The Plastic Sea

I hope you are all having a lovely Christmas Eve spending time with your family or friends. Today's blog post is sort of in the festive spirit, relating to those presents that Santa may, or may not, be bringing you! There is no doubt that over the Christmas period, you will all come into contact with some sort of plastic; whether it be drink bottles, food packaging, a present or some cracker gifts that you have always wanted! The majority of this will be waste (potentially forget your present at this point) and hopefully (!!) you will recycle it. For those of you won't, be prepared to lower your heads in shame.

When plastic is disposed of into a garbage pile, it remains in the environment for years due to its non biodegradable properties. Take, for example, a plastic sandwich bag; this takes approximately 400 years to break down when exposed to air and light (Coral Reef Alliance, 2013). Gradually, the plastic becomes increasingly brittle and breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, ultimately appearing like fine sediment. This is not natural and has many repercussions on the environment, particularly our oceans.

Throughout its decomposition, plastic finds its way into water bodies that then feed in to the ocean. Once there, ocean currents can transport the plastic away and wash it up on shorelines thousands of miles away. A good example of this is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is a region where plastic from all around the world collects due to the Northern Pacific Tropical Gyre. Double the size of the United States, the patch contains an estimated 100 million tons of garbage and reaches to depths of 100 feet below the ocean's surface (Dautel, 2009).  Much of this garbage washes up on the beaches in the area and the video below documents this problem at Midway Atoll, in the Northern Pacific.

This plastic pollution, along with other forms of rubbish, threatens marine wildlife. Sea turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, small fish ingest 'plastic' phytoplankton and this cascades up the food chain to the seabirds that prey on larger fish. On Midway Island, 

'at least 267 different species are known to have suffered from ingesting or becoming entangled in marine plastic debris, including 86 percent of all sea turtles species, 44 percent of all seabirds, and 43 percent of all marine mammals' (Oceana, 2012).

The festive message to take home from this is to please recycle your plastic rubbish (and any other that can be too!) over Christmas and help lessen the anthropogenic impact on our ocean.