Great Pacific Garbage Patch now contains 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch now contains 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, 16 times higher than previous estimates, experts have warned. A three-year mapping project led by the The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, which is based in The Netherlands, has discovered that the problem is far worse than first thought. The ‘Garbage Patch’ also known as the ‘Pacific Trash Vortex’ was first noticed by US boat captain Charles Moore in 1997 when he was sailing from Hawaii to southern California and claimed to have stumbled upon ‘plastic…as far as the eye could see” Experts said they were surprised about how large some pieces of plastic were  Credit: The Ocean Cleanup Foundation  Plastic aggregates in the area because of circular ocean currents which pick up rubbish along coastlines and swirl them into the centre. It is estimated that items take around six years to reach the patch from the coast of the USA and around a year from Japan. Previously scientists have used fine-meshed nets to trap the plastic and quantify how much rubbish has accumulated, but the new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, has found that the method has vastly underestimated the problem. The new study involved traditional trawling with nets, as well as aerial scanning to map plastic in the ocean in 3D. The team used huge nets to trawl for trash  Credit: The Ocean Cleanup Foundation  The results show that the Garbage Patch is now three times the size of France, with nearly two trillion pieces of plastic, weighing the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets. The figures are four to sixteen times higher than previous estimates. 92 per cent of the mass is represented by larger objects such as fishing nets, while eight per cent of the mass was due to microplastics. “We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered,”said Dr. Julia Reisser, Chief Scientist of the expeditions. “We used to think most of the debris consists of small fragments, but this new analysis shines a new light on the scope of the debris.” Much of the plastic was marine waste  Credit: The Ocean Cleanup Foundation By comparing the amount of microplastics with historical measurements of the Garbage Patch, the team found that plastic pollution levels have been growing exponentially since measurements began in the 1970s.   It is estimated that there is now a 1:2 ratio of plastic to plankton and, left unchecked, plastic will outweigh fish by 2050. Plastic in the oceans swallowed by marine animals that cannot digest it. Chemicals leach into the water, and it has been shown that even humans who eat seafood ingest 11,000 pieces of microplastic each year.   The Great Pacific Garbage Patch sites between California and Hawaii  Boyan Slat, Founder of The Ocean Cleanup Foundation and co-author of the study, elaborated on the relevance of the findings for his organisation’s cleanup plans: “To be able to solve a problem, we believe it is essential to first understand it. “These results provide us with key data to develop and test our cleanup technology, but it also underlines the urgency of dealing with the plastic pollution problem. “Since the results indicate that the amount of hazardous microplastics is set to increase more than tenfold if left to fragment, the time to start is now.”