Plastic Beach
In the Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
A beach cleanup on Midway Atoll made us feel just like Sisyphus.
There are millions of tons of plastics present in our oceans, and these are constantly fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces which are scattered throughout the water column and present, in different densities, throughout all the worlds oceans.
Contrary to what many people believe, there are no visible islands of trash anywhere –even if some areas, the gyres, accumulate higher densities of plastic pollution. In actuality, what is happening is much more complex and scary: our oceans are becoming a planetary soup laced with plastic.
To make thing worse, these tiny pieces of plastic are extremely powerful chemical accumulators for organic persistent pollutants present in ambient sea water such as DDE’s and PCB’s. The whole food chain, invertebrates, fish, sea turtles… are eating plastic and /or other animals who have plastic in them. This means that we are. Like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.
Cleaning up this mess is not feasible, technically or economically. Even if all the boats in the world were put to the task somehow, the cleanup would not only remove the plastics but also the plankton, which is the base of the food chain, and is responsible for capturing half of the CO2 of our atmosphere and generating half of the oxygen we need to breathe.
But even if this problem was solved too somehow, the amount of plastic that we could capture, at an immense cost, would be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount that flows into the ocean every day.
No matter how hard we push, in terms of technology or money, the boulder will be rolling back down the hill, throughout eternity, unless we stop putting more plastics into our environment.
The good news is that we can do this. We can do this now. We need to start a social movement that spreads virally and creates a critical mass of concerned citizens who pledge to move away from our disposable habits, and who raise their voice to reject and reverse a throwaway culture that might be profitable, but whose consequences are intolerable.
Video by Jan Vozenilek
Written and narrated by: Manuel Maqueda
Music by Christen Lien www.itsnotaviolin.com
Click here to see a satellite image of the exact location of this video (click on ‘view map’ and zoom all the way in.)
I have received permission to reproduce this article, here on my blog with the following conditions.
Hello! You are free to repost the text as long as you give attribution, do not alter the original text, mention where it was originally published, and include a link to the original post. You must also allow others to do the same (you cannot claim a copyright of the reposting). You are also free to quote, extract, mention, etc.
You are also more that welcome to embed the video. Thank you for asking, and thank you so much for helping us spread this message!
You my dear readers may do the same. Please lets see if we can get this message out to as many people as we possibly can. I know that I can’t stop the polar ice caps from melting but I can drastically reduce the amount of plastic that I and my family use.
Comments on this entry are closed.
I try, but it’s very difficult to avoid the wretched stuff. What we do get we endeavour to re-cycle but it isn’t always possible.
Not wanting to make light of a serious situation, but, ha ha “plastic soup”. Isn’t that the stuff that comes in cans, with pretty, bright labels?
scary to think innit? I really didn’t think of the tiny little pieces washing up on the shore…
Bloody scary.
They say some plastic containers emit chemicals when reheated in microwaves or dishwashers so we think we’re playing it safe by avoiding that…too bad it’s already in the food chain 🙁
That’s scary indeed!
If we all cleaned up after ourselves instead of dumping stuff, the world could look a lot better …
glad I don’t have to drink desalinated water!
as an older person I often say how lucky I was to travel overseas in times before humans trashed the planet from the Himalayas down to isolated atolls with plastic.
shame, shame…
The oil giants know there is another better solution to their PRECIOUS black stuff, is 100% biodegradible, can replace nearly all petro based products, and will send them broke. HEMP:)
I doubt there’s much digestible left over after hemp is processed into a fuel! If we turn over arable land to biofuel production at the expense of food we sentence those who cannot afford the inflated food prices to starvation.
so it’s working. i feel less like throwing out plastic now. less like using it.
it’s working.
I’ve recently purchased re-usuable bottles for my children to take in their lunch for school. It’s just one small step I can take to help heal our planet.
@ Joyce-Anne If every one just took the same small step we would have the plastic problem fixed in no time at all.
@ warriorwitch It is with me as well. I have become very conscious of just how much plastic is out there. I use heaps of cling wrap (saran?) to keep my clay work damp. I am going to start using material instead. Old sheets will do nicely I reckon. As Joyce-anne said it is the small steps that are the important ones.
What is this massive area in the Pacific that I am hearing about,the area of Texas,6 meters deep with plastic waste.Can somebody tell me more please.Phil Lowe lowestas@aapt.net.au
Hi Philip, I assumed that the pacific garbage dump was just that, a huge floating dump. I imagined full plastic garbage bags floating around, sort of the watery equivalent of an open face tip. When I went to Chris Jordan’s lecture at the uni in November he spoke aboke something much more insidious and mostly hidden from sight. Chris showed us that there isn’t actually a garbage dump per se but what there is, is tonnes of plastic rubbish floating just under the suface, a cigarette lighter here, a plastic bottle there. All merrily breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. The images that Chris showed us of the scale of the plastic waste in the ocean chilled me to my core.
Here are some links that might get you started with your research.
(TED)Captain Charles Moore on the sea of plastic
The blog Midway
Plastic pollution coalition
Greenpeace’s 44 page study into plastic in our oceans
Cheers Kim
Plenty of underutilised land for hemp and it’s the product the British empire was founded on before rum and tobacco.