Garbage Island
Do you know about garbage island? Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this massive clump of trash is made up of more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. Globally, we produce roughly 380 million tons of plastic waste a year. A portion of this waste ends us in the ocean every single day. Everything from microplastics to large chunks of industrial material gets pitched into the ocean and builds up into this massive, floats dump.
Though environmental groups are working to clean up this floating wild life hazard, they aren’t able to keep up with the speed of human waste. Right now, this patch is roughly three times the size of Texas and steadily growing. You’ve probably heard the statement that if plastic waste keeps growing at the current rate, we will have more pieces of plastic than fish in the sea in 25 years. This one patch of debris weighs over 80,000 tonnes and is impacting millions of sea creatures. Unfortunately, this one patch is not the only patch of its kind. There are actually 5 such patches across the oceans of the world. This one is simply the largest and the US is one of its main contributors. The patches are held together by ocean currents that create a sort of vortex, pulling trash together into these floating formations.
Single use plastic and plastic waste are ruining our oceanic ecosystems. This is a problem that we all need to commit to solving in order to make any progress. It isn’t enough to recycle and reduce your personal usage. We need to support global initiatives and support those who have the power to enact large scale changes! We’ve recently witnessed the first steps towards a cooperative global initiative to reduce world wise waste. Now we need to hold our leaders and big business owners accountable so that actions follow their words.