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What really happens to the plastic you throw away - Emma Bryce

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Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Ocean Pollution Awareness

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Wiki page

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The Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre of marine debris particles in the central North Pacific Ocean discovered between 1985 and 1988. It is located roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N.

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Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Laos to Hawaii, Tropic of Cancer - BBC Two

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Simon Reeve finishes his journey around the Tropic of Cancer in Hawaii, where he discovers that the paradise islands are the extinction capital of the world, with more species dying-out than anywhere else on the planet.

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A habitat, or biome, is the type of environment in which plant and animals live. Habitat is dictated by what kinds of plants grow there, the climate and the geography. Rainforest, coral reefs and the tundra are all habitats where particular kinds of plants and animals might be found.

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poss starter on biodiversity in oceans?

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At the Ice Festival in Sapporo (Japan) - Greenpeace reveals an ice sculptor by artist Yasuhiro Sone celebrating the beauty and importance of the world's oceans.

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plastic and the oceans

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The Pacific Trash Vortex, also known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," is an area the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean in which there's 6 times the amount of plastic as there is natural plankton. Photographer Kim Preston wanted to draw attention to this growing problem, so she shot a series of photographs titled Plastic Pacific that features everyday household plastic objects made to look like the sea life they're choking to death.

The simple concept was executive with a minimal budget and a very simple setup. Preston tells that she shot the photos using a Nikon D5000, Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 lens, Nikon SB600 flash, and Wesctott 43-inch Orb in her backyard shed.

All the objects (except the straws) were hanging from a clothes rack with an extended arm. The backdrop was some blue fabric stapled to the wall. Everything was held together using fishing line, double-sided tape, and gaffer tape. For the bags and shower caps, Preston would quickly puff them up and/or blow into them before snapping a shot with a wireless shutter release.

Each sea creature was captured by itself, so post-processing involved stitching the images together and color matching them in Photoshop.

She had originally planned to shoot the entire series inside a large fish tank, but her lack of budget forced her to become more creative with her methods and literally think outside the box. At the very end, Preston added some artificial brush strokes in Photoshop to create the illusion that everything was captured underwater.

(via Kim Preston via Feature Shoot)
Image credits: Photographs by Kim Preston and used with permission

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Everyday Objects Photographed to Look Like Sea Creatures

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The Pacific Trash Vortex, also known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," is an area the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean in which there's 6 times the amount of plastic as there is natural plankton.

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BBC

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The quantity of small plastic fragments floating in the north-east Pacific Ocean has increased a hundred fold over the past 40 years.

Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography documented the big rise when they trawled the waters off California.

They were able to compare their plastic "catch" with previous data for the region.

The group reports its findings in the journal Biology Letters .

"We did not expect to find this," says Scripps researcher Miriam Goldstein .

"When you go out into the North Pacific, what you find can be highly variable. So, to find such a clear pattern and such a large increase was very surprising," she told BBC News.

All the plastic discarded into the ocean that does not sink will eventually break down.

Sunlight and the action of the waves will degrade and shred the material over time into pieces the size of a fingernail, or smaller.

An obvious concern is that this micro-material could be ingested by marine organisms, but the Scripps team has noted another, perhaps unexpected, consequence.

The fragments make it easier for the marine insect Halobates sericeus to lay its eggs out over the ocean.

These "sea skaters" or "water striders" - relatives of pond water skaters - need a platform for the task.

Normally, this might be seabird feathers, tar lumps or even pieces of pumice rock. But it is clear from the trawl results that H. sericeus has been greatly aided by the numerous plastic surfaces now available to it in the Pacific.

The team found a strong association between the presence of Halobates and the micro-plastic in a way that was just not evident in the data from 40 years ago.

Ms Goldstein explained: "We thought there might be fewer Halobates if there's more plastic - that there might be some sort of toxic effect. But, actually, we found the opposite. In the areas that had the most plastic, we found the most Halobates.

"So, they're obviously congregating around this plastic, laying their eggs on it, and hatching out from it. For Halobates, all this plastic has worked out well for them."

Ms Goldstein and colleagues gathered their information on the abundance of micro-plastic during the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (Seaplex) off California in 2009. They then compared their data with those from other scientific cruises, including archived records stretching back to the early 1970s.

Plastic waste in the North Pacific is an ongoing concern.

The natural circulation of water - the North Pacific Gyre - tends to retain the debris in reasonably discrete, long-lived collections, which have popularly become known as "garbage patches". In the north-eastern Pacific, one of these concentrations is seen in waters between Hawaii and California.

This Scripps study follows another report by colleagues at the institution that showed 9% of the fish collected during the same Seaplex voyage had plastic waste in their stomachs.

That investigation, published in Marine Ecology Progress Series, estimated the fish at intermediate ocean depths in the North Pacific Ocean could be ingesting plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tonnes per year.

Toxicity is the issue most often raised in relation to this type of pollution, but Ms Goldstein and colleagues say broader ecosystem effects also need to be studied.

The abundance of ocean debris will influence the success, or otherwise, of "rafting communities" - those species that are specifically adapted to life on or around objects floating in the water.

Bigger creatures would include barnacles and crabs, and even fish that like to live under some kind of cover, but large-scale change would likely touch even the smallest organisms.

"The study raises an important issue, which is the addition of hard surfaces to the open ocean," says Ms Goldstein.

"In the North Pacific, for example, there's no floating seaweed like there is in the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. And we know that the animals, the plants and the microbes that live on hard surfaces are different to the ones that live floating around in the water.

"So, what plastic has done is add hundreds of millions of hard surfaces to the Pacific Ocean. That's quite a profound change."

Ms Goldstein's co-authors were Marci Rosenberg, a student at the University of California Los Angeles, and Scripps research biologist emeritus Lanna Cheng.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter

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The quantity of small plastic fragments floating in the north-east Pacific Ocean has increased a hundred fold over the past 40 years. Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography documented the big rise when they trawled the waters off California. They were able to compare their plastic "catch" with previous data for the region.

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dutch lad clears up plastic

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Boyan Slat is a 20-year-old on a mission - to rid the world's oceans of floating plastic. He has dedicated his teenage years to finding a way of collecting it. But can the system really work - and is there any point when so much new plastic waste is still flowing into the sea every day?

"I don't understand why 'obsessive' has a negative connotation, I'm an obsessive and I like it," says Boyan Slat. "I get an idea and I stick to it."

This idea came to him at the age of 16, in the summer of 2011, when diving in Greece. "I saw more plastic bags than fish," says Slat. He was shocked, and even more shocked that there was no apparent solution. "Everyone said to me: 'Oh there's nothing you can do about plastic once it gets into the oceans,' and I wondered whether that was true."

Over the last 30 to 40 years, millions of tonnes of plastic have entered the oceans. Global production of plastic now stands at 288 million tonnes per year, of which 10% ends up in the ocean in time. Most of that - 80% - comes from land-based sources. Litter gets swept into drains, and ends up in rivers - so that plastic straw or cup lid you dropped, the cigarette butt you threw on the road... they could all end up in the sea.

The plastic is carried by currents and congregates in five revolving water systems, called gyres, in the major oceans, the most infamous being the huge Pacific Garbage Patch, half way between Hawaii and California.

Although the concentration of plastic in these areas is high - it's sometimes described as a plastic soup - it's still spread out over an area twice the size of Texas. What's more, the plastic does not stay in one spot, it rotates. These factors make a clean-up incredibly challenging.

"Most people have this image of an island of trash that you can almost walk on, but that's not what it's like," says Slat. "It stretches for millions of square kilometres - if you went there to try and clean up by ship it would take thousands of years." Not only that, it would be very costly in terms of both money and energy, and fish would be accidentally caught in the nets.

Slat had always enjoyed working out solutions to puzzles, and while pondering this one, it came to him - rather than chase plastic, why not harness the currents and wait for it to come to you?

At school, Slat developed his idea further as part of a science project. An array of floating barriers, anchored to the sea bed, would first catch and concentrate the floating debris. The plastic would move along the barriers towards a platform, where it could then be efficiently extracted. The ocean current would pass underneath the barriers, taking all buoyant sea life with it. There would be no emissions, and no nets for marine life to get entangled in. The collected ocean plastic would be recycled and made into products - or oil.

The high school science project was awarded Best Technical Design at Delft University of Technology. For most teenagers, it would probably have ended there, but Slat was different. He had been interested in engineering from a very young age. "First I built tree houses, then zip-wires, then it evolved towards bigger things," he says. "By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry." This led him to set a Guinness World Record for the most water rockets launched at the same time: 213, from a sports field in his native Delft. "The experience taught me how to get people crazy enough to do things you want, and how to approach sponsors." Useful skills, as it turned out.

When Slat began studying aerospace engineering at Delft University, the idea of cleaning up the oceans just wouldn't let him go - he says it niggled at him like "an asymmetrically positioned label" on a pair of boxer shorts. He set up a foundation, The Ocean Cleanup, and explained his concept in a TedX Talk: How the Oceans can Clean Themselves. Then, six months into his course, he made the decision to pause both university and social life to try make it a reality.

His entire budget consisted of 200 euros (£160) of saved-up pocket money, so he spent a few desolate months trying to get sponsorship. "It was so disheartening, because no-one was interested," he says. "I remember one day contacting 300 companies for sponsorship - only one replied, and that, too, resulted in a dead end."

But then something happened. On 26 March 2013, months after it had gone online, Slat's TedX talk went viral. "It was unbelievable," he says. "Suddenly we got hundreds of thousands of people clicking on our site every day. I received about 1,500 emails per day in my personal mailbox from people volunteering to help." He set up a crowd-funding platform that made $80,000 in 15 days.

Slat still doesn't know what made his idea take off like that, but he describes it as a great relief. "A year ago I wasn't sure it would succeed," he says. "But considering the size of the problem it was important to at least try."

The amount of plastic being discarded into the marine environment is such that we could eventually see an ocean where the amount of plastics is roughly one third the total biomass of fish - 1lb of plastic for every 2lbs of fish, according to Nicholas Mallos from Ocean Conservancy, which organises coastal clean-ups.

According to the UN Environment Programme there are on average 13,000 pieces of floating plastic per square kilometre of ocean - but that goes up to millions of pieces in the gyres. Many of these particles end up being accidentally ingested by marine animals, which can die of starvation because of the plastic filling their stomachs.

Albatrosses are particularly vulnerable because they feed on the eggs of flying fish, which are attached to floating objects - now most likely a piece of plastic. Dr Jan Andries van Franeker from the Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies (IMARES) in the Netherlands has some of these objects in a pot in his office: a toothbrush, cigarette lighters, floaters from fish nets, a golf ball, a tampon applicator - all found in albatross chick's carcasses. "The plastics may not directly kill the bird, but it will have less energy reserves and it will have a higher load of chemicals so if things get problematic at sea, or if you have to raise a chick, those are the ones that die first," he told the BBC.

Turtles tend to be the victims of plastic bags, which when immersed in water look just like jellyfish. Evolutionary adaptations make it impossible for turtles to reject bags once they've started to eat. "Because jellyfish are so slippery, turtles have a system in their throat that stops their prey from slipping out, so even if you find out it's a plastic bag, it has to go in all the way," says van Franeker.

The amount of industrial plastic pellets van Franeker finds in the birds has halved since the 1980s - it seems the industry has at least partially cleaned up its act. "It's an economic loss if the factory loses raw product," he says. "Unfortunately with consumer plastic, there is little profit in taking back waste. It doesn't cost us anything to throw it away."

But the cost to us could be very high, in the long term.

Plastics can act as a sponge and soak up chemicals in the water. "There are a lot of pollutants in the oceans now, things like DDT," Nancy Wallace, director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Debris Program, told the BBC. "Those chemicals adsorb on to the plastic and we know birds and fish are eating those pieces of plastic - so the question is, how does that transfer up the food chain and what is the impact?"
Find out more

Boyan Slat spoke to Outlook, BBC World Service - Listen via the iPlayer

Jan Andries van Franeker and Nancy Wallace spoke to Shared Planet, BBC Radio 4 - Listen via the iPlayer

Professor Richard Thompson and Dr Kerry Howell spoke to Costing the Earth, BBC Radio 4 - Listen via the iPlayer

It is a grave situation - so when Slat came along with a seemingly simple solution, he began making headlines across the world. Could a teenager save the world's oceans? His enthusiasm fired up millions of people, but along with the offers of help and donations, came criticism. It wouldn't work, some said. Others argued that it would be better to collect litter from beaches, where it gets deposited by waves.

When people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong
Boyan Slat, Marine debris entrepreneur

"It's in my nature that when people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong," Slat says. Having caught the world's attention, the first thing he did was to disappear from sight. He needed scientific evidence to back up his theory and answer his critics.

He assembled a team of 100 people, mostly volunteers, who were spread out across the world - the lead oceanographer was based in Australia. To manage so many people at such a young age was "interesting", says Slat. "We had an intern who was 24 and we weren't too satisfied with him - I remember some colleagues saying: 'Oh, he's so young, he'll learn,' not realising that they were talking to a 19-year-old."

During the feasibility study Slat visited the gyre known as the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, where the platform is destined to be built. "I was pretty seasick the first three days. There were winds of 25-30 knots and waves 3m high. It was quite an experience," he says.

In June, a month before his 20th birthday, Slat re-emerged with a 530-page feasibility report, the cover of which was made out of recycled ocean plastic. The report, based on extensive testing and computer simulations and authored by 70 scientists and engineers, answered many of the questions which had been levelled at him by his critics. It was followed by another crowd-funding campaign which swiftly reached its target of $2m. This will fund a larger pilot next year and Slat hopes the North Atlantic platform could be a reality in 2020.

But if Slat expected all experts in the field of ocean plastics to welcome his concept this time, he was wrong.
Plastic soup on your plate?

Ocean plastic breaks down into tiny fragments called microplastics, a term first coined by Prof Richard Thompson.

Thompson found small quantities of microplastics in a range of fish species in the English Channel. "This in my opinion doesn't constitute a risk in terms of human consumption, but I am concerned about the longer-term," he told the BBC.

A study from Ghent University in Belgium found microplastics in mussels and oysters.

Particles smaller than 2mm wouldn't get caught by Slat's system, but removing larger pieces would help to prevent the quantity of microplastics from increasing.

One problem is that plastic isn't just floating on the surface, but found throughout the water column, even in sediment at the bottom of the ocean. Dr Kerry Howell, a deep-sea researcher at the University of Plymouth, told the BBC that she has found rubbish in the deepest parts of the ocean. "You're going to a place no-one's ever been to before, you're going to the last frontier on earth, exploring new places, and you find that our litter's got there first," she says. "It's like going to the moon and finding a crisp packet."

It's like going to the moon and finding a crisp packet
Dr Kerry Howell , Deep-sea ecologist

Another issue is the potential effect on wildlife. "In terms of biological damage the concept is flawed," says van Franeker. "They say anything alive will be able to swim under the curtain, but some, like the fish eggs, will be trapped with the plastic which means they will still be there to be eaten by albatrosses - and in 10 years' time you will take away all the fish eggs along with the plastic."

Aside from the question whether the Ocean Cleanup technology could work, there is also the question whether it should be a priority.

"It seems a foolish strategy to focus on approaches to take litter out of the oceans, when we could prevent it from getting there in the first place," says Prof Richard Thompson of Plymouth University.

"If I had a sum of money to invest in the problem then I would spend 95% of it on approaches to stop the plastic from entering the oceans. Of course we want to find ways to remove litter but we shouldn't delude ourselves. It's like trying to mop up the bathroom floor while leaving the bath overflowing and the taps turned on full."

The mop analogy is one that Slat has heard often, and it really gets him fired up. "First of all, the 'mop' hasn't been invented yet so it certainly can't do any harm to try," he says. As for focusing solely on prevention, he feels it is an "uninspiring and demotivating message to say 'The best we can do is not make it worse'."

He adds: "Of course it shouldn't be an excuse to pollute, but I think it's a motivating message that it's not a hole that's too deep to climb out of."

Nicholas Mallos disagrees. "The risk is that people think there is one device that will solve our problem in a few years - this grossly over-simplifies the problem," he says.

"He has bright ideas about how to get plastic of various sizes out of the water, but it would be better if he directed his efforts to smaller-scale projects in river outlets," says van Franeker. "Only a fraction of the money would be necessary and it would be more effective."

Several other companies are now emerging with clean-up technology designed to capture plastic in rivers and streams, like the Plastic Visser ('plastic fisher') which is being trialled in the Netherlands, or the Trash Wheel - a solar-and water-powered barrier being used in Baltimore harbour.

Slat, too, is looking to develop spin-off technologies for use in rivers. "It is difficult to adapt something that works in rivers to the sea, whereas it's actually quite easy to adapt something that was developed for the worst conditions in the world - the sea - to work in rivers," he says. "That is why we're approaching it in this order."

At this point he is planning to stay in the Netherlands. "A lot of big names are here that I have to work with so it's a very suitable place to be - it's like the Silicon Valley of the off-shore industry," he says. "Perhaps [the Dutch] are under the impression that through engineering everything can be solved, and we're pretty good at mastering the ocean."

Meanwhile, as his friends lead normal carefree lives, Slat still works 15-hour days. "I haven't seen my friends for ages, they try to annoy me by telling me how fun university is," he says.

Slat doesn't think his youth has held him back, if anything it may have been an advantage: "Not only does it make the story more appealing, but I think I'm very enthusiastic about my concept and that really helped," he says.

Besides, he had everything to play for. "I had nothing to lose except my study income, so it was not a worry," he says. "If you want to do something, do it as soon as possible." A rallying cry to teenage inventors everywhere.
Boyan Slat spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service. Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook Listen again on iPlayer or get the Outlook podcast.

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Boyan Slat is a 20-year-old on a mission - to rid the world's oceans of floating plastic. He has dedicated his teenage years to finding a way of collecting it. But can the system really work - and is there any point when so much new plastic waste is still flowing into the sea every day?

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pretty vid

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The world's oceans contain millions of tons of trash, much of it collected into vast floating islands of plastic and debris. Even if humanity stopped putting garbage in the water today, researchers project that these garbage patches would continue growing for hundreds of years. One such trash island, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, already spans hundreds of miles.

How do we get all that garbage out? A 19-year-old Dutch aeronautical engineering student unveiled the results of the feasibillity study, proving that we can likely clean our oceans. He is raising million to build an ocean cleanup contraption he designed to passively funnel garbage to specific collection points.

Slat's plan, expressed simply, is to deploy several V-shaped floating barriers that would be moored to the seabed and placed in the path of major ocean currents. The 30-mile-long arms of the V are designed to catch buoyant garbage and trash floating three meters below the surface while allowing sea life to pass underneath. "Because no nets would be used, a passive cleanup may well be harmless to the marine ecosystem," he writes in the feasibly study.

Over time, the trash would flow deeper into the V , from which it would then be extracted. The report estimates that the plastic collection rate would total 65 cubic meters per day and that the trash would have to be picked up by ship every 45 days. Slat hopes to offset costs by recycling the collected plastic for other uses.

Over 82% of the money to build a pilot version is in. The Ocean Cleanup already has more than 30,000 backers who have contributed over .6 million towards the million goal.

[Support the effort!](http://www.theoceancleanup.com/)

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This 19-Year-Old Just Raised .6 Million to Build an Ocean Cleanup Machine with 30-Mile-Long Arms

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The world's oceans contain millions of tons of trash, much of it collected into vast floating islands of plastic and debris. Even if humanity stopped putting garbage in the water today, researchers project that these garbage patches would continue growing for hundreds of years. One such trash isla...

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home page

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Have you ever wondered 'what can I do to help the Great Barrier Reef...?' Joining a Local Marine Advisory Committee is an effective and fulfilling way to make a difference.Run by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the 12 voluntary community-based committees operate along Great Barrier Reef coast and provide advice on Reef-related issues.

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looks excellent !!!!

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some good some not so

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BBC Nature - Great Barrier Reef wildlife

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The Great Barrier Reef can only be described as breathtakingly beautiful and one of the wonders of the natural world. It is the largest collection of corals on Earth (over 400 types) making up thousands of individual reefs of all shapes and sizes, alongside hundreds of exotic islands.

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good introduction

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Why plastic is causing a problem for the world's oceans - CBBC Newsround

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Plastic is everywhere but what happens after we throw it away is causing a problem in the sea.

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Biologist Dr Pennie Lindeque from Plymouth Marine Laboratory explains how plastics in the marine environment get into the food chain.

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watch this first

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Plastic polluting our oceans - CBBC Newsround

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More than 8 million tonnes of plastic goes into the world's oceans every year, according to new research from the University of Georgia in America.