this story to me as we sit on the deck of his boat, the Alguita, early one morning in Hilo, Hawaii, as the sun rises in front of us.
He says the gyres — giant, circular oceanic surface currents — calm the waters between Hawaii and California; so much so that yachtsmen typically sail north toward Oregon or Alaska to catch enough wind before tacking south. The calm waters are known in the sailing world as the “horse latitudes,” because it was here in times past that ships would jettison their horses overboard to lighten their loads and make better headway in the calms.
At any rate, Moore had some extra fuel that year and decided to take some time on his way back to California to trace the scores of bottles, caps, and plastic bags he was seeing in the ocean. “It’s a big blue ocean so you expect to see some trash part of the time. But for a whole week we were seeing it,” he says. The Garbage Patch is spread out and debris is dispersed on the ocean’s surface as well as underneath.
“It isn’t what people think. It isn’t some pile of garbage that you can land on and see all of the time,” Moore says. But you can see garbage much of the time, for miles and miles. That piqued Moore’s interest. So he started doing some investigating, taking samples he found along the way.
Moore is the go-to expert when anyone investigates the Eastern Garbage Patch because he has been the most active in trawling it.
Before he stumbled across the patch, Moore had been conducting water-quality samples along the West Coast of the United States, examining areas of pollution, mostly from where rivers meet the sea. Little did he know how far the pollution extended.
The Eastern Garbage Patch begins to take hold about a thousand miles off the California coast. It’s extensive and it’s spread out. It’s filled with myriad materials, but mostly plastics. And as we all know, plastic does not biodegrade but rather breaks down into tinier and tinier pieces; it doesn’t go away. For example, there are enough particles of plastic in just one liter-sized bottle to put a piece on every mile of beach in the entire world. Those are the tiny particles that are ingested by fish and other sea life. Now think about those 129 million plastic water and soda bottles we discard every day. Those alone are enough to make an ocean of plastic, or what Moore has come to call “the synthetic sea.”
Excerpted from "You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet." Copyright (c) 2008 by Thomas Kostigen. Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins. To read more, click here.
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