Chapter 3: Harmful Effects on The Environment

There are numerous ways plastics have negatively changed our environment. The first and obvious reason being that plastic stays forever in our environment and breaks into tiny pieces that are impossible to clean up. As the last chapter discussed, these tiny pieces are on the land, in the air, and in our water, permanently polluting the planet.

This pollution also causes plastics to accumulate into incredibly massive piles in our ocean, which poses harm to wildlife and pollutes ocean water. Additionally, plastics are a cause of global warming and release hazardous chemicals into our atmosphere when produced and incinerated. This chapter discusses the accumulation of plastic waste into piles in our ocean, as well as the effects of plastic waste on our planet’s atmosphere.

Garbage Patches

What are Garbage Patches?

Garbage patches are very massive collections of marine debris that have piled up in large areas in the ocean. Marine debris is litter and waste that makes its way into the ocean and other bodies of water. The waste and debris in garbage patches constantly accumulates due to plastic not being biodegradable.

What most people imagine when thinking of a garbage patch is a huge pile of trash and rubbish floating on the ocean. Contrary to popular belief, this is not what a garbage patch looks like. Garbage patches are almost completely made up of tiny microplastics due to plastic not biodegrading and rather breaking down into tiny particles. Since microplastics are so tiny and a lot of them cannot be seen by the naked eye, they make the water of the patch look like one big cloudy soup mixed with larger pieces of waste, such as plastic bags, plastic bottles, fishing gear, and other rubbish. How Does Trash End Up here?

Garbage patches are bounded by gyres which are systems of swirling, rotating currents. A garbage patch is basically an enormous whirlpool of swirling ocean currents with a vortex that’s made up of plastic waste and debris that have broken into smaller pieces. The center of the gyre is calm and steady. The circular motions of the currents pull the plastic waste and debris into the center. Because the center of the gyre is stable and calm, while the areas around the center are strong, swirling ocean currents, the waste and debris get trapped into the stable center and are unable to get out.

Five Garbage Patches

There are currently five gyres in the ocean. There is one in the Indian Ocean, two in the Atlantic Ocean, and two in the Pacific Ocean. In each gyre lies a garbage patch. The biggest and most famous garbage patch is the North Pacific Gyre, which contains the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, consisting of two large gyres in the Pacific Ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch extends from the West Coast of North America all the way to Japan. This patch contains both the Western Garbage Patch, which is near Japan, and the Eastern Garbage Patch, which is located between Hawaii and California. These two patches are connected by the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, an area where warm water from the South Pacific meets with the cool water from the Arctic. This zone transports debris from one patch to the other.

This is a map of the five garbage patches in our world.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is bounded by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. It’s bounded by four currents that rotate in a clockwise direction around an area of 20 million square kilometers, which form the Northern Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The four currents are the California current, the North Equatorial current, the Kuroshio Current, and the North Pacific current.

North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone

This is a map of the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone and its currents.

Can They be Cleaned Up?

Garbage patches are way too large for scientists to investigate. It is unknown how much waste and debris are in each of the garbage patches. Furthermore, not all the waste and debris float on the surface. The ocean floor beneath each garbage patch is believed to be an enormous underwater mass of trash and waste. Denser debris can sink beneath the ocean surface, and this makes the vortex region impossible to measure.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is extremely far from any country’s coastline and cleaning it up would be extremely expensive. Because of these reasons, no nation will provide the funding to clean it. Cleaning up marine debris is a very difficult job. The Marine Debris Program of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration calculated that it would take 67 ships in one year to clean less than one percent of the North Pacific Ocean. Nets designed to catch trash would not work because of how massive the ocean is, making this job incredibly time-consuming.

Although it is impossible for anyone to take on the job to clean up the garbage patches, it will only get worse into the future as more plastic is manufactured, wasted, and discarded. One major way we can all contribute to stopping the growth of these patches is for everyone to limit or eliminate their use of plastics, especially single-use plastics, and to use biodegradable or reusable materials.

Air Pollution

Incineration is the burning of waste, which is a substitute for landfills. Although this seems like a better idea than to let waste pile up in a landfill and pollute the planet, there are some rising concerns about harmful chemicals being released during the procedure.

The plastic incineration process releases dioxins, furans, and polychlorinated biphenyls into the environment. There is also a lot of air pollution that comes from the fumes themselves that are released into the atmosphere from incinerating plastic. Incineration releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This traps heat into our planet and prevents it from escaping the earth’s atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

The process of creating plastic also contributes to global warming. Plastics are made with fossil fuels, which means that the process to extract the fuels and manufacture them into plastics releases heavy amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.