Late last year, the
San Francisco Chronicle ran a story describing a patch of plastic garbage, twice the size of Texas -- and growing -- floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii.
The Christian Science Monitor reported on it in 2006.
So why don't we see photographs of it? Experts say that's because it is 80 percent plastic -- and therefore translucent -- and much of it floats just below the water's surface.
Because of the lack of photographic evidence, the federal government, so far, is unsure how large the so-called Pacific Garbage Patch is (it's also called the Eastern Garbage Patch). But there is general agreement that there is a very large collection of plastic debris floating out there somewhere.
The Los Angeles Times reported on the Garbage Patch in its Pulitzer Prize-winning
"Altered Oceans" project.
The floating mass may be so large, and so far from shore, that there is no way to clean it up. But the federal government
said last fall that it may try anyway.
The
problem of floating plastic is enormous:
The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every
square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic [source:
UN Environment Program, PDF]. In some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton
by a ratio of six to one. Of the more than 200 billion pounds of
plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the
ocean [source:
Greenpeace].
Most of the floating trash started out on land and was washed out to sea. As
The Christian Science Monitor story notes, ocean currents can carry this junk halfway around the world:
A container of thousands of plastic yellow toy ducks bound from China
to the U.S. was lost in the Pacific Ocean in 1992, but made news in 2003
when the ducks began washing up in Europe. Examples of trash slopping
onto U.S. beaches have included Nike running shoes, Lego building blocks,
umbrella handles and hockey gloves, experts say.
As The Christian Science Monitor story notes, ocean currents can...
