Pacific Garbage Patch

Prediction and Discovery

Located between Hawaii and Alaska and estimated to be roughly the size of the state of Texas, the patch is one of several sites within the world's waterscapes where marine litter has gathered since the early 1900s. A gyre is a vortex that slowly accumulates waste material because of the rotation of ocean currents and wind movements. Oceanic garbage patches are unusual among pollution events because marine scientists predicted that they might exist before they were officially documented. In the conventional narrative of pollution events, a group of people take note of a negative development affecting human or nonhuman life and seek out a precipitating cause and responsible party. The impact of plastic on the ocean was already a growing concern when a paper at the 1989 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conference proposed that high densities of waste plastic might converge in the ocean's gyres. But it was not until a catamaran piloted by Captain Charles Moore took a detour through the north Pacific gyre in 1997 that the extent of the patch became apparent. Moore and his crew were returning from a race from Los Angeles to Hawaii and decided to explore the vast stretch of sea, which was typically avoided because of its lack of fish and winds. They were stunned by the amount of plastic waste they found floating at or near the surface, which Moore estimated as approximately 3 million tons.

Marine litter from ocean dumping is a known problem, but most organic wastes are consumed or disappear into the food chain. Plastics, on the other hand, tend to endure and decay only gradually through exposure to the sun. Over time, photo degradation breaks plastic objects into their basic constituents—polymers—creating a chemical soup of tiny plastic pellets, which blend in with the marine ecosystem.

When a pollution event is discovered, there is an effort to assess the damage, find the party responsible, and clean it up. Typically, this is conducted under the supervision of the territorial government's regulatory mechanisms. But nonhuman forces of circulation carry plastic garbage from shipping lanes and coastlines into transboundary waters, where no country has ultimate jurisdiction. As a consequence of the nonhuman traffic in plastic, it is not entirely clear who is responsible. Many societies have practiced ocean disposal for centuries, and some have speculated that one source of plastic might even be landfills along the coast, losing stray plastic debris in the wind. Not surprisingly, many writers on the subject of the garbage patches defer responsibility to consumers and society's everyday dependency on plastic use. In some ways, this crisis in accountability mirrors difficulties with climate change governance, particularly the difficulty of distributing responsibility and inviting individuals and households to change consumption and disposal habits in order to prevent global catastrophe. Even if a particular party were held accountable or took responsibility for the oceanic debris, it is not clear what could be done about it.

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