The Problem
Trash is ending up in the world's oceans at an alarming rate, impacting sea life, damaging ships and contaminating our food supply. Its greatest concentration is in five large vortices called "gyres" which rotate slowly far from land, out-of-sight but no longer out-of-mind thanks to a growing awareness created by the work of individuals like Midway Island photographer Chris Jordan. - View Bird Photos
Increasingly Polluted Oceans
1. Fish are eating plastic in the oceans that has absorbed PCBs and DDTs, then we eat the fish. PCBs were used as cooling fluids in electrical equipment and machinery because of their durability and resistance to fire. DDTs were developed as an insecticide in the 1940s, and were widely used until the 1960s to combat insect-borne diseases.
2. The trash is often unusable for regular recycling processes because it becomes a brittle "plastic gruel" due to photo-degradation by the sun. It also becomes contaminated by absorbing harmful chemicals.
3. The trash is spread out over vast areas, where it continues to break down into smaller pieces that are more easily consumed by sea life.
4. The trash is mixed with micro-organisms and larger sea life.
"Plastics — when they end up in the ocean — are a sponge for chemicals already out there," says researcher Chelsea Rochman. "We found that when the plastic interacts with the juices in the [fish's] stomach, the chemicals come off of plastic and are transferred into the bloodstream or tissue." The fish on the marine plastic diet were more likely to have tumors and liver problems. - Full NPR Story
Friendly Floatees - Charting the paths of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs, washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992.
Related Videos: Midway Island | Trash Vortex (rubber ducks)
By photographer Chris Jordan on Midway Atoll.
Hazardous and Nuclear Waste Collection
Since no single country owns the vast gyre regions in the middle of the oceans, there is little incentive to clean up the growing trash vortexes. In additions, Georgia and South Carolina lack an automated Savannah River cleaning system with the capacity to collect nuclear waste. We see an opportunity to use an expanded Savannah river port as a base station for a revenue generating waste extraction system that could serve the entire North Atlantic Gyre.
Innovative Waste Treatment Facilities - Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)
Efforts to introduce new methods to convert trash to reusable material have been met by opposition. Land is in short supply, especially land near the sea.
