The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometres They persist on the ocean surface as they make their way out to sea. The stronger, more buoyant plastics show resiliency in the marine environment, allowing them to be transported over extended distances. A portion of this plastic travels to ocean garbage patches, becoming caught in a vortex of circulating current. The Ocean Cleanup is currently cleaning up plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is the largest of five offshore accumulation zones of ocean plastic in the world, located between Hawaii and California.Įvery year, millions of tonnes of plastic enter the oceans, primarily spilling out from rivers. The organisation aims to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040 and works with individuals, corporations and governments worldwide towards a future where plastic no longer pollutes the Earth’s oceans. He dropped out of his aerospace engineering study at TU Delft to work full-time on this ambitious project. The Ocean Cleanup is headed up by founder and CEO Boyan Slat, an inventor and entrepreneur who creates technologies to solve societal problems. The Ocean Cleanup designs and develops advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic through ocean clean-up systems and river interception solutions. “Thank you to our determined offshore crew and supporters worldwide together, we have now officially cleaned up 1/1000th of the GPGP.” “More than 100,000kg of plastic removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP),” The Ocean Cleanup announced. It's ecologically significant, but nowhere what those images of costal garbage accumulation might lead you to believe.Over 100,000 kilograms of plastic has been removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) in a record haul orchestrated by non-profit ‘The Ocean Cleanup.’ 5mg of material per square meter then runs about 4 square centimeters of grocery bag plastic per square meter. Plankton abundance was approximately five times higher than that of plastic, but the mass of plastic was approximately six times that of plankton.įor comparison, a typical single-use plastic grocery bag given freely in US supermarkets weighs about 6 grams, of a material (0.5 mil HDPE plastic) that weighs about 12 grams per square meter. The abundance and mass of neustonic plastic was the largest recorded anywhere in the Pacific Ocean at 334 271 pieces km2 and, respectively. The density of plastic in the Pacific Ocean northern gyre garbage patch is given as 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer of ocean area, or 5.1 mg/m 2. Those are pictures of contaminated costal waterways. Those pictures are not of an oceanic garbage patch. Plastic Accumulation in the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre. A recent surface current modeling study simulated that most of the particles from our sampling area should be retained there for at least 12 years - (Moore, et al.) The dominant clockwise gyral currents also serve as a retention mechanism that inhibits plastics from moving toward mainland coasts. The plastic can stick around for awhile because of the ocean's currents. In the North Pacific central gyre, there is about 5 kg of plastic for every square kilometer of open ocean, this was measured to be six times more plastic by mass than plankton in the same region. The plastic from say a milk jug is still there, but now in smaller bits. It is likely that plastic pieces ultimately become small enough to pass through the 335-μm mesh net used in this study - (Law, et al.) Out in the ocean, things are different.Ĩ8% were less than 10 mm in largest dimension, and most had characteristics suggesting physical deterioration such as brittleness, rough edges, or cracks. The pictures you are linking to are generally from shore debris which can easily get that dense if near a large population center. You will not see this plastic from a boat, much less from space as it's essentially a transparent density. The overwhelming majority of plastic in the ocean garbage patches are broken apart to millimeters in size from friction and sun weathering.
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