Great Pacific Garbage Patch on Google Maps. Great Garbage Island. The dangers and consequences of ocean water pollution

"has been portrayed as a floating island of plastic debris stretching across the surface of the ocean, an area the size of India - a symbol of man's mistreatment of the planet. But images from the first-ever aerial survey of the area reveal nothing quite so spectacular.

Instead of a giant blanket of plastic containers, fishing nets and garbage, debris was found scattered over a large area, among which only about 1,000 large objects were found over thousands of square kilometers.

Although members of the charity The Ocean Cleanup say they have found more plastic in the ocean than they expected, experts say the "garbage patch" has always been a myth, unsupported by any scientific research, and distracting the public from the real problem - the dangerous amount of microplastics in the ocean. water.

The images often depicting the "garbage patch" are actually taken from the coast of Manila in the Philippines

Dr. Angelica White, an associate professor at Oregon State University who has studied the garbage patch in detail, says: “The use of the term is confusing. I would say that this is a myth and a misnomer. It is not visible from space. There are no islands of garbage. It's just a soup of plastic floating in the ocean. There really is plastic in the ocean. Peer-reviewed work suggests that the highest concentration of microplastic particles is three eraser-sized pieces per cubic meter. The continued use of terms like "islands of plastic" and "the size of two Texas" are hyperboles that, in my opinion, undermine people's credibility. We need to focus on reducing the flow of trash into the oceans."

The Garbage Patch is also known as the Pacific Garbage Gyre and was first described by American ship captain Charles Moore in 1997 while sailing from Hawaii to southern California. He claims to have come across "plastic... floating everywhere as far as the eye could see."

Plastic is supposedly collected in this place due to circular ocean currents, collecting garbage along the coasts and bringing them to the center. It is believed that it takes six years for things to reach this place from the US coast, and one year from Japan.

Plastic floating in the ocean discovered by The Ocean Cleanup team

The size of the center of the garbage patch is estimated at one million square kilometers, and the periphery extends to another 3.5 million square kilometers.

However, in 2008, Dr. White's team dragged a net behind the boat and found that most of the plastic was in small pieces, which is actually more dangerous because it can be eaten by plankton-hunting animals.

Professor Tamara Galloway, from the University of Exeter, said: “There are many misconceptions about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, including its size and appearance. Some people think that these are giant floating islands of garbage, but this is not true. There may be approximately 77,000 pieces of garbage per sq. km. In comparison, coastal areas are more polluted. Some such sites, for example, can contain up to 4 million pieces of waste per sq. km. The garbage patches are important because, being located at a great distance from the source of the plastic, thousands of kilometers away, they show how mobile and ubiquitous our garbage is.”

The Ocean Cleanup is an organization from the Netherlands that aims to remove and recycle trash islands. "Aerial surveillance - our latest mission - brings us one step closer to cleaning up the Pacific Patch," says Boyan Slat, the organization's director.

“The expeditions’ first findings highlight the urgency with which we need to address the problem of plastic accumulation in the world’s oceans.”

An organization trying to clean up the oceans has developed long floating barriers that would filter debris from currents for collection. The barriers are expected to be built by 2020.

Dr White says the cleanup scheme was not well thought out. "One of the most frightening prospects of this plan is that any large-scale filtration will remove plankton, which play a vital role in the ecology of the ocean's surface," she says.

Perch larva with small beads in the stomach

Clogging of water bodies with human waste is one of the pressing problems of our time. Some of the garbage decomposes over time, but a considerable amount of it settles to the bottom or remains floating on the water surface, causing enormous damage to the environment.

Huge accumulations of garbage, resembling islands or even entire continents in size, are often found in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. Researchers of this phenomenon compare it to a “garbage soup”: some of the waste does not sink, but floats on the surface or in the water column – and such “spots” of garbage stretch for many kilometers.

Where does such a large amount of human waste come from in the ocean?

First of all, this is what is thrown into the water by residents and guests of cities located in close proximity to the seas.

For example, environmentalists call India, Thailand and China the leaders in polluting water with garbage, where dumping everything unnecessary into rivers and seas is considered practically the norm.

Tourists vacationing on warm sea coasts around the world usually litter especially actively and thoughtlessly. They release cigarette butts, plastic bottles and cans from various drinks, glasses, corks, plastic bags, disposable tableware, cocktail straws and other household waste into the water.

But that's not all. Let's remember school lessons. Rivers flow into the seas, the seas are part of the oceanic waters, which make up more than 95% of the entire water shell of the Earth - the hydrosphere. Thus, most of the garbage thrown into rivers, carried by currents, will also end up in the ocean.

According to scientists, about 80% of the volume of this gigantic water dump comes from the ground. And only the remaining 20% ​​is the waste of “marine” human activity:

• torn fishing nets;
• waste from floating oil drilling rigs;
• garbage that is thrown from ships, etc.

All this rubbish that ends up in the ocean floats with the current and finally accumulates in certain “quiet” places, where it forms entire “floating landfills” on the waves.

Pacific Garbage Gutter

The world's largest water dump is located in the North Pacific Ocean. It is there that ocean currents form a kind of funnel into which debris is pulled.

The result is a real “dead sea” of rotting waste, marine flora, corpses of aquatic inhabitants, and shipwrecks. And since the mid-twentieth century, floating remnants of plastic have rapidly begun to accumulate here, which naturally decomposes over several hundred years.

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, “Garbage Iceberg” - as they call this huge accumulation of floating waste and garbage, located between Hawaii and California, in the media.

The exact dimensions are still not known. According to rough estimates, its weight could be more than 3.5 million tons with an occupied area of ​​10 million square kilometers or more.

According to its structure, the “garbage iceberg” is divided into two large parts - Western (closer to the shores of Japan and China) and Eastern (near California and Hawaii).

Facts about Garbage Island in the Pacific Ocean:

1. Even before its actual discovery, its existence was announced in 1988 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Such conclusions were made by scientists based on observations of the oceans, the movement of waste accumulations in them, as well as the nature of currents.
2. The “garbage channel” was officially discovered in 1997 by Captain Charles Moore: while traveling on a yacht, he found himself in a part of the body of water covered for many miles with garbage floating on the surface. The discovery amazed Moore so much that he wrote several articles about it, which attracted the attention of the whole world to the problem. He subsequently became the founder of an environmental organization for ocean research.
3. About 70% of waste sinks, so the so-called “garbage soup”, which occupies a huge area on the surface of the water, is only one third of the total volume of the “world’s water dump”.
4. Plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean kills more than a million seabirds and aquatic mammals every year.
5. There are forecasts that promise a doubling of the scale of the “continent of waste” in just ten years if humanity does not reduce the volume of plastic products consumed (and thrown away).

The production of plastic products in the world is still growing steadily every year. Accordingly, an increasing amount of it ends up in natural reservoirs.

For details about the Pacific Garbage Gutter, watch the video:

The dangers and consequences of ocean water pollution

The damage that garbage islands cause to the environment, and ultimately to the lives and health of people themselves, is simply colossal:

1. In vast areas of the ocean, sunlight does not penetrate through the waste-polluted water columns. As a result, algae and plankton die in these areas, which in turn provide food for the inhabitants of the depths. Lack of nutrition can lead to their extinction and further complete disappearance.
2. The bulk of garbage is all kinds of plastic. The period of its complete natural decomposition in the natural environment, according to ecologists, can range from 100 to 500 years. That is, at the moment this entire mass is not decreasing, but is only increasing due to daily new arrivals.
3. When exposed to the sun, plastic gradually breaks down into small granules that can absorb toxins from the environment, turning into real poison.
4. Plastic particles are consumed by animals as food. This happens because its pieces are overgrown with algae, and the small granules look like eggs and the same plankton. Often, plastic eaten by birds and fish causes their death. Even if the animal survives, in any case it receives chronic poisoning with harmful substances that cause diseases and mutations.
5. The waste covering the bottom of the oceans destroys the habitat of the inhabitants of the deep.

The laws of the food chain are inexorable and fair: as a result, poisons from plastic inevitably affect commercial fish species, and through them cause harm to human health.

Note! Ocean Trash Facts:

• scientists believe that by 2050, plastic will be ingested by almost all birds and marine life without exception;
• about 40% of albatrosses die precisely because of pecking on plastic as food;
• about 9% of fish have plastic residues in their stomachs, and according to scientists, in general, fish eat up to 20 tons of waste polymers per year.

If you combine all the “garbage spots” into one whole, you will get an area larger than the United States of America. And so far, every year this “water dump” only expands its borders.

How to deal with the problem?

It would seem obvious that the problem of waste in the seas and oceans needs to be solved by the whole world and as soon as possible! But so far no one is actually doing this. Garbage accumulates in international waters, and none of the countries wants to take responsibility, and most importantly, bear the financial costs associated with solving this problem.

But it is worth noting that these expenses are unlikely to be within the budget of one, even a developed, country - the amount of garbage accumulated in the oceans is too large.

The solution proposed by environmentalists may sound categorical, but reasonable. In their opinion, humanity as a whole needs to, if not completely abandon plastic and polyethylene, then at least reduce its production and consumption to the bare minimum.

Also a serious step in solving the problem is the need for environmentally friendly recycling of plastic waste.

Important! Of course, each of us individually is not able to solve the problem of plastic pollution in full, but each of us can make our personal contribution to the protection of natural resources:

• reduce the amount of plastic and polyethylene used, giving preference to containers and packaging made from natural materials: fabric and paper bags and bags, wooden and cardboard boxes, etc.;
• Under no circumstances should you throw items made of any type of plastic into water, on the ground, or even into the general mass of garbage, but store them in special containers marked “for plastic” or take them to recycling collection points for subsequent processing and disposal.

Will people heed the calls of environmentalists, or is humanity destined to perish from the waste of its own life and its own frivolity? So far, the problem of “garbage spots” on the Earth’s waters remains as acute as it was five and ten years ago. Individual attempts by enthusiasts to deal with garbage in the ocean are just a drop in the ocean; solving this problem requires enormous funds and considerable effort.

Model of the formation of debris patches in the Pacific Ocean, initially evenly distributed over the surface

NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Environmental scientists have conducted a detailed quantitative analysis of ocean plastic debris in one of the world's largest accumulations, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Based on the measurements taken, the scientists built a mathematical model with which they estimated the total mass of debris inside the spot, the area it occupies, and its size distribution. It turned out that previous studies underestimated the total mass of plastic in this area by about 4-16 times, the scientists write in Scientific Reports.

Due to the configuration of ocean currents, large amounts of anthropogenic debris accumulate in some areas of the ocean. One such accumulation is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located in the Pacific Ocean between the coast of California and the Hawaiian Islands. The area of ​​this accumulation is more than a million square kilometers, and accurate estimates of the total mass of floating debris (including, for example, fishing nets, plastic bottles, fragments of buoys, ropes, films, various types of packaging) have not yet been made. Some measurements only made it possible to estimate the minimum possible mass, which, when taking into account various types of garbage, ranged from 5 to 20 thousand tons.

A team of scientists led by Laurent Lebreton of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation measured the amount of different types of plastic debris in this area of ​​the Pacific Ocean, and based on the data obtained, ecologists modeled the garbage patch and estimated its total mass and area. Since 99.9 percent of all debris on the surface of the ocean is plastic, the scientists used measurements of four types of plastic debris of varying sizes in the patch as the main source of data for the model: microplastics (0.05 to 0.5 centimeters in size), microplastics (0.05 to 0.5 centimeters in size), mesoplastic (from 0.5 to 5 centimeters), macroplastic (from 5 to 50 centimeters) and megaplastic (more than 50 centimeters).

The measurements were carried out from July to September 2015. A total of 652 measurements were taken at various points in the large Pacific garbage patch. Scientists also estimated the number of large pieces of the largest debris by photographing the ocean surface from an airplane. Based on the collected data, a mathematical model was built that made it possible to calculate the mass, area and size distribution of debris in the spot.

Results of numerical modeling of the total mass of plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The calculation results showed that the garbage patch contains approximately 80 thousand tons of plastic, which in total occupy an area of ​​about 1.6 million square kilometers. This mass is approximately 4 times the maximum of previous estimates and 16 times the value obtained from previous measurements of the amount of debris collected in trawl nets.

Results of measurements of the mass of garbage of various sizes. The line marks the boundary of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

L. Lebreton et al./Scientific Reports, 2018

In addition to the total mass of plastic in the garbage patch, scientists analyzed its fractional composition. It turned out that more than three quarters of all objects in the spot are larger than 50 centimeters in size, and almost half of the spot consists of elements of fishing nets. At the same time, for example, the content of the smallest microplastic garbage (mainly individual elements, fragments and scraps of other types of garbage) is only about eight percent of all garbage by weight, but at the same time 94 percent if you count the garbage individually (in just a spot approximately 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic waste).

At the same time, the mass of microplastic debris has increased significantly in recent years: if in the 1970s, for every square kilometer of the ocean surface inside a garbage patch, on average there was approximately 0.4 kilograms of microplastic, then by 2015 this mass increased more than 3 times: to 1.23 kilograms.

Scientists attribute the differences compared to previous measurements both with refinement of analysis methods and directly with an increase in the amount of garbage during the time that elapsed between studies. Scientists also call a large tsunami caused by an earthquake off the eastern coast of Honshu in 2011 one of the possible natural reasons for the increase in the amount of plastic.

At the same time, it turned out that the accumulation of plastic in the garbage patch is exponential and this process occurs faster than if new garbage appeared only due to ocean currents. The results obtained, according to the authors of the study, should help to understand the exact mechanisms of the increase in the mass of plastic waste and develop ways to combat its consequences.

To understand the mechanisms by which islands are formed in the ocean from garbage or other passively floating objects (for example, colonies of various biological organisms), scientists often have to use rather complex physical models based on hydrodynamic approaches or the kinetic theory of gases. For example, using one such method, scientists have discovered that the process of debris drift consists of two main stages: first, small objects form into clusters, after which these clusters slowly move apart from each other.

Alexander Dubov

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, “North Pacific Gyre”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, as this giant island of garbage is called, which is growing at a gigantic pace. There has been talk about garbage island for more than half a century, but virtually no action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being caused to the environment, and entire species of animals are becoming extinct. There is a high probability that a moment will come when nothing can be fixed.

Pollution started from the time plastic was invented. On the one hand, it is an irreplaceable thing that has made people's lives incredibly easier. It makes it easier until the plastic product is thrown away: plastic takes more than a hundred years to decompose and, thanks to ocean currents, gathers into huge islands. One such island (larger than the US state of Texas) floats between California, Hawaii and Alaska - millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly; every day, ~2.5 million pieces of plastic and other garbage are dumped into the ocean from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean creatures) suffer the most. Plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean is responsible for the death of more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100 thousand marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these objects, mistaking them for food.

"Trash Island" has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the characteristics of the North Pacific Current system, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, the current mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and its area is more than a million square kilometers. “The Island” has a number of unofficial names: “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Eastern Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, etc. In Russian it is sometimes called also a “garbage iceberg”. In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island area by six times.

This huge pile of floating garbage - in fact the largest landfill on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of underwater currents that have turbulence. The swath of "soup" stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California through the North Pacific Ocean past Hawaii and just short of distant Japan.

American oceanographer Charles Moore - the discoverer of this “great Pacific garbage patch,” also known as the “garbage gyre,” believes that about 100 million tons of floating trash are circling in this region. Marcus Eriksen , Director of Science (USA), founded Moore, said: “Initially, people assumed it was an island of plastic trash that you could practically walk on. This view is inaccurate. The consistency of the stain is very similar to plastic soup. It’s simply endless—perhaps twice the size of the continental United States.” The story of Moore's discovery of the garbage patch is quite interesting: 14 years ago, a yachtsman Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to relax in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to test his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had sailed into the trash heap.

“For a week, every time I went on deck, plastic junk floated past,” Moore wrote in his book “ Plastics are Forever ? “I couldn’t believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge area of ​​water?” I had to swim through this garbage dump day after day, and there was no end in sight...”

Swimming through tons of household waste turned Moore's life upside down. He sold all his shares and founded an environmental organization with the proceeds. Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), which began to study the ecological state of the Pacific Ocean. His reports and warnings were often brushed aside and not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would await the current report. AMRF, but here nature itself helped environmentalists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic garbage onto the beaches of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. They say he is the son of a famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau , who went to film a new film in Hawaii, almost had a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic has not only ruined the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, Moore's name has not left the pages of American media. Recently the founder AMRF warned that unless consumers limit their use of non-recyclable plastics, the surface area of ​​the “garbage soup” will double in the next 10 years, threatening not only Hawaii but all Pacific Rim countries.

But in general they try to “ignore” the problem. The landfill does not look like an ordinary island; its consistency resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in the water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70% of all plastic that gets here sinks to the bottom layers, so we don’t even exactly imagine how much trash can accumulate there. Since plastic is transparent and lies directly below the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from a satellite. Debris can only be seen from the bow of a ship or when scuba diving. But sea vessels rarely visit this area, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains have laid routes away from this section of the Pacific Ocean, known for the fact that there is never wind here. In addition, the North Pacific Gyre is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is no one's.

Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer , a leading authority on floating debris, has been monitoring the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for more than 15 years. He compares the garbage dump cycle to a living creature: “It moves around the planet like a large animal let off a leash.” When this animal approaches land - and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago this is the case - the results are quite dramatic. “As soon as a garbage patch burps, the whole beach is covered with this plastic confetti,” testifies Ebbesmeyer.

According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, replete with debris, poses a risk to human health. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets - the raw material of the plastics industry - are lost every year and eventually end up in the sea. They pollute the environment by acting as chemical sponges that attract man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. This dirt then enters the stomachs along with food. “What ends up in the ocean ends up in the stomachs of ocean creatures and then on your plate. Everything is very simple".

The main ocean polluters are China and India. Here it is considered common practice to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water.

There is a powerful North Pacific subtropical eddy here, formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio Current, northern trade wind currents and inter-trade wind countercurrents. The North Pacific Whirlpool is a kind of desert in the World Ocean, where a wide variety of rubbish has been carried for centuries from all over the world - algae, animal corpses, wood, ship wrecks. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of rotting mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, so the North Pacific Whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, no mammals, no birds. No one except colonies of zooplankton. Therefore, fishing vessels do not come here, even military and merchant ships try to avoid this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.

Since the early 50s of the last century, plastic bags, bottles and packaging have been added to rotting algae, which, unlike algae and other organic matter, are poorly subject to biological decay processes and do not disappear anywhere. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90% plastic, with a total mass six times that of natural plankton. Today, the area of ​​all garbage patches even exceeds the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of ​​this colossal landfill increases by an order of magnitude.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch produces tons of waste that destroys the environment. Dangerous residues end up in lakes, rivers, and then into the World Ocean. They pose a serious threat to the environment: fish and animals die. Only by radically changing their behavior can people save the water elements from waste.

The environmental threat has reached its depths

Between California and Hawaii lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The aquatic inhabitants that live there are on the verge of extinction. The reason for this is a lot of pollution. The stigma of trash is growing very quickly. This problem needs to be studied and a solution found. Now is the time to act proactively to protect the planet from environmental disaster.

Charles Moore was returning to California after a regatta in 1980 when he discovered a garbage island in the Pacific Ocean. The scientific community and the public learned about the existence of this dangerous zone thanks to the captain. He wrote several articles on this topic. Subsequently he founded a foundation for environmental research. They believed him only after a storm that threw piles of plastic products into the coastal areas of the Hawaiian Islands. And as a result, thousands of corpses of marine life.

Debris in the water can drift from above, settle in the middle layers, and heavy objects end up at the bottom. Sewage systems and rivers carry industrial, food, and sewage waste. For more than 30 years, garbage has been accumulating in the sea. Cigarette butts and plastic dishes fall into the water from liners, commercial and fishing vessels. Tourists often throw out pieces of fishing nets and wooden boats broken during natural disasters from ships. This creates a landfill in the ocean, threatening its inhabitants.

Increasingly, entire towns are being built in many coastal areas: Southeast Asia, Japan, India, and on the African coast, which are also being added. All waste is collected in the so-called garbage continent, most of which consists of plastic items. As an example, in Indochina life is in full swing on stilts; Jean-Michel Cousteau came to Hawaii to make a film about the beauty of virgin nature. However, I found 70 tons there. It cost him a heart attack. Plastic trash made its way there too. One of the researchers swam in the Atlantic Ocean for 18 days, constantly taking samples for water analysis. He was amazed: there was plastic floating around.

How the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Was Formed

The invention of plastic is a technical progress, but if it ends up in the water after use, the balance of the ecosystem is disrupted. In the subtropical abyss, the corpses of animals rested for a long time, algae rotted, fragments of logs, the liquid was saturated with hydrogen sulfide. Now it is a dead place, to which disposable tableware, bottle caps and other items that are not subject to biological decay have been added. They turned it into a garbage continent that does not stand still and is constantly expanding rapidly.

Many people take it literally. They believe that it is possible to move along it. Actually this is not true. It was formed due to currents in the Pacific Ocean, which can be surface or deep. It is impossible to see them, but they exist. Due to the peculiarities of the system of currents moving in a circle and the wind, a sea of ​​calm is formed in the center. That's where the eastern garbage continent is located. It is a whirlpool into which all the trash is drawn. When waste gets inside, it cannot leave the spot and ends up in a trap.

The size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 3 times the size of France; the American state of Texas - in 2, in numbers - over 352 million tons of waste. This cannot be verified, since it is impossible to determine the true extent of contamination either from an airplane or from a satellite due to the transparency of polymer particles and their microscopic nature. Despite this, the floating island can be seen when you are directly on the bow of the ship or underwater with scuba gear. The view from space will be natural, no dirty spot will darken the view.

How the food chain breaks down

In nature, everything is interconnected. Ecology does not forgive mountains of garbage. The result is that a person punishes himself with his irresponsibility. Let's trace the relationship:

1. Rubbish accumulated in a certain place does not allow sunlight to penetrate. The result: plankton and algae die, the inhabitants of the depths are deprived of food, which leads them to extinction and even extinction as a species.
2. The main volume consists of plastic masses. It decomposes slowly. Therefore, it does not become less, but due to what comes from outside, it multiplies.
3. Under the influence of ultraviolet radiation, the polymer breaks down into microparticles that collect in the surface layer of water, but retains its dangerous structure and can absorb organic pollutants from the water. Toxin sizes can start from 3 mm.
4. These poisonous granules are eaten by fish and animals, which causes their death. Albatrosses and other birds die without water or food after swallowing a piece of plastic. Mammals cannot escape from abandoned fishing nets. Garbage does not give concessions to weak individuals. The surviving inhabitants of the waters in the Pacific Ocean receive poisonings that cause mutations. Such specimens can end up on a person’s table.
5. Garbage on the ocean floor is destroying the habitat of deep-dwelling inhabitants.

The food chain is being destroyed. The poisons also affect commercial fish. If a person eats them, his health will be harmed. After conducting a large study, C. Moore found out that over half of the pollution came from land, a fifth - from ships. The unique world of the archipelago has been destroyed for several decades. This area is rarely a travel destination.

We are looking for a way out

The current state of the problem of garbage accumulation causes fear for natural resources. The issue is long overdue and needs to be resolved together. However, none of the states wants to take responsibility for neutral waters or bear financial costs. The difficulty lies in the cleaning mechanism. In the UK they came up with a marine garbage collector. The device resembles a basket made of mesh (fiber) and an external pump. But there is also a minus - marine inhabitants can get into it. Whether this project is promising or not, time will tell.

If nothing is done to improve the situation, the consequences of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be unpredictable - this threatens an environmental disaster. One person is unable to radically change the pollution situation, but everyone is obliged to contribute to the protection of natural resources. A joint fight against unnecessary trash will certainly give a positive result. Some countries are developing new technologies for the production of degradable plastics (Italy, Ireland).

You should not create an ocean of garbage or throw objects made of polymers into bodies of water or onto the ground. They must be disposed of in special containers. One of the main objectives is to increase public awareness of upcoming environmental threats. Then the new frightening large Pacific garbage patches will not appear on the map. There is no evidence of visible dangers of polymers, but they carry pollution and heavy metals found on its surface.

It’s time for humanity to invent new methods for recycling plastic, cleaning beaches and coastal areas from trash, in order to forever leave the causes of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the past. Therefore, you should look for safe materials to replace polymer products. It gives us confidence that our country will develop a comprehensive solid waste management system. and other infrastructure facilities can stop the pollution of water and land spaces.