I wanted to blog about this today because it is so in need of attention. Yesterday, a good friend of mine told me that a toxic garbage island twice the size of Texas is growing between Hawaii and San Fransico. It is located in the pacific gyre, that is now called "The Eastern Garbage Patch."  and was discoverd by Charles Moore. In a nutshell, the largest landiflll in the world is in the pacific ocean!
The garbage is made of mostly plastic.

Due to currents and air pressure, most of the ocean debris coming from Asia accumulate in this endlessly circulating vortex. The marine biologists are saying it is coming mostly from land. According to Greenpeace, roughly 10 million tons of plastic finds its way into the sea each year. About 20% of this plastic emanates from ships and ocean-based 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.

cited from "the independent enviroment"

Facts about toxic garbage island

-80% plastic
-The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s
-weighs 3.5 million tons
-plastic to sea life ratio is 6:1

They have a documentary on it on You Tube. It has 3 parts to the series. I watched the documentary and it is more like a soup of plastic rather than an island that you can camp on. A team of reseachers went out on their own ship and travelled from California to Hilo Hawaii and recorded the amount of plastic they found floating in the ocean as they went along. They saw, helments, buttons, fishing nets, chain metal, boots, dolls, toys, you name it they found it. They even went swimmiing and came out with tiny plastic bits on the their body that looked like body glitter, but it was really broken down plastic.

That's the problem, it breaks down to tiny fragments but not completely, so it becomes very easy for marine animals to consume it. It also becomes easy for it to stick to seaweeds, phytoplankton, basically everything, and can form a thick layer on the ocean's surface. 

The patch of garbage has accumulated in a part of the ocean hardly anyone goes to, but because of the way the ocean currents circulate, all the garabge from land coagulate at this one point. To view this stream go to Eastern Garbage Patch to see how the ocean currents work. As the team of researchers got closer to the toxic island the levels of plastic they measured  in the water samples started to become more concentrated, until all you observed is plastic in some of their samples.

What's the Good News?

-many forms of biodegradable cups, plates, utensils are being brought into the main stream
-people are being encouraged to bring their own fabric bags for groceries
-documentaries are more popular now with real life information
-people are seeking to declutter their lives from STUFF they don't need, thats what the garbage patch is "STUFF"
-people are realising that "less is more"

I think it is good to be aware that our garbage is ending up in the ocean, I knew there was a lot, but this documentary is a really great eye opener.

Lindsay Tietz, BSc, HD
Owner Intention to Heal
Homeopathic Medicine Practitioner and Holistic Nutrition Expert
Proudly Serving The Toronto Danforth Area Directly 

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