Voyage Confirms Pacific Plastic Pollution

I wonder if any plant or animal life has taken root yet?

Birds and other marine life have tried!!!!!!

The remains of an adult albatross..........with a gut full of plastic.

A turtle eating plastic..........not that we need the caption!!!

Plastics are toxic........not much nutritional value either

Plastic is being found in an increasing number of sea birds, turtles and other marine life.

It beggars the question.............Who cares??

Obviously not too many!!!

Any one for an ocean cruise..............the Pacific gyre.

This is plastic, what about all the other crap that is poured into this bottomless pit that we call the ocean (all seas and oceans)...........crude oil (accidental discharges, deliberate discharges, groundings and collisions, oil well blow outs, etc.), numerous toxins, all other forms of unwanted waste and garbage, etc............and of course probably one of the largest polluters...........ALL the rivers that run into the sea.......many of them worse than open sewers.......far more toxic, from industrial discharges into rivers.

Sorry for going on and on............but............somthing needs to done.

Just to set matters straight I am not a "tree hugger", but, I think enough is enough.

Be interesting to see if they could trace some of the material back to origin & use, country, etc....Sad stuff for sure....

tough, I know, as everything is shipped/used globally, but who knows!

I was wondering when that expedition was going to publish their trip - thanks!

Good link. Sad but true.

Our grandchildren will suffer for our disregard of the planet.

Yeah..let's go there, but let's not actually do anything about it while we are there.
The ycould be scooping it up, ginding it and filling their hold...but..
Nah, that would be useful.
Del

Let's be fair - it's the size of Texas after all. (In metric units that's 5.33 Englands.) So scooping up a ship's hold worth of it is not going to "actually do something about".

We need to be thinking big. Crack open a couple of large oil tankers and set the whole mess on fire. Not only do we clean up the ocean, but the soot will darken the sky and put an end to global warming.

Yeah..but if you come upon a major traffic accident...there are a dozens of injured... do you help one?
Nah just walk away 'cos there are too many.
If you create a precedent by actually doing something maybe others will follow?
It's like these enless useless G8 or whatever sumits...has anyone actually done anything....? Nah...didn't think so...Like bunch of kids...I won't unless he does...nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.
The one person bending down to pick up a bit of litter on the street and putting it the bin is helping.
Pencil me in for the platitutes about each jourey begining with blah blah... I dunno...there's too mutch to bitch about...so I won't bother anymore.
We are plagued by people measuring, auditing, inspecting, certify who contribute nothing...
I'm not so much worried by the plastic as the mountain of paper we will be burried under.
Fast forward a hundred million years...
The dead Earth is being minded for it's mineral resources, especially the valuable seams of paper.

Crack open a couple of large oil tankers and set the whole mess on fire. Not only do we clean up the ocean, but the soot will darken the sky and put an end to global warming.
Now your talkin'

Del

Del, I usually love your rants and posts, but this time I think you may have missed the point of the project.

http://www.projectkaisei.org/

A quote from the website:

"The Mission

Project Kaisei consists of a team of innovators, scientists, environmentalists, ocean lovers, sailors, and sports enthusiasts who have come together with a common purpose. To study the North Pacific Gyre and the marine debris that has collected in this oceanic region, to determine how to capture the debris and to study the possible retrieval and processing techniques that could be potentially employed to detoxify and recycle these materials into diesel fuel. This first research expedition, scheduled for the summer of 2009, will be critical to understanding the logistics that would be needed to launch future clean-up operations and testing existing technologies that have never been utilized under oceanic conditions.

Project Kaisei will examine the largest area of the Plastic Vortex, an ocean gyre, situated to the North East of Hawaii, and approximately five days by boat from the United States (San Francisco area). The expedition will consist of a large pass through the Plastic Vortex, with the aim to collect and study plastic and other debris forms from the ocean in order to showcase some of the new technologies that will be used for processing and recycling. "

...........one would not want to use their engine.............or at least have a good system of clearing blocked sea strainers for engine sea water cooling system.

This would probably be worse than jelly fish..........and boy are they be a pain in the butt.

I was wondering why they used a sail boat. I didn't think of debri clogging the cooling system.

It sure would be a big problem...............it would be forever blocking up.........many yachts only have a small engine and are only raw (sea water) water cooled.........blockage..........immediate loss of cooling..........overheating.

Yeah, you should know by now...I don't actually read the OPs .
A rant has it's own therapeutic value.
Del

Pollution in the Baltic Sea

Pollution....a river in Indonesia.

Where does all this end up.............in the ocean...........this is only one river.

New sea food...........plastic.

Some marine birds are feeding their young plastic.........doesn't do much for other marine life either

Plastics pollution again..........Gore Point, Alaska.

One could go on and on.............it is a sorry state of affairs...........an indictment of mankind today.

I also should have made the point..........it did not need a "Pacific Voyage" to confirm what was known years ago.............and what has been done about it..........zilch.

From what I can recall...........and that probably isn't very much...........this photograph was taken a couple of years ago in the Pacific Ocean.

Yeah, it's the accumulation of every individual who throw down that plastic burgerbox...
the school over the road from me has litter blowing around and all snagged up against the fence.
I said to my Brother in Law who used to be a head teacher...'I'd make the kids clean it up...anyone staying behind in dentention would have to do litter picking duty'
He said...'You can't do that these days, the parents would complain, the're'd be heath and safety issues...you just can't do it'.

No wonder we are going to hell in ahand cart, if you can't make kids pick up the litter they drop.
Del

You would think some greedy sod would figure out a way to make money reprocessing the free plastic into a sell-able item and charge the world a small fee for the service.

Also when you bury plastic in a land fill do you get carbon credits for sequestering carbon?

Actually (primatively of course) it begins to show signs of merging and already supports a bit of an ecosystem.

Just need some longer stranded sea life to start tying it together, then we can have a new island.

PWslack,

The plastic menace is going to hit much worser than global warming issue it seems. We humans got to be ashamed of our irresponsible disposal system like this.

To me it sounds like some country/ city is deliberately doing this just to get away from their garbage. If sea is going to be the secret disposal yard, no more corrective action can be done.

Like the KYOTO protocol and international co operation on environmental aspects, it is worth a firm policy governance and ways to deal this menace.

Garbage disposal and handling with raised open air tanks sounds to be a better option than sea discharges.

If we are not concerned and change our attitudes, we don't deserve to use the so called high tech life and standards of modern life. The stone age people seems to be better civilized under the disguise of innocence.

Are we blind and deliberate?

Interesting reading.

Keep it coming!

what a lie. There is not an island of trash the size of Texas. In 30 minutes they counted 100 pieces of trash.

Some of the other attached pictures were not taken at the site.

So!!!

Here we have an expert..........I suppose the the holocaust never happened either.

One of the Islands in that general area is covered in trash but it is not even the size of Manhattan. To overstate an issue or to understate it, so as to have an effect, is still to lie.

When facts become wrested from the truth it becomes propaganda and it looses all credibility until the real facts are given with undeniable proof.

The problem is people are creatures of convictions and get emotionally attached to their perspectives. When their perspective is challenged and changed they are made uncomfortable by the reality of being wrong and tend to avoid the whole subject because it is attached to uncomfortable emotions.

Spin doctors use this tactic to make creditable issues white elephants to the public. When the masses find out they backed the wrong perspective (that they were lead to believe in) they tend to avoid the whole subject due to the negative emotions attached to the subject. Now the minority that had proper perspective has a very hard time effecting a proper fix when the subject is avoided because the public does not want to learn what to believe due to the emotional response. Convoluted at best.

Brad