A new flag: Homage to human wastefulness and environmental pollution. (Photo: Flickr)

As if one legacy to human waste and carelessness weren’t enough – witness the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the world’s largest garbage dump – now an ocean garbage patch has been discovered in the Atlantic, reports Red Orbit. Specifically, it’s in the Sargasso Sea, between Bermuda and the Azores Islands, but those kinds of semantics pale in significance when compared with the petroleum-based plastics that are poisoning fish, birds and, by extension, human beings.

An ocean garbage patch within the Bermuda Triangle

Apparently the Bermuda Triangle is the place where plastic refuse goes to die as well as lost ships and planes, if this newly discovered ocean garbage patch is any indication. Gulf Stream currents run toward the area, opening into regions of calm winds and seas. Unpowered ships throughout recorded history – including those in the voyage of Christopher Columbus – have experienced this rather unique peril of being stranded in the dead of the Triangle. Many sailors jumped overboard when food stores ran low and madness ran high, which may have contributed to some of the popular myths of the Bermuda Triangle. Now all it takes is a loan company to fund the average consumer’s foray into science texts to see that it’s not mysticism.

The environmental impact of the ocean garbage patch is very real

Anna Cummins and Markus Eriksen told the Associated Press that they took samples every 100 miles on their recent trip across the Sargasso Sea. Once they began to discover plastic waste with every draw of the trawl, they knew they’d discovered “the great Atlantic garbage patch. Most of the plastic bits are smaller than pencil erasers, but that’s just large enough to attract the attention of birds and fish.

The couple’s discovery has inspired them to start an educational campaign, so that people will understand the global significance of plastic ocean pollution. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), ocean-born plastic waste causes the deaths of “as many as 100,000 marine mammals” yearly. Nearly 80 percent of plastic ocean waste comes from land as well, says the United Nations Environmental Program.

Not one more plastic bottle

It’s been proven that commercially bottled water is no safer to drink than tap water – and could be even more dangerous in some instances, claims the Government Accountability Office. Thus, there is no good reason for anyone on Earth who has access to clean public water to continue to buy bottled water. Millions of plastic bottles are polluting our seas and creating an ocean garbage patch wherever major currents run. This will catch up to us. The damage to the ecosystem will eventually hamper the quality of human life and we will have to take to the stars to find an inhabitable world, as prospects for such projects as hurling the plastic into the sun is cost prohibitive. Start making a difference where you live. Inaction is no longer acceptable. If you can’t afford a washable thermos for water, get payday loans – they can be had in small amounts.

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29212301@N00/ / CC BY-SA 2.0)

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For those of you who have never heard of this, it definitely bears repeating. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (aka “Garbage Island“) will eventually destroy the Pacific Ocean. That damper upon our vast ecosystem will be yet another thing that will eventually kill us, probably before our sun goes red giant or a hyper nova, Oort Cloud or other falling object can do the dirty. But I’m no expert on astronomical disasters. I just hype/hawk low interest loans.

Hocking up our lives in the North Pacific Gyre

North of Hawaii, west of North America and much bigger than Texas sits a plastic reminder of how wasteful the human race has become. It used to be that what was sucked into the North Pacific Gyre would biodegrade. Put wonderful plastic has changed that. It will eventually break down, but just into smaller pieces that are easier for ocean life to swallow. And that ocean life, in controlled numbers, will eventually hit our dinner tables!

It’s people at sea dumping their waste, right?

Not according to VICE. They report on VBS.TV that 80 percent of what’s found on Garbage Island comes from land disposal. Shampoo bottles, birthday balloons, those rings that hold six-packs together and all things plastic manage to migrate there. Much of the waste has been floating on Garbage Island for years. Now water samples indicate that it’s all turning into a chemical soup, which is more good news for everything that lives and breathes. Let’s get those cleanup projects going already. Launch it into the sun if we can’t nuke it all on Earth. Sure, it’ll cost more than all the low interest loans on the planet, but we need to protect life at all costs. Everything else is just for show.

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Traveling through an ocean garbage dump the size of Texas (Photo: seacat.wordpress.com)

In the Pixar film “Wall-E,” pollution has run rampant, to the point where the Earth is uninhabitable. Much of this pollution comes straight from the waste inherent in our high-speed consumer culture of convenience. As a result of their sloth, humankind have been forced to evacuate the planet and live a complacent life among the stars.

And what should we learn?

The movie is meant to draw our attention to the responsibility we have to maintain our world for future generations. There will come a time when we must take to the stars and look for new places to continue the spreading of our race. I’m not saying it will be exactly like “Wall-E,” “Dune” or any other science fiction stories we’re familiar with, but astronomic events will eventually rob Earth of its ability to sustain life. There are numerous astronomers and scientists who believe this, so I’m not a lone voice in the wilderness here. I’d bet short term loans and payday loans with no faxing on it, if I were a betting man…

But let’s not rush to muck things up!

That’s exactly what the Great Pacific Garbage Patch represents: our lack of care, moving us ever closer to the day when life will be choked away by all the garbage. I include apocalypse/”Rapture”-type cults among this garbage… it’s just garbage that chokes out the intellect instead of birds, plants, fish and asthmatics.

Paul Rogers reports for MercuryNews.com that scientists are doing all they can to learn more about “one of the most glaring examples of waste and environmental pollution on Earth,” the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s a place 1,000 miles west of California and north of Hawaii where all the trash from our sewers and storm drains flows. It’s “a massive vortex of floating plastic trash estimated by some researchers to be twice the size of Texas,” says Rogers.

It’s everywhere

Mary Crowley, co-founder of the nonprofit expedition Project Kaisei, believes that it’s high time something be done about this serious threat to life in the Pacific Ocean.

“More and more now, you see signs of marine debris and plastic everyplace. You can be at very remote beaches, and you’ll see plastic bottles, barrels, toys and a lot of plastic fishing nets,” she said.

I say more effort should be made to clean up such waste and recycle it, whenever possible. If you want to start such an effort in your community, take that first step. It may take a little bit of money to get it off the ground (biodegradable advertising signs, a Web site, etc), and if you need a cash boost to get that going, payday loans with no faxing and short term loans are available right here.

Find a new use for plastic – fast!

It’s unclear exactly when the Great Pacific Garbage Patch began to form or what its exact boundaries are, but it is know that the plastic that forms the bulk of it will not decompose in the traditional sense. Exposure to sunlight will eventually break it down into small pieces, but that could simply make it more difficult to clean up. Truly, many scientists believe that cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be impossible. The last hope may be that it can be converted into some sort of fuel.

Studying the harm done

Crowley and other researchers like Miriam Goldstein aim to study the size of the garbage patch and how it affects ocean wildlife.

“We are going to try to target the highest-plastic areas we see to begin to understand the scope of the problem,” said Goldstein. “The team of graduate students will be studying everything from phytoplankton to zooplankton to small midwater fish.”

The danger of confetti

That’s what the plastic essentially breaks down into. According to Rogers, there are billions of pieces of tiny plastic floating just below the surface of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Not only are the smaller pieces much harder to collect, but they’re much more likely to be consumed by wildlife like sea birds and fish. The plastic then fills their stomachs without providing nutrients. This often leads to death of the animal. Furthermore, plastic pieces can absorb toxic chemicals, which migrate up the food chain and eventually make it to humans.

And more frightening bits

Plastic fishing line, some of them from drift nets that are several tons in weight, entangle thousands of sea turtles, whales and marine mammals each year. In addition to this, plastic junk carried by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre include cigarette lighters, floats, toothbrushes, bottle caps and more. Some of the junk is decades old.

To put the amount of waste in perspective, scientists point out that for every pound of plankton in the center Pacific Ocean, there are as many as six pounds of marine litter as seen in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That’s about 46,000 pieces of plastic litter for each square mile of the oceans, according to a 2006 United Nations study.

What can we do?

Full cleanup may be impossible, so in the time we have left on Earth before space travel makes a mass exodus possible, we must be responsible. Try to recycle your plastic waste, or only use products that break down in the environment. Dispose of waste properly, too – don’t just chuck it down the drain or into the ocean. Also, whenever the opportunity comes about to help fund scientific studies and projects designed to help combat such problems, donate if you can.

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