Mommy, where does all my trash go? Between 22 and 38 degress latitude

Eric Hill

Opinion Editor

There is a never-ending stream of filth and crud accumulating in the world, we bag up a lot of it and put it on barges to somewhere. So where is that somewhere that I can find all of the plastic coke bottles, shopping bags, ketchup packets and everything else? It turns out that it accumulates in the ocean in what is known as the “great Pacific garbage patch,” which is estimated to be up to twice the area of the continental United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

No, you read correctly, it is twice the size of this country. It’s comprised of millions of tons of plastics and low-density garbage that are forced together by ocean currents. It doesn’t pile up like a landmass – that would be easy to clean up – it is basically a dense soup of trash that descends hundreds of feet into the ocean.

An American oceanographer, Christopher Moore, discovered the trash soup in 1997 by accident. Since the day his schooner spent an entire week sailing through trash, he has rededicated himself as an environmentalist, founding the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

But I live on the East Coast, you say? There’s no way all that trash is my fault—it must be China or something. No worries, according to a report from the BBC, the Ocean Scientist Meeting held in Portland concluded a two-decade-long study of plastics accumulation in the Atlantic Ocean. Their findings reveal that the density of trash in some places is nearly as bad as in the center of the Pacific, the greatest densities being between 22 and 38 degrees latitude.

As a child I used to watch kids throw sticky cinnamon bun wrappers outside of the bus window, which would drift into the small lake adjacent to our bus route. By the end of the year there were enough soda cans, wrappers and boxes that a group of ex-cons in orange jumpsuits had to come by to clean it all up. This only occurred at one spot of the lake, the one part of it that was visible from the golf course across the street. The other side slowly accumulated trash until it was choked with the refuse of children.

As we debate the impact of our behavior on the environment, a large number of people claim that we cannot observe or measure the ways in which our civilization affects the earth. That global warming is scare-tactic put on by environmentalists to raise taxes or prevent sensible oil drilling. I say that those people have spent so much time pretending to care about issues that they now consider genuine fear to be ploy. If they want proof that we are destroying the earth, maybe they should take their yachts a few hundred miles off of the coast.

If that isn’t enough, other studies are revealing that atmospheric carbon is affecting ocean carbon levels, causing the disintegration of coral reefs. A study by the Carnegie Institution of Science reveals that if carbon levels continue to rise at current rates, by the end of the century, coral reefs will have stopped forming and begun a process of disintegration. This is due to the choking of algae from the reefs, which bleaches them of their color and eliminates a primary link on the reef’s food chain. The more carbon in the atmosphere, the more carbon is absorbed by the ocean, thus, the less algae can grow.

There are also concerns that the process of global warming could be sped up due to large deposits of methane being released from northern permafrost and ocean deposits as the Earth’s temperature warms up. Methane is another greenhouse gas that can magnify the effects of solar heat being trapped in the atmosphere. The worry is that if a large enough amount of methane can be released at one time, global warming would tip into an accelerated process that could not be stopped.

When someone reads these kinds of things, it is very easy to think that this is some kind of hypothetical example or worst-case scenario. The truth is that the science responsible for these studies is carefully done, over large periods of time and data is heavily scrutinized. This is not a climate-gate, there is no reason to lie about such things despite skeptics’ claims that scientists prophesize doom and gloom to get more funding. That isn’t the behavior of scientists—that’s the behavior of preachers passing around a collection plate.

Many are worried that there is no economical solution to fixing environmental problems and they are right, there isn’t. People don’t profit from cleaning up the environment, it is just something you do. Carbon taxes probably won’t work, what will work is a massive government effort. Not committees and studies, but sheer numbers of millions of citizens sorting trash, dredging the ocean, cleaning up parks and building energy grids. People will not profit, but they will stop behaving like children, who scream only for themselves, and demand that the world be beholden to their will. Until the time of self-sacrifice, the road will only get harder each day, as the ocean trash heaps pile deeper and we slowly run out of the resources that keep us alive.