Issue date: 9/22/08 Section: Money/Health

Last time I talked about the importance of water in everyday living and I mentioned a few things about our beloved convenient little water bottles as well. This week I will take some time and discuss a related and growing concern that is scarcely reported but is increasingly vital in the education of a "going green" society.

According to many oceanic and environmental watch groups, one being the well known Greenpeace International, there is a growing mass of trash in the northern Pacific Ocean, called "The Northern Pacific Gyre," that has been estimated at a size twice that of Texas and growing continuously as societies become more and more reliant on plastics, said Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Long Beach-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

Chris Perry, of the California Costal Commission, said the garbage patch has grown ten-fold per decade since the 1950s.

This spiraling mass of conveniently sized containers and packaging lies where few travel, between San Francisco and Hawaii. Greenpeace International states, "Every year there are 100 million tons of plastic produced, 10 percent of that will end up in the ocean, 20 percent of (the amount in the ocean) is from ships and off-shore platforms."

This means that we, humans everywhere, throw around 10 million tons of trash into the ocean every year, two million of that is thrown off a boat. Greenpeace continues later to say that, "for every one kilo of naturally occurring plankton there are six kilos of floating trash."

Do not think this is an isolated phenomenon either, as it has also been noted by Dutch scientists who estimate that there are six hundred thousand tons of garbage in the North Sea alone.

The ecological impacts of a trash island twice the size of Texas can be devastating to the marine inhabitants that depend on the surface waters for food and sunlight.

In Hawaii, birds have been found dead on beaches and shallows with ruptured stomachs spilling bottle caps, used lighters and various assortments of bite sized plastic bits. These plastics are not only a physical choking or starvation hazard but a chemical hazard as well. When plastics break down they tend to release various chemicals, a common one being Polychlorinated Biphenyls, or PCBs for short.

As noted by the Environmental Protection Agency, the use of PCBs in plastics and other industrial products was banned in the late 1970s. PCBs were found to cause cancer in many animals, and also were deemed endocrine disrupters which inhibit the body's endocrine system.

The endocrine system is a series of small glands that help the body release and regulate hormones. Prolonged exposures to endocrine disrupters have caused fish to begin to switch genders well after their formative periods.

Hence the layman's term for endocrine disrupters: gender benders. This is only one of many on the potentially long list of chemicals that could be leaking into the ocean waters.

It has been stated with deep sorrow by many marine biologists and ecologists that there is no chance of cleaning up the mess, all we can do is reduce the amount of plastic that we use in the name of petty causes such as convenience or beauty.

By decreasing the amount of plastic we use we can only slow the growth of our neighboring island.

But nonetheless it is our responsibility to be aware of the consequences of our behaviors and to begin to learn from our shortfalls to help prevent new ones in the future, and in saying that, vote wisely.

Thompson is a sophomore environmental health major. This column appears biweekly.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools