Where Is The Biggest Garbage Dump On Earth?

Even though 80% of trash starts on land, tons of it ends up in the ocean, swirling around in a massive patch of plastic debris.

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Episode Transcript

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(01:31):
brain Stuff, it's Christian Seger. I got a question for you.
Where is the biggest garbage dump on Earth? It's only
miles away from California's shores, right in the Pacific Ocean,
and it's called the Great Pacific garbage Patch. It affects
our ecosystem by presenting hazards to marine life and the
fishing industry. Fun right, So what is this Great Pacific

(01:53):
garbage Patch? Well, it was found by a racing boat
captain named Charles Moore. When he was saying in from
Hawaii to California. More noticed millions of pieces of plastics
surrounding his ship. And the thing is this garbage patch.
It isn't really that thick. You can't walk on it,
you can sail through it. Most of the debris isn't

(02:14):
on the water's surface. Actually, it's more like this plastic
soup plastic to zooplankton. There is a ratio of six
to one there in the northern Pacific Ocean. There's an
ocean gyre, a system of circular ocean currents formed by
both the Earth's wind patterns and the rotation of the planet,

(02:34):
and the one in the North Pacific moves slowly in
a clockwise spiral of currents. It forms an area of
about twenty million square kilometers that's seven point seven million
square miles. Now the gyre actually forms two garbage patches.
There's the Western and Eastern Pacific garbage patches. The eastern

(02:55):
one floats between Hawaii and California, and it's twice the
side of Texas. The western one floats between Hawaii and Japan.
Now they're connected by a six thousand mile long current
called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Trash debris accumulates there as well,
and it acts kind of like a highway between the

(03:17):
two patches. Fishermen and sailors rarely travel through this because
there is a lack of fish and only some gentle breezes.
Nearby land masses, however, receive large amounts of this trash
on their shores. Hawaii, for example, some of the beaches
there are buried in five to ten feet of trash.
Some say they can't quantify how much trash there actually

(03:41):
is in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Others claim it
holds three point five million tons of waste. There are
four other similar gyres in the world's ocean, and all
of them hold trash. So where does the trash in
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch come from? Well, eight scent
of ocean trash originates on land, mainly in North America

(04:05):
and Asia. Rivers and overflowing storm drains carry garbage out
to the ocean, and also some of it comes from
the litter that are on beaches now, Trash from America's
coast takes six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Trash from Asia, however, takes only a year to get there,
and it's mostly made of plastic. Plastic has been only

(04:28):
around for a little over a century, and today we
use two hundred billion pounds of it a year. Ten
percent of that ends up in the ocean. Plastic makes
up roughly eighty percent of ocean waste, and every square
mile of ocean hosts forty six thousand pieces of plastic.

(04:48):
These pieces are often less than a millimeter wide, so
for example, think of like plastic bags, or bottle caps
or water bottles or styrofoam cups all of those breaking down.
Like take a plastic bottle for example. It takes five
hundred years to break something like that down, so it's
out there for a long time, and they don't wear down,

(05:09):
they just break into smaller pieces because of sun exposure.
These tiny pieces are called mermaid tears or nerdles. I
know it sounds cute, but not so much. The plastics
in the ocean have different levels of toxicity, and the
pieces concentrate and absorbed chemicals and poisons that are also
now in the water, like an oil spill for example.

(05:32):
The pieces also leach out pollutants, photodegradation, leeches out colorance,
and chemicals linked to environmental and health problems into the water.
All right, so how about some examples of how these
cause hazards for animals. Well, when animals eat the plastic,
both kinds of chemicals go into their bodies, and these

(05:54):
chemicals could be passed up the food chain. Plastic garbage
kills one million birds a year and a hundred thousand
ocean animals like dolphins and turtles. Now, let's take an
albatross for instance. It ingests lots of plastic trash on
Midway Island alone. They can give birth to five hundred

(06:15):
thousand chicks a year. Two hundred thousand of these chicks
die because their parents accidentally feed them plastic and what
happens is that punctures their digestive tracks, killing them. Same
with loggerhead turtles. They mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, for instance,
or seals. They get trapped in fishing nuts and drown.

(06:35):
There's a term for this, it's actually called ghost fishing
an algae. Because microplastics block sunlight, algae and plankton communities
are also threatened. This could affect the entire ecosystem or
food web, with less food to go around in general,
making seafood less available for humans at the top of

(06:55):
the food chain. So how do we prevent this? How
do we clean up this great Pacific garbage patch? Well,
trawling the ocean for trash is just impossible, and it
would also harm the plankton that's already there. It would
take sixty seven ships a year to clean up less
than one percent of the North Pacific. So the best

(07:16):
thing that we can do is manage waste on land,
try to find alternatives to plastic, use biodegradables instead, expand
recycling programs, to accommodate for more types of plastic and
buy fewer plastic items, or you can always recycle. Check

(07:37):
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