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Great Pacific Garbage Patch

This “garbage patch”  is an area of marine debris concentration in the Northern Pacific. While litter there is debris such as discarded fishing nets, bottles, caps, etc, it is not a literal blanket of trash that is visible from satellites or aerial photographs.  Much of the debris is actually bits of floating plastic, quite small, and not immediately seen by the naked eye.

Nurdles In Paradise

These bits of plastics, or nurdles, break down under the rays of the sun into minute particles light enough to float in the air. The potential scope of the problem is staggering. These bits of plastic accululate toxic chemicals in the marine environment such as PCPs and DDT. In Moore's 1999 study, he showed that there was 6 times more plastic in this part of the ocean than the zooplankton that feeds ocean life. In 2002, a later study showed that even off the coast of California, plastic outweighed zooplankton by a factor of 2:5. These are then igested by marine life who transport them back to the human fish eating poluters.

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