The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Here’s an interesting fact. Imagine a blue whale, the largest living mammal on earth, and now imagine 57,000 of those huge beautiful creatures. Together, these mammals weigh up to 17.6 billion pounds. That’s the amount of garbage we dump every single year in our oceans. However, here’s the twist. The largest mammal, being an endangered species, is no more than 25,000 in number. That’s how messed up human civilization is. Our garbage acquires more space in its habitat than the actual inhabitants do. So how does trash get into the ocean? It’s dumped, pumped, spilled, leaked, and even washed out with our laundry. Each year, we expose the world’s waterways to an increasing variety of pollutants — plastic debris, chemical runoff, crude oil and so much more.

Oceans. The origin of life. The engine of life. And it is under threat day after day, year after year. It absorbs 50 times more carbon dioxide than the earth’s atmosphere. It is home to countless organisms which thrive in its darkest depths. Geographically speaking, the ocean is the driver of weather patterns and climates. Ocean currents are a major factor in determining climate patterns. The five primary circulation patterns are known as the Ocean gyres. They are a large system of circular ocean currents formed by global wind patterns and forces created by Earth’s rotation. The five major circulation patterns formed by the currents on this map are the world’s five major ocean gyres: North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, and South Pacific. (The Indian Ocean Gyre is two, split slightly below the Equator.)

The movement of the world’s major ocean gyres helps drive the “ocean conveyor belt,” which circulates ocean water and regulates its temperature, salinity, and nutrient flow around the world.

Due to the heavy ocean currents, these gyres are not only places of strong global wind currents but have also become hotspots for garbage accumulation. These are known as Garbage Patches. Garbage patches came into mainstream media not so long ago, and continue to be a major problem. Ocean gyres circle large areas of stationary, calm water. Debris drifts into these places and can pile for years due to the lack of activity in the region. These regions are called garbage patches. Significant garbage patches can be found in the Indian Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, and North Pacific Ocean. The garbage patch in the North Pacific Ocean is sometimes called the Pacific trash vortex or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the world’s largest swirling mass of marine debris spanning 1.6 million square kilometers in the North Pacific between California and Hawaii. Garbage patches are created slowly. Marine debris makes its way into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for instance, from currents flowing along the west coast of North America and the east coast of Asia. Some of the debris is also dumped from ocean vessels.

The circular motion of the gyre draws in the debris, mostly small particles of plastic. Eventually, the debris makes its way to the center of the gyre, where it becomes trapped and breaks down into a kind of plastic soup. Oceanographers and ecologists are concerned about garbage patches. In particular, they are studying the degradation or breaking down, of plastics. Unlike natural substances, such as wood or metal, plastic does not disintegrate into organic substances. It simply breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. These tiny plastic particles are as small as the algae and plankton that form the basis of the entire ocean food web. Species such as shrimp, birds, and fish consume these microplastics, which oftentimes kill them. The plastic chemicals can also be absorbed by predators of these species. The concentration of these chemicals increases through each trophic level of the food chain, a process known as biomagnification.

Garbage patches generally accumulate far from any country’s coastline, and it is nearly impossible to track the origin of marine debris. The tiny plastic particles that make up most of the patches are also very difficult and expensive to detect and remove. Hence, there are very few yet daring organizations and individuals that have stepped up to take up this challenge. One such initiative that is worth mentioning is Boyan Slat, a Dutch inventor and founder of The Ocean Cleanup at the age of 19 to combat ocean pollution.

The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit engineering environmental organization based in the Netherlands, that develops technology to extract plastic pollution from the oceans and intercept it in rivers before it can reach the ocean. The organization conducts scientific research into oceanic plastic pollution. The Ocean Cleanup’s first target is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The group estimates the patch holds at least 79,000 tonnes of plastic. If the flow of plastic into the ocean continues unabated, the seas will contain more plastic mass than fish by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum. It has conducted two expeditions to the North Pacific Gyre, the Mega Expedition and the Aerial Expedition, and continues to publish scientific papers Their ocean system consists of a floating barrier at the surface of the water in the oceanic gyres, that collects marine debris as the system is pushed by the wind, waves and current, and slowed down by a sea anchor. The project aims to launch a total of 60 such systems, and they predict this capability could clean up 50% of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years from full-scale deployment.

In August 2015, The Ocean Cleanup conducted its Mega Expedition, in which a fleet of approximately 30 vessels, including lead ship R/V Ocean Starr, crossed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and mapped an area of 3.5 million square kilometers. The expedition collected data on the size, concentration, and total mass of the plastic in the patch. According to the organization, this expedition collected more data on oceanic plastic pollution than the last 40 years combined.

The Ocean Cleanup is mainly funded by donations and in-kind sponsors, including Maersk, Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff, Julius Baer Foundation, and Royal DSM. The Ocean Cleanup raised over 2 million USD with the help of a crowdfunding campaign in 2014. In October 2020, they unveiled their first product made from plastic certified from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, The Ocean Cleanup sunglasses, to help fund the continuation of the cleanup.

But with every initiate comes a flip side. Many experts suggest that The Ocean Clean-up’s plans are unlikely to be effective, and could potentially cause more harm than benefit. It’s unlikely that massive floating devices can clean up a significant amount of plastic without causing harm to marine life and potentially adding more garbage to the situation. Most of those experts had serious concerns about The Ocean Cleanup project. Over the years, Ocean Cleanup’s plans have changed dramatically. Boyan Slat’s (founder of ocean cleanup) original concept involved mooring a massive plastic-collecting trap to the seabed almost three miles below — something many scientists said was unlikely to be possible. One massive multi-mile trap evolved to become a series of smaller, long u-shaped floating arrays. These were designed with underwater anchors that would allow them to move slowly through the water, so faster moving plastic would run into the arrays and get trapped by underwater screens. The organization now says that it’s realized the underwater anchors won’t be stable, so the new array features a different design: A nearly 2,000-foot (60-metre) long u-shaped boom that will float atop the water unanchored, with a 10-foot (3-metre) screen to trap plastic below. This should allow the system to more effectively trap plastic so that boats can pick it up every few months and take it to shore for recycling, according to The Ocean Cleanup.

But since the system design has changed several times, it’s hard to know how well the current system will aggregate plastic once it is fully operational. Some researchers also worry that a large floating system will aggregate marine life, which may feed off the plastic and get trapped in the debris. Oceanographer Kim Martini has argued that the group’s arrays should be placed off the shores where most plastic enters the ocean.

“As with any novel technology, success is not guaranteed, but this is exactly why we test, test and test again. Until the final risks and uncertainties have been mitigated” a spokesperson for the group told Business Insider.

Ridding the world’s oceans of plastic requires worldwide action — it is a problem of global proportion. And, as of October 2021, The Ocean Cleanup teamed up with Mr. Beast and Mark Rober in Team Seas fundraising campaign. YouTubers Mark Rober and Mr.Beast announced their latest fundraising campaign, #TeamSeas to enact a movement of this proportion. #TeamSeas aims to motivate global social media creators and fans to create content about cleaning the oceans and direct their communities to #TeamSeas to contribute to the initiative. For every dollar raised, one pound of trash will be removed from rivers, beaches, or oceans — with the ultimate goal of raising $30 million (USD) to clean up 30 million pounds of trash. With the problem gaining the attention it requires, the world is acting as fast as it can. With more technologies and advanced engineering combined with widespread knowledge about marine biology and geography, we might be heading in the right direction, slowly but surely. Put another way: The tide may be turning and we are all here for it.

Co-Authors —

Nidhi Dhamne, Haritashva Shrivastava