Durability, stability and resistance from disintegration: those are the properties that make plastic one of the products with wider usage and utility for final consumer, the same properties that make plastic a frightful villain. Every year, around 100 million tons of plastic are produced and near 10% of this production ends on our Oceans.

The vortex seeing from above

In the Pacific Ocean there is a huge floating littler of plastic, that is already considered as the world’s larger concentration of garbage, with 1000 kilometers length, that goes from California coast and almost reaches the Japanese coast, and 10 meters depth. Scientists believe that this garbage vortex contains around 100 million tons of plastic from every kind: nets, bottles, balls, dolls, rubber toys, shoes, lighters, bags, kayaks or any kind of object that can be made out of plastic. People who discovered this enormous “plastic soup” is about twice bigger than the USA.

The oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, that have been researching this “ocean stain” for more than 15 years, compares this vortex to a living organism, a giant animal that navigates freely around the Pacific Ocean. And when it comes close to the continent, the results are devastating, with beaches covered with plastic garbage.

Turtle trapped by a plastic ring.

This massive plastic stain is divided into two big “balls” of garbage, connected by a narrower part. They are known as the “East stain” and “West stain”. A sailor says that, during the late 90’s, while he was crossing the Ocean, he was stunned with the vision of a giant Ocean made of plastic just in front of his eyes. “How come we could make this?” – “I navigated for more than a week on the top of all that plastic.”

All pieces of plastic seen on the right were taken from the bird’s stomach.

Scientists alert that all plastic piece or object that were once produced since we discovered plastic, and that were never recycled, are still laying somewhere. On the top of it all, there is the problem of decomposed particles of that plastic. According to Curtis Ebbesmeyer, in some areas of the Pacific Ocean the concentration of plastic is 6 times superior to the amount of phytoplankton biomass, which is the base of the oceanic food chain.

Death bird with the stomach filled with plastic.

According to UNEP (United Nations Environment Program), the plastic that we find on the Oceans is responsible for the death of more than a million birds every year and any other fauna that lives in these areas, as turtles, sharks and several species of fishes. To make things even worst, this “plastic soup” operates as a sponge that absorbs all kinds of persistent pollutants. That means that animals that live in these regions ingest high levels of poison. Through fishing, this poison can easily be introduced in human food chain, closing the circle and confirming that any damage we cause to Earth will return to us, human beings.

(We received this information by email. We haven’t confirmed neither the veracity of informations displayed here, nor the names of people involved.)