Trash In The Ocean

Why is the Western rubbish patch to the east of the Eastern rubbish patch?

There is an infinity between east and west. When you go west you are always going west no matter how many times you encircle the globe... when you go east likewise you are always going east. Unlike north and south where when you go north eventually you go south and then eventually north again...

I think the better explanation might be that the things were named by someone in North America rather than Asia, but I could be wrong.

For thousands of years the orient has been called "the east".

How in the heck does that much trash end up in the ocean? Is this corporate?

Again lobbyists have paid our senators to look the other way while they dumped trash in the sea....

Lobbyists for who?

State and local governments have dumped more trash in the ocean than any corporation, and, of course, the US isn't the only country dumping trash in the seas.

It isn't going to be cleaned up until it presents a truly imminent threat to the entire world.

As with pollution, and carbon emissions, the developing world isn't going to give up its chance to at least pull up equal to the developed world by restricting its currently unrestricted growth.

If the US never let another molecule of green house gas escape from its technology and never threw so much as another coke bottle into the ocean, the effects of unchecked growth in the developing world would still wreck whatever ruin upon the earth these practices are capable of.

This paranoia about corporations being the source of all that is bad in the world is just that --- irrational fear and suspicion.

How simple life in your mental world must be.

Err, senators also have a hand in local governments... OR did you forget that??? Very stiff fines could have been imposed on all illegal dumping... And because SOME developing nations may litter too that means we don't have a responsibility to clean up what WE have dumped in the ocean... How simple is life in your mental world???

Shift the blame and see what is done to clean up the damned mess...!! That mess was caused by the developed countries. So let me see because we treated the earth with total disregard that means developing countries will do the same? Do you even have a brain? Because our communities treat the ocean without a conscience that means other countries will do the same? Because you beat your wife that means all others who marry will do the same? So why stop beating your wife?? Why do you even bother to think..!!!. Because developed countries are pigs that means undeveloped countries will be pigs too?

Don't people learn from the past. Don't undeveloped countries recycle? Undeveloped countries don't have to wait 150 years to finally start to recycle... That is why shared ideas and technology bring change... Clean energies and advancements in waste management. Many countries are far ahead of the United States in the way they handle their energy problems and you call us DEVELOPED? We have not switched over to clean energy because of the almighty dollar!!! It is easier to pollute the earth and keep the energy prices down than to create energies and policies that don't pollute. People complain when the oil prices spike. Soon the prices for energy will spike anyway and there will be no solution. What if we had doubled our energy prices long ago and spent that surplus money on research and "development", then our oceans would not look like a toilet.

Even dogs know better than to defecate where they sleep... DO YOU???

http://www.the-river-thames.co.uk/environ.htm

Why aren't epidemics like this as common?

http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/news/4077434.Thames_Water_fined___125_000_for_river_pollution/

It was obviously an occident.

Barbie
Meryn Cadell

Don’t throw your Barbie dolls in the ocean
There are more important things for them to do
Don’t throw your Barbie dolls in the ocean
They’re going to come back to manipulate you.
Barbie lives in a plastic apartment
with her own elevator and a phone
Barbie’s got a boyfriend with a suntan
and whenever Ken phones Barbie, she’s home.
Malibu beach parties, how come I can never go?
Barbie, you’ve got it all together
How come you always know what to do?
Barbie, you’ve got it all together
I wanna come and live with you.
Well I’m older now, but I still think of Barbie
I’ve got my own brown boyfriend, Ken
But my little room is pretty far from Barbie’s dream home,
And plastic dolls can’t make calls so Ken never phones.
Malibu beach parties, how come I still can never go?
Barbie, you had it all together
How come you always knew what to do?
Barbie, you had it all together
I wanted to live with you.
And I still want to live like you.
Barbie, Barbie.

Perhaps Dys but I don't see it that way. One can reckon it as a nautical east and west or a cultural east and west. The cultural east and west terminology carries more weight. Lays more blame on those countries cultures who have contributed the most to the problem. It is meant to be psychological and not directionally correct. I agree with that approach... The America's are called the west. The the trash would be a sludge created by western types of garbage. The middle east to the far east is the called "the east" and thus the garbage there would be items derived from far eastern cultures. What is notable that people have been living off the far east coast for thousands of years and only 200 years off the western coast of the Americas and yet the sludge dump off California is nearly twice the size of the one off the far east. Animals have been living on this earth for millions of years without even a fraction of an impact on the globe as developed nations.

Considering what this does to the earth's natural ocean currents perhaps the arctic ice melting is also a direct result of this sludge. It is like having a pulmonary blood clot in the earth's circulatory system. I am certainly not saying that CO2 is not the major cause but it seems that warmer water could be being forced further up north because of the altered currents. Also considering that most of the sludge is plastic it is only a matter of time when that plastic releases its hydrocarbons in the beating hot sun of the mid earth climate it will soon kill everything in the ocean for many thousands of square miles.

Were that sludge pile ever to become incinerated it could change the earths atmosphere into an unlivable dead zone. We are talking about a plastic dump the size of a continent. All caused because we wanted dollar a gallon petrol instead of clean energy that might cost 2 or three dollars per energy unit. This all caused because of frivolous living and and poor public policy... I am sure we can blame corporations for the bottom line of offering consumers these plastic items without paying any mind what would be done with them after they were no longer useful. These corporations in the east and west have made trillions of dollars while they have pollute the oceans on unsuspecting consumers.

Solution?... Just as most states have bottle returns, well plastic should be redeemable even old plastic of any size for a cost that comes directly out of these corporations pockets. If these corporations can proliferate the world with this plastic they can fork up the lions share to pay to clean it up also. Whenever a plastic item is bought it should come with a hefty redemption value that is shared by the corporation and even the consumer... If plastic had a high redemption value we would have street bums scouring the shores looking for old items to sell back to "the corporations". These corporations facilitated and profited from these items knowing that later they would be discarded. So we pay five extra cents for a toothbrush, plastic fork or disposable razor so it can be disposed of correctly... What is the big deal? Otherwise we have a plastic dump the size of Africa floating in the ocean and people pointing fingers saying, well, developing nations will contribute to is someday too... err not that bright...

It is already been reported by Chilean scientists that a similar mass exists in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/17/2164780.htm

Cash for clunkers is a rexred thing... Please don't end a rexred thing...

It might be interesting to consider the chemical composition of this sludge dump floating on the pacific ocean. It is mostly a mix of two chemical compounds. One is polyethylene and the other is polypropylene. Most people who are proponents of alternative fuels are unaware of the distinction between these two types of "plastic". One is derived from the oil that has been collected from the oil wells in nearly every country in the world. The other type of plastic from bio mass like corn and other ethanol producing vegetation. This second form of plastic comes from the sunlight that is captured in bio mass and refined into fuel. The first thing that should be considered about this sludge pile is that at some point it could become extremely flammable and highly explosive. One wonders if an explosion of such magnitude could actually send the earth plummeting off course…

If such a pile of plastic should incinerate the volume of gas that would ensue would be exponentially larger than the continent size refuse dump itself. Perhaps then to 25 times the size of this continent would become gas and it could wipe out our atmosphere and turn the rain into a mix of sulfuric acid and radiation.

Consider that we have taken this oil this energy and left it in a pile on the surface of the planet. If the sun has a soul it must be angry with us. The sun has given us this energy and we have laid it waste in the oceans of the earth. The earth has created this oil for our use and we have littered the earth and placed this plastic there like a time bomb on an earth that is millions of years old.

What could be any worse?

Well I propose we take these nuclear powered aircraft carriers and make huge fleets of them. The governments of the world could pay citizens to man them. Then we modify these carriers to be tankers equipped with cranes, liquid vacuum and scoops to load this refuse into the hulls, crush it and filter the ocean water, then bring back the plastic to the mainland in huge cubes to be recycled into ecofriendly products.