Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World's Deepest Ocean Trench (nationalgeographic.com)

The Mariana Trench -- the deepest point in the ocean -- extends nearly 36,000 feet down in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. But if you thought the trench could escape the global onslaught of plastics pollution, you would be wrong. From a report: A recent study revealed that a plastic bag, like the kind given away at grocery stores, is now the deepest known piece of plastic trash, found at a depth of 36,000 feet inside the Mariana Trench. Scientists found it by looking through the Deep-Sea Debris Database, a collection of photos and videos taken from 5,010 dives over the past 30 years that was recently made public.

Comments

Why?

[cascadingstylesheet]

But if you thought the trench could escape the global onslaught of plastics pollution, you would be wrong.

Why would I, or anyone, think that?

Re: Why?

[olsmeister]

I would expect things to COLLECT in the deepest portions. As current moves things around, they will eventually tend to settle in the deepest portions as it's much much likely that currents will sweep debris up and out of these places.

Re:Why?

[GameboyRMH]

Humans are very prone to magical thinking about even the most practical matters. For example, a small but meaningful fraction of the world population thinks that their fossil CO2 emissions magically don't contribute to climate change.

Re:Why?

[ShanghaiBill]

You can consume less plastic. You can start now.

I started back in 2012, when my city, San Jose CA, banned single-use plastic bags.

Hawaii bans bags statewide.

Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda ban bags.

China doesn't ban bags, but they cannot be free. Shops have to charge extra for them, which greatly decreases their use.

Re: Why?

[Sarten-X]

While the volcano is busy breaking down the plastic to elements, it'll still release a lot of those half-broken molecules as debris and ash, many of which will float on the air over to populated areas. In Hawaii, those areas are also the places that bring in that lovely tourist revenue.

You're essentially suggesting we use a volcano as an incinerator, without bothering to put any filtration or scrubbers on the exhaust. Granted, the heavy stuff will be completely destroyed... but the lighter stuff will be just as bad as any other incineration. It might be possible to capture the released gas and try to filter it, but I suspect the higher heat of the volcano will make building such a structure rather difficult.

Did you pick it up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably like most people they commented about it but left it there for someone else to deal with.

Re:Gravity works!

[guruevi]

I think at those depths, buoyancy and currents has much more forces on the bag than gravity. Even above water a plastic bag is quickly overtaken by those.

Age of Plastic

[foxalopex]

I wonder how long some of this plastic will survive? It's going to be weird when millions of years from now, our layer in the geologic records is marked by plastics, chemicals and a mass extinction.

Re:How long?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Well, given the dimensions of the trench, and the average mass of a grocery bag is around 9 grams, and the density of LDPE is around 0.94 g/cc, it would take about 1.87 * 10^22 bags to fill the trench to the surface of the ocean.or about 2.4 trillion bags per person on the face of the Earth.

Re:Paper.

[Applehu Akbar]

Like... whatever happened to the paper bags we used to get out groceries in? You know, environmentally friendly, renewable, cheap, QUICKLY biodegradable, strong, reusable paper bags.

Those paper bags are still there, in every supermarket. You just have to ask for them.

Re:Relevance

[Wulf2k]

Finding plastic bags in the underwater trenches of an exoplanet would actually be fairly remarkable on a number of fronts.