Trashland

Last weekend one of my compatriots, Harrison, was talking about how the United Nations was planning on granting statehood recognition to the giant garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. That sounded kind of silly and I couldn't find any collaborating news stories or articles. Harrison insisted I keep looking.

Harrison been known to have his "Emily Litella" moments. Just in case you're not old school Emily Litella was a character Gilda Radnor played on the original Saturday Night Live. Emily would do impassioned editorials on things she misheard, such as confusing endangered species with endangered feces. Before she could finish her editorial she would be corrected and then cut short her little speech with an embarrassed "never mind".  Harrison refuses to concede but that's okay because the more I keep looking into the great garbage patch the more I'm really surprised by it.

Ocean currents move in a circular track. Like a hurricane when an ocean current spins in a complete circle it also creates a calm center. One of such area most people might have heard of is The Sargasso Sea. It's in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As the Gulf Stream moves North and East and then flow turns South to become part of the Canary Current and the moves West to complete the cycle as the North Equatorial current. This complete circuit is known as gyre.  In the middle of the above mentioned gyre is the Sargasso Sea, a million square miles of calm water and seaweed.

The Portuguese explorers named the area in the 15th century. Sailors of that time didn't have a complete understanding of ocean currents and some tried take a shortcut straight across the ocean. It was a shorter distance in miles but they would have gotten home faster if they stayed in Gulf Stream and taken the longer way back.

The Sargasso Sea became a place to stay away from had traditionally been linked with apprehension and mystery. It understandable in the age of sailing ships how you want to avoid anyplace that doesn't have wind or currents. Over the centuries poems, books and movies have fictionalized the Sargasso Sea as a dreary graveyard of lost ships and even lost continents.

All the oceans of the world have gyres. In the center of each one is an eye of calm water where floating object can accumulate and stay trapped. In the Pacific Ocean there is area larger than Texas that covered in floating trash. You might ask how something like this could develop unnoticed? Like the Sargasso Sea there are large parts of the oceans that most ships avoid. There are no trade winds, no favorable currents or commercially viable fisheries to harvest. This happened out of sight and only recently has the public become aware because the problem is now so large. 

  

In the Great Trash Patch of the Pacific, Greenpeace estimates there is 6 kilos of plastic trash for every 1 kilo of plankton. You might not think much of plankton but is the foundation of the ocean food chain and it coverts more carbon dioxide back into free oxygen than all the plants on land.

 

The increase of world trade, especially between United States and the Pacific Rim nations have added to the trash at sea. Also as more people want to enjoy the luxury of living along the water, more trash gets accidently washed away. The tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 washed countless tons of man mad objects out to sea and lots of it continues to wash up on the shores of North America. One of the more unbelievable objects was a motorcycle found on the beach in the Northwest United States. Through the serial number it was traced back to its former owner in Japan.

There are about a dozen greater Trash Patches in the oceans (yes also including the Sargasso Sea). It's believed that millions of sea birds and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals are killed every year from eating bits of floating plastic or getting entangled in plastic packaging. The overall health of the oceans could be in jeopardy because there is that much junk in the water but right now it's mostly in isolated places where few people go.

I always like irony. It's difficult for me to go day to day without little irony in it, like it was a dietary supplement. Probably the most common object found in the flotsam of the great trash patches is plastic water bottles. As if bottled water was stupid enough, where people pay a premium price for a product that's usually no better than your average tap water; the stupidity gets compounded. The disposable plastic bottles are a tremendous biohazard because they tend to be difficult to recycle so they end up packing the landfills or floating out to sea. One of the great deceptions is that everything that goes into a recycling bin actually gets recycled. The best way to reduce your environmental impact isn't recycling but reducing the amount of garbage you produce in the first place.

 

That does change the fact on the ground, or better said the fact on the water, that there is a patch of floating garbage bigger than Texas, maybe even twice the size of the Lone Star State and worldwide if all the garbage patches where put together they might cover an area the size of India.

In a past posting I mentioned the micro nation of Sealand.  An old gunnery platform off the coast of England originally built in international waters and the current owner claims as a sovereign nation. Recently that inspired a group of rich libertarians want to form a "nation" of anchored ship in international waters to have a totally free capitalistic state.  Something like the idea behind Andrew Ryan's city of Rapture in the game Bioshock .

Another group that turning their attention to the sea is a group of activists backed by The Netherlands Architecture Fund. Instead of creating a haven for cyber gambling and off shore banking, they want to build a floating city that will harvest and recycle the great trash patches. To turn an environmental mess into a green paradise.

One of the plans envisions a floating island that would eventually grow to size of Hawaii. It would be agriculturally self sufficient and be own nation state. (And who knows, this might have been what Harrison had half heard something about).

It sounds outlandish or at least an idea for Kevin Costner if he ever makes a sequel to the movie Waterworld. These new ideas of floating nation states are not covered under current laws of the sea -so maybe the United Nations is working on developing new laws for a new age ahead.

Right now The Netherlands Architecture Fund is supposedly looking for engineers and scientists to start work on the project.  One idea is a robotic boat that works like a pool skimmer collecting the raw materials and clean the ocean.  Maybe someday in the not too distant future we'll look forward to a vacation on Recycle Island.