Drowning in plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France. Richard Grant reports on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and a new expedition that aims to make us reassess our relationship with plastic. Illustrations by Brett Ryder Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' title='Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' />Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris. It was discovered in 1. Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 5. For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 9. It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by, says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' title='Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' />Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldnt identify. It wasnt a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine mesh net, and that was the real mind boggling discovery. Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 1. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasnt even close. We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal, he says. Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' title='Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch' />No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from. So ended Moores retirement. He turned his small volunteer environmental monitoring group into the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, enlisted scientists, launched public awareness campaigns and devoted all his considerable energies to exploring what would become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and studying the broader problem of marine plastic pollution, which is accumulating in all the worlds oceans. The worlds navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 6. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 8. United Nations Environmental Programme agrees. The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source. Plastic does not biodegrade no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. Asus P5k Premium Windows 8. But it does photodegrade. A simple explanation of bioplastics and biodegradable plastics, their benefits for the environment and drawbacks. The plastic plague Can our oceans be saved from environmental ruinProlonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across. Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 1. 00 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging. During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname mermaids tears. You can find nurdles in abundance on almost any seashore in Britain, where litter has increased by 9. Pacific islands, along with all kinds of other plastic confetti. Theres no such thing as a pristine sandy beach any more, Charles Moore says. The ones that look pristine are usually groomed, and if you look closely you can always find plastic particles. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until you dig a foot down. On Pagan Island between Hawaii and the Philippines they have what they call the shopping beach. If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of all the plastic trash thats washed up there from thousands of miles away. On Midway Island, 2,8. California and 2,2. Japan, the British wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found that many thousands of Laysan albatross chicks are dying every year from eating pieces of plastic that their parents mistake for food and bring back for them. Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 1. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles. A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 9. Plastic particles are not thought to be toxic themselves but they attract and accumulate chemical poisons already in the water such as DDT and PCBs nurdles have a special knack for this. Plastic has been found inside zooplankton and filter feeders such as mussels and barnacles the worry is that these plastic pellets and associated toxins are travelling through the marine food chains into the fish on our plates. Scientists dont know because they are only just beginning to study it. We do know that whales are ingesting plenty of plastic along with their plankton, and that whales have high concentrations of DDT, PCBs and mercury in their flesh, but thats not proof. The whales could be getting their toxins directly from the water or by other vectors. Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are six major subtropical gyres in the worlds oceans their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earths surface and that they are all accumulating plastic soup. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now been tentatively mapped into an east and west section and the combined weight of plastic there is estimated at three million tons and increasing steadily.