Look out Great Lakes, Plastic Islands are Forming.
This week I have seen more and more articles about a 'Great Garbage Patch' being visible in the great lakes. This pulls on my heart strings as I grew up in MI and now live in Chicago, as this is the current home of Better Bag.
This is a huge issue and one of the main reasons Better Bag exists and is fighting to ban plastic. Organizations like 5Gyres are trying fight this problem on a large scale, but honestly it effects us everywhere.
"The massive production of plastic and inadequate disposal has made plastic debris an important and constant pollutant on beaches and in oceans around the world, and the Great Lakes are not an exception," said Lorena M. Rios Mendoza, Ph.D.
You know when you are running on Lake Shore Trail or at your local beach or pond and get grossed out when you see a few plastic cups and bags tangled in some sludge, imagine this happening twice the size of Texas (estimated) in the Pacific Ocean!
The trouble is that in the Great Lakes, pollution is “24 times” worse than in the South Atlantic. A closed system, of course, accumulates a bigger percentile of materials, faster.
Think of all the large cities around the Great Lakes that depend on it's awesome amount of fresh water to drink and play in. Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Green Bay even Toronto rely on the Great Lakes for food and water. We also send all of our run-off to this fresh water; there are not many other outlets the water and garbage can go to once it is in the lakes.
The swirling “islands” of plastic pollution often go unnoticed because, rather than whole plastic bags and bottles for instance, the mess is made up of small and battered bits of plastic. In the samples Rios' team collected in Lake Erie, 85 percent of the particles were tinier than two-tenths of an inch, and much of that was microscopic. The researchers found between 1,500 and 1.7 million of these particles per square mile.
Plastic debris usually sits just under the surface of the water and can not be scooped up by a simple sifter or net. Fish, birds and other animals eat this, then we do too (more on this later... this is a huge discussion).
"The massive production of plastic and inadequate disposal has made plastic debris an important and constant pollutant on beaches and in oceans around the world, and the Great Lakes are not an exception," said Rios
Think about everything plastic you use and where it goes. Stay tuned for solutions to this problem from Better Bag!
More articles about this news item:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/10/great-lakes-garbage-patch_n_3055042.html
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/04/09/now-theres-also-a-great-garbage-patch-in-the-great-lakes
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/a-great-garbage-patch-grows-in-the-great-lakes
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/347654
