#north pacific garbage patch

[meadowslark]

(via More than 90% of identifiable trash in North Pacific Garbage Patch comes from just six countries)

[drag-tween]

[unconsumption]

The tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011 washed some 5 million tons of debris into the north Pacific. Three years later, much of the refuse is still at sea.

Photographer Mandy Barker spent a month aboard a ship with a team of researchers studying the impact of all that debris. Her series SHOAL offers a beautiful yet haunting example of marine pollution, the many fragments of garbage hanging in the darkness never quite disintegrating.

More: Swirling Tsunami Debris Visualize Our Poisoning of the Oceans | WIRED

[unconsumption]

Plastic is the enduring residue of consumer society. A plastic shopping bag corrodes in approximately 20 years; a plastic bottle decays in something like 450 years. Cheap and universally applicable, 225 million tons of it are produced every year, made from a resource that is not quite as interminable as it used to be: oil.

Plastic clouds our oceans as floating particulate, sometimes forming entire islands. It is estimated that there are 150 million tons of plastic in the oceans, with 100,000 tons in the North Pacific garbage patch alone. This means that plastic is responsible for about 70 percent of all oceanic pollution. If those numbers fail to illustrate the sheer scope of the problem, just look at these people posing in the middle of their weekly production of household rubbish.

It was while diving through Greece that Boyan Slat, then 17, grasped the gravity of the problem. ...

Today, he leads a team of 100 scientists, students, and supporters. And with his latest crowdfunding success, Slat's workload shows no sign of slowing down. He explained that he next plans to build upscaled prototypes of his floating, 100-kilometer long collectors, before anchoring the systems in polluted waters within the next three to five years.

(via This Kid Plans to Rid Oceans of Plastic Using Giant Nets and Natural Gyres | Motherboard)

[thingsmegansees]

Check out these before-and-after charts on the amount of plastic debris floating in the Pacific Ocean. The first chart is from 1972-1989 and the second is from 1999-2010.

[messagebottles]

thousands of marine life die each year from getting caught in or eating trash from the ocean. 

[messagebottles]

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The North Pacific Garbage Patch is a giant island of trash located in the Pacific ocean between California and Japan. The Garbage Patch is twice the size of Texas and weighs 3.5 million tons. It's the planet's largest landfill. It is made up of garbage such as plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. 80% of the debris within the Garbage Patch comes from land and the other 20% comes from cargo ships. 

[toriegehlmeyer-blog]

Reusable Water Bottle. Kerplunk!

So I'm pretty distubed by the idea of plastic, how it comes from oil, the chemicals involved in processing, and all the technolical know how that I wont get into. But mainly the fact that it's sprinked over our entire planet, acorss coast lines, lineing roads and highways, and floating in the bodies of water that we drink from #northpacificgarbagepatch. It's even scarier that plastic is here to stay, out living most life forms here on earth, including us.  

Below is a picture of my reuable waterbottle, I'm slightly obsessed with it. The company that makes them is called Kerplunk. I found it in City Market, a Co-Op 2 minutes down the street from my place in Burlington for about $12. Now that might not sound incredibly cheap, but if your a big water drinker it certainly pays for itself. They've got some pretty cool designs as well, making the whole reuable water bottle idea a bit more fashionable and chic, not just outdoorsy and eco-friendly for granola crunching hippes.

It's made of glass so it is pretty fragile, but I'm generally pretty careful with my most treasured belongings i.e. iPhone, MacBook, etc. so it works for my lifestyle. Something about the glass design makes you really thirsty. When it's filled with cold water and the outside gets frothy, it's almost like drinking glacier water. Of course I really have no idea what drinking water from a glacier is like...but I feel like it would be something like this.