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Great Pacific Garbage Patch. You might ask what It looks like from up Above?. The Facts!. Founded first by a sailor named Charles Moore as he crossed the Pacific in 1997 after competing in the Transpacific Yacht Race.
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You might ask what It looks like from up Above?
The Facts! • Founded first by a sailor named Charles Moore as he crossed the Pacific in 1997 after competing in the Transpacific Yacht Race. • The patch, you see, isn’t well understood. People think it’s like a solid mass of trash you’d find at a dump site. But you can’t you walk on it. You can’t land a plane on it, it’s really diffuse, like “plastic soup,” as Moore describes it. SO DON’T LET THE NAME CONFUSE YOU. • Plastic waste is one of the most significant sources of marine pollution. It accounts for 90 percent of all debris floating in the oceans • It is roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifiers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles too numerous to count. • Floats between Hawaii and San Francisco. • Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. • Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean. That’s 20 billion pounds. • Of the 20 billion pounds, 70% of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the ocean floor. That’s 14 billion pounds of plastic each year going to the bottom of our ocean. • "What people don't get is that it's not really a patch and it's not really an island, both of which you might be able to contain and control. No, what we found is much worse. It's like a gigantic toxic stew and it's a big big problem that we need to pay attention to now.“ says VBS.TV
Effects on Animals • There is 6 times as much plastic than there are plankton. • If you are a bird or fish or turtle trying to determine what to eat you have a better chance of eating plastic than getting real food which they then later die of plastic poisoning or blockage of their digestive system. • This not only effects the oceans food chain and life but ours as well. Disease, infertility etc. • Plastic is 100% nonbiodegradable.
What to do? • The trash is so dispersed so we can’t just take a huge boat with a huge net out there to clean it up. Also we would risk killing any animals that are in the way. • Best the is to prevent any more garbage from getting out to the ocean. • There is a group project already doing things to cleanup the surface and easy trash to pick up also called Project Kaisei.