Last year, while studying overfishing in our oceans, some of my Model United Nations students came across images of debris floating in large bodies of water as far as the eye could see. “Are these images real?”, they asked curiously. With confidence they told me they were images of the Great Garbage Patch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was skeptical. The images seemed exaggerated, perhaps "photoshopped". Could so much waste congregate in the middle of an ocean? The students were convinced the pictures of the Great Garbage Patch were real. It turns out we were all misinformed by the images. The issue goes much deeper and we all have a lot to learn about the problem and how to go about solving it.
Turns out images like the one above reveal what it might look like at the source of the Ozama River in the Dominican Republic. After heavy rains, trash around and in the river flows into the Caribbean. Only a small percentage flows back on the beaches. Wanna see what a small percentage looks like?
What is happening in the Dominican Republic is only a small symptom of a larger global problem. A majority of the debris, much of it plastics, flows to the high seas, into a vortex/spiral (gyres) that repeatedly toss and turn the debris in an endless, vicious cycle that breaks down the plastic into microplastics. The Great Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre is estimated to be 617,000 square miles (2x the size of Texas, 3x the size of France). In this large of an area you would see large debris, but it is supposedly scattered and not necessarily congregated as it would look coming out of the source of a river. It's deceiving to call it a patch because it conjures visual images in the imagination akin to an island made of trash. It is more like a region that looked like the rest of the ocean to the naked eye, but is polluted with tiny microplastics. Of greatest concern is that you don't necessarily see the microplastics that have been broken down and continue to remain in the large vortex. After decades of this cycle, moving around in this region, the plastics might look like this:
Of greatest concern is what you don't see in any of the three images above: the toxic stuff.
Once it is out in the open, plastic breaks down and releases chemicals that are impossible to fully contain. Equally disturbing is another vicious cycle of where the plastics go:
In the past year I have become somewhat obsessed with the issue of single-use plastics and how we, as a species, can stop our bad habits that have such a devastating affect on our planet. I started by reading about how our reliance on plastics began in the 20th century. I checked my own habits, noting that in a single day I may come in direct contact with over 250+ items made of different kinds of plastics. I'd be kidding myself if I thought my recycling efforts, use of bamboo shopping bags and no straw policy in my life would make a difference. It's a start, but it's putting a band-aid on the overarching problem. I'm not even sure yet what that problem is, but my students last year challenged me to spend part of my sabbatical trying to figure it out. So what does a visual person with an arts and science background do to approach a problem?
On July 18, I am headed to the Great Garbage Patch to see for myself what this region looks like and engage with a team of scientists, educators and explorers to study the current problem, investigate current projects helping to solve the problem and bring back accurate information to my students to hopefully inspire them to promote change for the future. It will take roughly twenty-one days to sail from Oahu, Hawaii to Victoria, Canada. No doubt lots of throwing-up overboard, but a small sacrifice to make considering how invested I feel in tackling this problem.
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