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Ocean Currents Are Sweeping Billions of Tiny Plastic Bits to the Arctic (smithsonianmag.com)

Posted by msmash on from the sad-state-of-affairs dept.

The world's oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic -- bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles -- and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic. From a report: The plastic was discovered by an international team of researchers who circumnavigated the Arctic on a five-month journey aboard the research vessel Tara in 2013. They sampled the ocean water along the way, looking at plastic pollution. And though the plastic concentrations were overall low, they located a specific region located north of the Greenland and the Barents seas with unusually high concentrations. They published their results in the journal Science Advances this week. It seems that the plastic is riding up to the pole with the Thermohaline Circulation, a "conveyor" belt ocean current that transports water from the lower latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean toward the poles. "[A]nd the Greenland and the Barents Seas act as a dead-end for this poleward conveyor belt," Andres Cozar Cabanas, lead author of the study and researcher at the University of Cadiz, Spain, says in a press release.

10 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Plastic is lower density than water by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 3, Insightful

    More importantly, it might act as a convenient surface to catch snowfall and get it thick enough to form a new glacier before the salt water underneath can get to it.

  2. I don't expect action on this by DeplorableCodeMonkey · · Score: 2

    Because the environmental movement has been anti-human for a long time and never concerned itself with pragmatism. Hence the knee-jerk hostility toward all--all--nuclear power, instead of saying we should make it safer as we invest in it. This issue is hard, but something governments can actually pursue aggressively without intruding hard into the economy. Simple solution: phase out disposable plastic as much as possible. Going to glass and aluminum will make soda too expensive for the poor? Good. Now we're tackling public healthcare-subsidized obesity at the same time.

    1. Re:I don't expect action on this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Going to glass and aluminum will make soda too expensive for the poor? Good. Now we're tackling public healthcare-subsidized obesity at the same time.

      Back when sodas were sold in glass bottles, Coke (and their forgettable competitors) implemented a bottle buyback model so they could clean and re-use the bottles.

      Soda companies did not move from this model to thin plastic because plastic was cheaper, they moved away because of a germaphobic generation obsessed with discarding anything that might carry pathogens just to be safe. Faced with the widescale rejection of their bottle reclamation and re-use program, soda companies found the cheapest disposable resource, which was also a favorite of the sanitary dogma, plastic.

      Cans survived because even though there was also a can buyback process, the mechanism of opening a soda can is destructive and non-trivially reversible. Even the more extreme of the sterile fanatics could accept that melting tin or aluminum and recasting a new can would be destructive enough to kill any bacteria from prior human contact.

    2. Re:I don't expect action on this by swb · · Score: 2

      I remember those 16 oz returnable bottles and how carrying two 8 packs back to the dorm two blocks damn near killed my hands they were so heavy.

      I have a hard time believing that germaphobes, and not cost, had anything to do with the death of "Coke bottles". Unless you only eat fast food, EVERY ITEM ON YOUR RESTAURANT TABLE except the food has been used before, and that's just ONE example.

      Those returnable bottles were extremely heavy, 12 ounces empty when they held 16 ounces of liquid. An eight pack weighs 6 pounds empty, 14 pounds full. The fuel cost alone of hauling around tons of glass bottles is enough to justify switching to cans and plastic bottles.

      And this is in fact what's been driving the craft beer industry to adopt canning over bottles. The weight and volumetric inefficiency of bottles is very high. Cans are highly recyclable and the linings are good enough that the flavor isn't compromised. They stack denser and weigh less than bottles. They don't break as easily.

    3. Re:I don't expect action on this by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Seeing as there's a viable recycle market for it even if no redemption value is applied, whereas glass is cheaper to landfill than to sort and transport to recycle I would argue that Al *is* expensive.

      That's only because you don't know what you're talking about. Aluminum and glass are both energy-intensive to produce. But recycling glass takes so close to as makes no difference as much energy as producing virgin glass, while recycling Aluminum is much cheaper than refining new aluminum. Glass containers are also bulky and heavy compared to aluminum ones, so it costs more to transport them to and from the recycling site. Finally, laser spectroscopy has made it very cheap to sort aluminum by grade, and sorted recycled aluminum's properties are essentially identical to the virgin aluminum, so recycling it is even more appealing than steel. The single most commonly recycled consumer good on the planet is the automobile. The single most recycled component is the battery, where everything but the stickers definitely gets recycled and even they might too, but the body (and where present, frame) is right behind it.

      TL;DR: You don't have to work hard to convince anyone to recycle aluminum because recycled aluminum is cheap and good.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Re:Potentially a good thing ..... by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

    No need to filter, or worry about getting the plastic out. The bits will break down by sun, waves, and bacteria.

    If you want to do something, it's better to start at the beginning, and reduce the amount of plastic that goes into the ocean.

  4. Re:Plastic is lower density than water by MightyYar · · Score: 2

    If we let them put lead and mercury in the plastic to meet this directive, then we can also get rid of all our dangerous heavy metals.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  5. Re:Plastic is lower density than water by slacktide · · Score: 3, Informative

    All of the plastic decorations on the bottom of my fishtank beg to disagree. Some plastic is lower density than water. Some is not.

  6. Re:Mod parent DOWN! by MightyYar · · Score: 2

    I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread is joking.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  7. Re:Potentially a good thing ..... by GrumpySteen · · Score: 2

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    It's not collected in one area and the areas that are polluted are so large that we can't collect enough samples to say for certain how large they are. Estimates range from 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres (5,800,000 sq mi).

    Even if you could determine where it all was, filtering is not an option. It's not like mowing a lawn. Water moves. You can't filter one patch at a time. Even if you could, you'd be removing all of the plankton in the area and food chains tend to collapse when the lowest level organisms disappear. Making a dead zone in the ocean that's somewhere between the size of Texas and the twice the size of the United States would be... problematic.