This is an eye opener.
Read this story........as the old saying goes...'dont poop in your own nest' ...but it seems like we've done it big time now....and have done for a long time......its shocking!!
"IT has been described as the world's largest rubbish dump, or the Pacific plastic soup, and it is starting to alarm scientists.
It is a vast area of plastic debris and other flotsam drifting in the northern Pacific Ocean, held there by swirling ocean currents.
Discovered in 1997 by American sailor Charles Moore, what is also called the great Pacific garbage patch is now alarming some with its ever-growing size and possible impact on human health."
Charles Moore's Algalita Marine Research Foundation has a crew of six currently on a voyage to the area again to see first hand whats happening there.
They have a blog going here and they post everyday.
Its worth following and I hope it creates worldwide interest and some sort of action, although it sounds like its way out of control!
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9 comments:
I read your post yesterday and have been thinking of it off and on ever since.
:-/
That is just vile thinking of all that crap floating out there slowly poisoning the ocean.
How the fuck are they...WE... ever going to get it all cleaned up????
Shitting in your own nest indeed.
Sometimes it is shameful being human. It's so easy to plead "not my fault" or say "I'm not responsible" but that doesn't make the mess go away does it?
Scary stuff.
Fiery,
It is vile isnt it, I found it sickening to think that all those creatures that rely on the sea for their lives are totally being done over by humans! The bits of plastic we can see are bad enough, but underlying this are the NURDLES!!! What are nurdles you may well ask....I had to ask Google...who told me another horror story!!
"Nurdles are the raw plastic that is shipped to manufacturers of bottles, car parts, toys, plastic bags, anything made of plastic. The real danger with nurdles is their absorptive capability. They are tiny magnets for metabolites, PCB’s, breakdown products of DDT—DDE and other dioxin-like substances. They are poisonous little bombs loaded with tens of 1000’s of times more poison than the ambient sea, and because they are translucent they are mistaken for fish eggs and enter the food chain."
"The problem comes from the fact that pre-production plastic resin beads, known as “nurdles,” which are the most common contaminant of our beaches (based on research published by SCCWRP), are less than 5 mm. (some areas have 5mm mesh screens to catch particles) These pellets have never been formed into products."
These things come in a variety of shapes — spherical, ovoid, and cylindrical — with sizes ranging from one to five millimeters diameter. They get lost in transit, and with 250 billion pounds of the stuff being shipped around the world each year, lots of them escape!
The real damage is what most untrained eyes miss: choking and starving birds, turtles, and other animals all from discarded plastic objects and those bloody nurdles!!!!
Stop the world, I want to get off!!!
*gack*
that is truly dreadful.
and cleanup is going to be prohibitively expensive.
unless someone devises a fuel made from nurdles and plastic bits, then they'll be mining this waste field.
god it's just fucking disgusting!!!!!
I've been feeling just sick in the pit of my stomach about this. and not one goddamned thing I can do about it.
if they let you off this world, i want off too!
I think clean up is impossible now, its too far gone!
Only thing now is to try and educate people to not just discard plastics and the nurdle companies that ship this stuff around the world into devising ways to stop them from escaping! Cant see the world stopping the use of plastic, its everywhere in our lives.
Years ago in Australia you could take softdrink bottles back to shops and get a refund on the bottle. I think it was about a penny or something like that. Kids would spend days collecting bottles and saving the money for something special. Maybe we could start a worldwide movement that would get kids and grownups to spend time collecting plastic rubbish and get paid a nominal amount per kilo by the government? or some other body...cant think this through right now...but unless everyone on the planet does their little bit we will eventually be literally drowning in plastic!!!
This is indeed shocking.
The more I learn, the more ignorant I find I am. I had no idea about this, and it's so huge!
Thump Thump - I believe South Australia still has a 5 cent refund on all glass and plastic bottles. A little while ago someone in parliament proposed the whole of Australia take up this scheme. It was shouted down for some reason?
Oz
I think the refund idea is a really good one...actually the SA government just increased the refund to 10c after 30 years...and the big hoo ha about the other states wanting to do it too, was defeated by the lobbying power of the beverage industry...go figure!!
Surely a similar thing for any discarded plastics would be a major help. The bottle collection system in SA generates something like 600 jobs, so doing the same thing with plastics would also create jobs....the dilemma is who will pay...or who will work out who will pay and who will lobby against that?
I read about this in the book "The World Without Us" I'm glad to see it's getting the attention it deserves. Plastics are the blessing and bane of humankind.
Thanks for pointing me towards that book T&A it sounds very interesting, I read the reviews at Amazon and I'm glad someone has written something like this, there should be more public discussion to raise awareness of this whole scenario of discarded waste (and other disgusting things that we're doing to the planet without a thought about what it means on a grand scale)!
Have you been following the blog of the Algalita voyage? The amount of plastic stuff in all forms they're finding is awful, not to mention the fact that lots of chunks of it have become homes for many sea creatures......I cant begin to imagine what this means in terms of the food chain, I think I might avoid eating fish, prawns, crayfish, crabs, scallops, mussells and other sea goodies that I used to love!
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