Plastics Pose a Great Risk to the Environment, Too

Plastics Pose a Great Risk to the Environment, Too

Plastics are not only an issue in products while they're being used but also when they're disposed of. While approximately 50 percent of plastic waste goes to landfills (where it will sit for hundreds of years due to limited oxygen and lack of microorganisms to break it down) the remaining 45 plus percent "disappears" into the environment where it ultimately washes out to sea, damaging marine ecosystems and entering the food chain.

Plastic particles are like "sponges" for waterborne contaminants such as PCBs, pesticides like DDT, herbicides, PAHs, and other persistent organic pollutants. This phenomenon makes plastics far from benign, and scientists have yet to determine the full extent of the dangers posed by their consumption or the effects higher up the food chain.

One of the biggest environmental assaults is the massive accumulation of plastic trash in each of the world's five major oceanic gyres. Gyres are large, slowly rotating oceanic whirlpools, driven by global winds and ocean currents.10 Garbage and debris is funneled into the center of these gyres, in a kind of toilet bowl effect or vortex.

One of these gyres, the North Pacific Gyre, is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean about a thousand miles from the Western coast. In its midst is a huge mass of trash (90 percent plastics), which floats in a soup of smaller pieces that have been broken apart by wave action.

Some call it the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" and others the "Pacific Trash Vortex," but regardless of its name, it's the largest "landfill" in the world. In it you will find everything from plastic netting to bottles and bags and buckets, paint rollers, hula-hoops and medical equipment. Most of the garbage patch, however, is not made up of large items but rather microplastics you can't see with the naked eye, forming a sort of plastic soup where pure seawater used to be. Filter-feeding marine animals ingest these plastic particles, and the toxins they contain, and subsequently pass them up through the food chain, and eventually to humans.