The truth about garbage patches in the ocean

Brut America

"It's like a big, toxic soup."   You might have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But it’s actually not a garbage “patch.” And there are five of them...

Transcript

00:00When people think of a garbage patch, they think of something that you could go

00:03and jump on and walk across. It is really like

00:06a big toxic soup. These things are huge.

00:20If you're talking to somebody on the street,

00:24they would think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. If you're talking to ocean

00:28scientists, they might refer to it as the North Pacific Gyre. The fire gyres in

00:33the ocean are effectively these like mega whirlpool-like

00:37currents. There's two gyres in the Pacific, two gyres

00:41in the Atlantic, and one in the Indian Ocean. This spinning

00:44motion collects and picks up plastic. It goes next to one coast,

00:48around to another, around to another coast, and then traps it

00:52in these gyres.

00:56One of the things that people don't appreciate

00:59is the vast size of these gyres. Sometimes you could have this mass of

01:05plastic soup that is the size of Texas. Some folks say the size of a couple

01:09Texases. You could sail across one of these features

01:14for days.

01:19There is a major misconception that this is a big island that you could drive a

01:23boat to, kind of like water world style, jump out on

01:26and go for a jog across. That's not the case. It is

01:30really like a big toxic soup. You see an increase in the

01:35concentration of big plastics, but there's an even

01:39higher concentration of small plastics that are constantly broken down to

01:43smaller and smaller pieces. Scientists call these microplastics,

01:46which is a sponge for toxins from the oceans that a sea turtle

01:50or a seabird might eat and is so challenging to clean up, is a lot

01:56scarier to me, honestly, than some big massive trash

02:00islands.

02:06We eat a lot of these species. So when you have seafood, you're buying fish that

02:10themselves have ingested some of these plastics and some of these toxins. So

02:13there's a lot of uncertain consequences that are being

02:17studied actively right now. Does that mean there are less

02:19food or less fish because we are losing fish and other wildlife

02:24from these sections of the oceans? Does that mean that some of these toxins are

02:27coming back to our own plates or plates of seafood

02:30were put in front of our kids?

02:36There are islands that dot these oceans, for example, in the Pacific,

02:41and they are the unhappy recipients as these gyres are spinning and carrying

02:44with them all this plastic. So a lot of Pacific island communities

02:48and a lot of uninhabited islands, which are home for some pretty amazing ocean

02:52wildlife, are becoming a bit like garbage bins

02:56because of all this plastic that washes up on their shores.

03:04The North Pacific gyre happens to move around some

03:08very populated areas, big cities on the west coast of the United States,

03:12big cities on the eastern coast of the Asia-Pacific

03:17communities. It becomes this big international

03:21cosmopolitan trash accumulation.

03:27Interestingly, it's this international character of these gyres

03:32that makes them really hard to clean up.

03:34The good news is because we're connected to it, we get to do something about it

03:37with our decisions in terms of how we say yes and hopefully no to

03:42single-use throw-away plastic pollution. That is you,

03:45that is me, that is part of that problem. So it's scary, but it's also exciting

03:52because that means we can do something about it.

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