Childhood memories may fade, but plastic is forever.Remember the Barbie and Ken dolls you played with when you were a kid? Your hula hoop or Mr. Potato Head? If you would like to take a trip down memory lane, you might want to charter a cruise between here and California to a swirling, expanding, massive floating garbage patch roughly twice the size of Texas. Although it has been given no official title, it has been nicknamed “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The North Pacific Gyre, where the Patch is located, is a naturally occurring vortex that effectively traps flotsam in perpetuity.
This floating island of manmade trash weighs approximately 3.5 million tons with a concentration of 3.34 million pieces of garbage per square kilometer, 80 percent of which is plastic made from byproducts of oil refining.
Waterways everywhere are flooded with plastic. One publication I read stated that marine researchers dissected pelicans so full of plastic lighters that they resemble convenience storks (I mean stores). A land-based turtle rescued in Florida waters was unable to submerge due to the amount of Styrofoam trapped in its body, making it permanently buoyant.
Plastic resists biodegrading, but it will photodegrade over time, breaking down into smaller pieces of fine plastic sand which is then consumed by sea birds and fish. If the animals don’t starve to death with a stomach stuffed with plastic, the plastic pellets act as sponges for toxins, concentrating chemicals such as DDT and PCP. This toxic concentration works its way up the food chain until it is served up to us at our local fast food chain. About 267 species have been reported to have eaten from, or became entangled in, the Patch.
We live in a convenience culture. We use plastic directly and indirectly every single day. We use some of our products and packaging for only a few minutes, but we make them out of a material that lasts forever. Every year we manufacture 34 billion bottles and containers. We buy products that consume another 14 billion pounds of plastic. Each of us on average uses 190 pounds of plastic annually. In total, we produce about 60 billion tons of plastic every year.
It is doubtful that we can ever clean up the big mess we Garbage Patch Kids have made. And the Patch is going to get bigger if our reliance on plastics continues. It has tripled in size since the middle of the 1990s and could grow tenfold in the next decade. The only long-term solution is to change our consumption habits, decreasing our reliance on plastic.
Remember this the next time you are tempted to buy more plastic in any form. You may have long since forgotten about Barbie and Ken, but more than likely, the perpetual plastic playmates are still out there cruising in their Barbie Boat through The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Because plastic is forever.