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The great garbage patch
Captain Moore, the discoverer of a continent in 1997 about which barely anybody wants to know, is a quiet guy, seemingly full of melancholy. He was the first, after a tour on the Pacific Ocean to describe a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean, on an area four times as big as Germany. It was on his sail back from the Transpac-Sailing Regatta from Los Angeles to Hawaii, a race over 2225 sea miles, with his crew they took a shortcut through the horse latitudes, which lay half way between Hawaii and North America. Sailors normally circumnavigate these waters, a convergence zone where still air prevails and often for days there is no getting ahead. It took a weak to get through, they did some great fishing, grilled some tuna filets and couldn't believe what they saw: everywhere floated plastic garbage around, bottles, lids, bags, pieces of something. Soon their boat „Alguita" plowed through the junk like an icebreaker through the Arctic Ice. Balloons, wrappers, polystyrene cans, detergent canisters, entanglements of nets and fishing lines, shreds of all forms and colors. „My feeling that something very bad is going on here became stronger and stronger", Moore says.
He didn't know that Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer from Seattle, suggested out of his studies of sea currents this „Garbage Patch". Powered by winds and the earth rotation, the sea currents in the high pressure area of the „ North Pacific Gyre" build a gigantic whirl, which veers and collects floating refuse from the pacific coasts of Russia, Japan, China, as well as the pacific coast of Mexico and North America. „It needs a year, says Moore, until garbage from Asia arrives at this waste disposal site and a couple of years, if it comes from America."
Until half a century ago, this floating refuse was harmless, wood decomposed, ropes decayed and glass eventually sank. Since the beginning of mass production of plastic, this changed. Around three million tons of synthetic materials, is estimated to swim in both parts of the „Great Pacific Garbage Patch", of which one lies eastern and another western of Hawaii.
Two years later Moore returned with a group of ocean researchers to the place. They wanted to find out what lies beneath the water surface and collected samples with a finely-woven net that they tightened under their boat. The founding was devastating, down to a depth of ten meters there were floating plastic pieces. There was six times more plastic than plankton. The last samplings he took two years ago; there was now 46 times more plastic than plankton. Thus the situation is getting worse and worse, quickly.
All this colorful, shiny and so practical plastic ends in the stomachs of birds and fishes and soon probably in ourselves in the form of nanoparticles out of fishes and sea fruits that we eat.
Eighty percent of the plastic junk that ends in the „Garbage Patch" comes from the land, the rest from ships and fishery. Out of streets, waste disposals, out of garbage wagons and freight liners, plastic gets carried away and lands in creeks, rivers, gullies and finally in the sea. The tide carries it out into open waters, currents take over and transport it into the the curl. Like a great toilet that never gets flushed. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), there is on every squared kilometer of ocean around 18'000 plastic pieces. Hundred million tons of plastic are today in total in the seas of the world.
The untouched beach in vacation commercials can't be found anywhere anymore. At Kamilo Beach in Hawaii for example, plastic particles are more numerous than grains of sand down to a depth of around 30 centimeters. And this is more than just an esthetic problem. According to a bulletin of UNEP, more than a million of seabirds die annually, because they confuse plastic with food. One hundred thousand marine mammals and turtles die annually in abolished fishing nets or because of eating plastic instead of real food. In the dead animals one can find pocket combs, tampons, lighters, plastic cutlery, cotton swabs, puppets, syringes, bags. They died with full stomachs, perished, because plastic sherds slashed their digestive tract or blocked it in such a way, that they couldn't either eat nor defecate.
Even more alarming is, what the Japanese Geo-chemist Hide-shige Takada found out. It is known that plastic is like a sponge for poly-chlorinated biphenyl (PCB) and other toxins. Even though these flexibilizers have been forbidden almost four centuries ago, after it was proven that they damage the hormonal balance, the plastic that was produced before will still contaminate the oceans with PCB. Takada found out that plastic pieces that are eaten by Atlantic-puffins contain toxic concentrations million times higher than the surrounding waters, because of the sponge effects. And Moore collected on one of his last trip hundreds of latern-fishes, which are the most common in the ocean, not longer than a finger. More than a third of these had with toxin contaminated plastic pieces in them. Lantern-fishes are the staple food of tunas, sword-fishes and dolphin-fishes. If these toxins accumulate like that in the food chain, they eventually land on our plates.
Important to say furthermore that plastic isn't either biodegradable nor bioeliminable, so the particles don't disappear, but just become smaller and smaller, not viewable for the human eye anymore. Up to day the total production of plastic is estimated to exceed a billion tons. It just started a couple of centuries ago, but it will take an eternity until evolution comes up with microorganisms that can digest this material. Even if plastic production was stopped tomorrow, the earth will have to cope for thousands of years with consequences for the environment.
The world doesn't seem to care too much about this waste though. The „Garbage Patch" is far away, out of the responsibilities of States from which the waste comes. There is only little research done on the subject, because little money is spent on it, even though experts agree that the plastic in the oceans is a problem.
Furthermore it is utopian to believe that the plastic can simply be fished out of the water, since first the pieces are too small and second the area is just too huge; 70 percent of the earth is covered by sea.
Nevertheless we won't get rid of the problem just by ignoring it and saying there is not enough knowledge about it. But the plastic garbage patches on our oceans will further grow, until we come up with new products made out of materials of everlasting or easily recyclable quality.
Our world is plastic, for example every toothpick is wrapped into plastic, why? Are we afraid that they mutually pollute themselves?
We, everybody, has to seriously think about his way of life in this world of plastic or no change for a more sustainable world is ever going to be possible.
(based on an article by Peter Haffner, Tages-Anzeiger, „Eine Ahnung von Apokalypse".)
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| Категория: Различные статьи | Добавил: Artur (02-Декабря-2009)
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