An editorial from the New York Times:
August 27, 2009
Editorial
Our Plastic Legacy Afloat
Until recently, the earth had seven continents.
To that number, humans have added an eighth an
amorphous, floating mass of waste plastic trapped
in a gyre of currents in the north Pacific,
between Hawaii and Japan. Researchers have
estimated that this garbage patch may contain as
much as 100 million tons of plastic debris and is
perhaps twice the size of Texas, if not larger.
Across the worlds oceans there are still many
more millions of tons of floating plastic, most
of it originating from land, not ships. All of
this solid waste is bad news. It traps as many as
a million seabirds every year, as well as some 100,000 marine mammals.
Now comes what could be more bad news. A new
study, announced at a recent meeting of the
American Chemical Society, suggests that plastics
in seawater break down faster than expected. As
they do, they apparently release contaminants,
including potentially harmful styrene compounds
not normally found in nature. This was not merely
a laboratory finding. The author of the study,
Katsuhiko Saido, a scientist at Nihon University
in Japan, found the same chemical compounds in
seawater samples collected near Malaysia, the
Pacific Northwest, and in the northern Pacific.
The effects of these broken-down plastics on
marine organisms is as yet unknown, and they will
be harder to measure than the damage that plastic
refuse does to sea-life. But adding to the
contaminant load of the oceans cannot be a good thing.
What we are seeing here is yet another of the
large-scale, potentially tragic, uncontrolled
experiments that humans have conducted on their
environment without intending to. And though we
cannot do much about the millions of tons that
have already been sent to sea, we can at least
begin to ask ourselves, when we get ready to
pitch a plastic container, where is this likely to end up?
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2009 <http://www.nytco.com/>The New York Times Company
