Oceans in Crisis - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 171

to catch zooplankton. They also caught plastic. Lots of plastic. They
counted the pieces of plastic that they had harvested, calculated how
far they had travelled, factored in a figure for the size of the plankton
net, and did some sums. There were, they calculated, 334,271 pieces of
plastic floating in every square kilometre of that patch of ocean. For
the Pacific this was a record. They did catch some zooplankton too
but, even more astonishingly, the amount of zooplankton was one-
sixth of that of the plastic. Charles Moore had discovered the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch.
In some ways this is not surprising. Since the middle of the twenti-
eth century, plastic, that wonderfully convenient material, has become
a central part of all our lives. In the US alone it has become a trillion-
dollar business employing more than a million people. Every year,
280 million tonnes (and rising) of this stuff is produced around the
world. Something less than half of this is buried in landfill sites or
recycled. The rest is used and then scattered to the four winds. Inevit-
ably, a lot finds its way into the oceans.
In the oceans, the currents carry the plastic long distances. The
current systems wrap around more slowly moving areas of the ocean,
hundreds to thousands of kilometres across. These are the gyres that
we have described in Chapter 5, and it is in these that the plastics
become trapped and build up to the amounts that Charles Moore
recorded. Gyres are common features in the oceans, and so there are
other rubbish patches out there—in the South Pacific, in the Indian
Ocean, in the Atlantic.
What happens to this plastic in the water? There are the large, obvi-
ous fragments—bottles, lengths of fishing line, bags. Eventually,
though, these break down into small fragments, just a few centimetres
or millimetres across. The denser fragments drift down to the sea
floor. The rest simply stays afloat, being swept by currents into those
enormous floating garbage masses, or washing up on beaches.