Trashlantis - the kingdom of plastic

Far out in the Pacific Ocean, where few ships sail, a new continent has emerged over the past few decades.

The new continent is already the size of western Europe, and continues to grow fast.

It’s a semi-submerged island formed not by the natural processes of volcanic action, tectonic uplift or coral reef formation, nor even by deliberate human intervention.

Instead, it’s an island formed by a complete failure of human intervention at the tail end of the consumer society.

The island is entirely formed of human rubbish and detritus, thrown or washed into the world’s rivers, lakes, seas and oceans, and gradually deposited in the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, refers to to the area as the “eastern garbage patch, others refer to it as the Pacific Trash Vortex(animation), but I think it more appropriate to dub it Trashlantis.

For just as one pseudo civilisation disappeared beneath the waves, now another is bringing forth a new kingdom atop the waves - a kingdom made of plastic.

Located roughly halfway between San Francisco and Hawaii, Trashlantis is forming in the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an area of slack winds and sluggish currents that draws in floating flotsam from all around the Pacific.

In the LA Times in 2006, Ebbesmeyer described the area of flotsam as moving “around like a big animal without a leash”.

“When it gets close to an island, the garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic.”

Ebbesmeyer estimated nearly 90% of floating marine litter was plastic, with four-fifths coming from from land, swept by wind or washed by rain off highways and city streets, down streams and rivers, and out to sea

The list of rubbish found in the bellies of albatross chicks on Midway island is a litany of household detritus: bottle caps, plastic dinosaurs, checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles, fishing line, small Styrofoam balls, Lego blocks, clothes pegs, fishing lures, nozzles, combs, golf tees, cigarette lighters, bucket handles, toothbrushes, syringes, toy soldiers and more.

Plastics take a very, very long time to degrade at sea.

Photo-degradation, wave action, impact with other pieces of rubbish and abrasion against rocks and coral only serve to make the pieces smaller and smaller, until eventually they’re the size of grains of sand and turn even the beaches into plastic.

These small pieces of plastic have been dubbed mermaid’s tears or nurdles - I prefer the latter as no self-respecting mermaid is going to cry plastic tears.

According to the LA Times, a piece of plastic found in an albatross stomach in 2005 bore a serial number that was traced to a World War II seaplane shot down in 1944.

Computer models re-creating the object’s odyssey showed it spent a decade in a gyre known as the Western Garbage Patch, just south of Japan, and then drifted 6,000 miles to the Eastern Garbage Patch off the West Coast of the US, where it spun in circles for the next 50 years.

And that’s the next part of the problem.

Trashlantis is not a single new continent. There are many of these plastic islands floating in the world’s oceans, with the Atlantic equivalent to be found in the northern Sargasso Sea.

They form wherever a gyre exists, and that means 40 per cent of the world’s oceans.

In June 2006, the United Nations Environmental Program report Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Deep Waters and High Seas (PDF, 1.29Mb) estimated there was an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the surface of every square mile of ocean.

And if you’re not worried about rubbish floating in some far-off ocean and you don’t care about the fate of wildlife choking to death on plastic, then consider the toxic effects for humans.

All those plastic nurdles collect the oily, toxic chemicals that don’t readily dissolve in water, including the pesticide DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Even if those chemicals have been banned years, or even decades, before, they’re still floating in the oceans waiting to return to us.

Some nurdles contain concentrations of these pollutants 1 million times greater than the levels found in surrounding water, making them into poison pills.

These pills find their way into the bellies of fish, sea turtles, seabirds and marine mammals, or are broken down into smaller and smaller pieces.

Eventually, they find their way into the human food chain and we consume them, too.

Once inside us, those plastic poison pills release their toxins, which studies have found lead to reduced fertility in laboratory animals, to subtle changes in the genitals of baby boys, to prostate cancer, to changes in egg cells in foetuses (causing mutations to skip a generation), to changes in testosterone production, and more.

Trashlantis, the continent of garbage, is now giving rise to a new population of genetically deformed humans.

All because we fail to kick our plastic habit and fail to clean up after ourselves.

Isn’t it about time you took a good hard look at all the the plastic you buy and rely on, and started seeking alternatives?