Published on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 by The Independent/UK

The World's Rubbish Dump: A Garbage Tip That Stretches From Hawaii to Japan
by Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an
alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental
United States, scientists have said.The vast expanse of debris - in effect
the world's largest rubbish dump - is held in place by swirling underwater
currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off
the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost
as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific
Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of
flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director
of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore
founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it
was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not
quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an
area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has
tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and
compares the trash vortex to a living entity: “It moves around like a big
animal without a leash.” When that animal comes close to land, as it does
at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. “The garbage patch
barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic,” he
added.

The “soup” is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of
Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About
one-fifth of the junk - which includes everything from footballs and
kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags - is thrown off ships or oil
platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997,
while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He
had steered his craft into the “North Pacific gyre” - a vortex where the
ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure
systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day,
thousands of miles from land. “Every time I came on deck, there was trash
floating by,” he said in an interview. “How could we have fouled such a
huge area? How could this go on for a week?”

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently
sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He
warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable
plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.
Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said
more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic
soup but that there was “no reason to doubt” Algalita's findings.
“After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we
get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine
ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems.”

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of
the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk
actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in
oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that
objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump.
“Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made
it into the ocean is still out there somewhere,” said Tony Andrady, a
chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just
below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs.
“You only see it from the bows of ships,” he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the
deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than
100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have
been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for
food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in
the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every
square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,
Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a
risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets,
or nurdles - the raw materials for the plastic industry - are lost or
spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act
as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and
the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. “What goes into the
ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that
simple,” said Dr Eriksen.

© 2008 The Independent