BACKGROUND
What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? The Garbage Patch is not just the world’s largest collection of floating trash but is described to be even larger than Texas. Believe it or not, it is said to be approximately 1.6 million square kilometers! It was first discovered in 1997, by a yachtsman named Charles Moore. The GPGP is located in the North Pacific Ocean, roughly between San Francisco and Hawaii, where the currents meet and accumulate debris, mainly numerous kinds of plastics. The Garbage Patch is formed by the North Pacific Gyre. A gyre is a system of flowing currents in an ocean, caused by the Coriolis effect, which is essentially how objects tend to turn toward the right in the Northern Hemisphere and left in the Southern hemisphere.
Because conventional plastic does not biodegrade in the marine environment, most of the plastic debris from land is able to accumulate and gather up. 94 percent of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the Garbage Patch is made of microplastics. A collection of small pieces of plastic that can not be seen with the naked eye are known as microplastics. Most of the 79,000 metric tons of the plastic in the patch are said to the stranded fishing gear, rather than the plastic bottles or packaging that it is known to be full of.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are toxic chemical components of many plastics that are released when the plastic is digested by different species. They can lead to numerous genetic mutations in future offspring or even tumors within organisms.
Some may believe leaving plastic for a couple of hundred years should help completely get rid of it, however, no natural process can help plastic biodegrade. This means there needs to be some other way to break down plastic when it’s in the ocean or landfills. The process of photodegradation is used to help integrate additives, or different materials, to help disintegrate them in landfills and the environment using ultraviolet rays from the sun. This process, though quite efficient, takes more time than anticipated, as a lot of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in an area underwater where sunlight doesn’t hit. Additionally, the plastic will fragment into tinier pieces but won’t completely break down. These small bits are known as mermaid tears or nurdles. The plastic 10 meters below is blocked by more plastic, so photodegradation isn’t the best solution to get rid of it.