Plastic Micro-Particle Patch Bigger Than Mexico Found in Pacific

Garbage on beaches is by definition not garbage in the "patches." If you are picking up plastic with your bare hands, you're not picking up the microplastics which even Moore now describes as the problem with the garbage patches. At best you can say that plastic chunks you pick up are hopefully not going to end up as microplastic bits in the gyres.

"[for a week] plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments" -- Moore, 1998(?)

vs.

"It was and is a thin plastic soup, a soup lightly seasoned with plastic flakes, bulked out here and there with “dumplings”: buoys, net clumps, floats, crates, and other “macro debris.”" -- Moore 2011, in the slate article above

And regarding the "plastic soup", every eye witness account I've found except Moore's say it's visually just ocean water, and occasionally you find a chunk of junk. (e.g., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sea-unworthy-a-pe...) Another research group cited in the Slate article decided to phrase it as "plastic smog" rather than soup.

When I've found videos or pictures claiming to be from the garbage patch, they're either of garbage-clogged harbors, or of an item or tangle of debris surrounded by clear blue waters, or as you describe, beaches with garbage. Do you have other pictures?

Where Moore has historically over-sensationalized his descriptions, I find I take his sensational descriptions with a grain of salt.

This isn't to say plastic in the oceans isn't a concern, or isn't something we should work really hard to avoid, just that sensational claims, along with sensational estimates need critical examination, rather than simple acceptance.

"Bigger than Mexico!" What does that even mean? An area the size of Mexico has detectable bits of plastic? What's the density threshold that defines the area? And they made this size estimate based on a single traversal? This suggests the size estimate is based more on the area of currents rather than measurement of the particulate density.

If you have better documentation of the area claim or densities than was given or linked from R-ing-TFA above, I'd love to see it. Something more along the lines of that 2011 study you glibly dismiss: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234157160_Plastic_p...

Where I live, the trash company is the same as the recycling company, so it's very likely the recycle (at least some portion of it) ends up in the trash. Better to just avoid the plastics, which is actually pretty impossible for some items.

in the article i cited, these bacteria were discovered to be out there in the ocean consuming plastic. so the genie is already out of bottle, so to speak. i'm curious if any negative externalities have been found due to their activity, or more optimistically, do they really metabolise the hydrocarbons into something non-toxic that other life forms can use?

They ask that you report technical issues to @ViceTech on Twitter:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/page/vice-about

That has AVAM written all over it. I accidentally left off the googley-eyes in my hastily scrawled recommendation.

> The wheel has removed 331 tons of trash since it was installed in May, according to the initiative.

Nice

There is also "The Ocean Cleanup" project [1] which is worth checking out if you haven't already. It's a pretty cool project which is under active development and in the prototype phase.

[1] https://www.theoceancleanup.com/

Ah, neat! Thank you :)

A density graph of the Pacific Ocean showing plastic particulate count measured at various points, with the gaps filled in using gradients, would be stellar here.

Well, it may not be very dense, but... It's still big, right?

You will find plenty of pieces that are several inches wide, along with large numbers in the cm size range. https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/garbage-island/563b9c912a...

Further, it's not about people. Fish gills for example are designed to filter a lot of water so fish do encounter a lot of plastic.

Agreed. But that doesn't justify making it sound like there's a Mexico garbage barge out there.

imo it's worse that it's particles instead of complete plastic objects.

The tiny particles are near-impossible to clean, hard to identify (without testing), and are arguably more dangerous to the wildlife.

The problem is that this sort of article gets "spun" into a much worse one. Complete with the infamous "floating garbage so bad you can't see water underneath it" photo. People immediately conjure up images of a floating garbage island that is larger than Mexico. Not to mention how catchy and self-gratifying it is to share such a spun article on social media where the conveniently "picked" photo happens to be the floating-garbage one. This is why we can't have nice things and reasonable discussions on nuanced topics.

"A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes"

It is a very serious problem, and it needs to be fixed.

For the two situations - loads of large trash floating at the surface or 4 particles per cubic metre suspended at all depths - you get very different solutions.

Look how popular that solar-powered ocean plastic scoop thing is, and how useless it is.

Did you consider how high you imagined the "landfill-like island"? Is it reasonable to imagine a landfill is 10 miles high? 1 mile? 1 meter? 1 millimeter?

Perhaps your expectations are so skewed by clickbait that you didn't recognize that it's closer to an accurate description than being clickbait.

> There’s nothing misleading about the headline

According to the NOAA (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/garbagepatch.html) "The name "Pacific Garbage Patch" has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter—akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case.".

Looks like the very definition of "misleading".

Those microorganisms are the grass and bugs of the ocean, the entire food chain depends on them.

What happens when krill eats microorganisms that ate plastic? What happens to the blue whales that eat the krill, or the yellowfin tuna that eat the schooling fish that eat these microorganisms?

Remember DDT? This could be so much worse.

Maybe the headline should have been "Plastic Garbage Patch Bigger Than Mexico, and far less dense than the air above Mexico, Found..."

So how _does_ the plastic get into the ocean? Clearly litter washes into rivers during storms and thus ends up in the ocean, but that seems like it must be a relatively insignificant source. Are there countries who are dumping barges full of trash out at sea? Which ones?

And how is that surprising? It even has a name: Tragedy of the commons.

read the comment again.

material is engineered to last, not decompose. in the sea Or land.

yet people use it every day. and when those news show up they show shock at a perfectly predictable outcome. then proceed to continue to use said product.