Most plastic is not biodegradable, it remains in our ecosystem permanently. So where does it go? There are only three places it can go: our earth, our air and our oceans.
Although the sea water does tend to protect plastic from ultraviolet light, plastic is subject to photo degradation. After prolonged exposure to sunlight plastic become brittle and breaks into smaller pieces. But it never actually disappears; it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. The tragedy for marine life is that many animals mistake these small pieces of plastic for small fish or plankton and they ingest that plastic.
Our oceans pulsate with powerful currents, and these currents keep plastic in constant circulation. As a result, debris travels in what are called ìgyresî. Gyres are swirling vortexes and garbage becomes concentrated where currents meet.
Bermuda is heavily influenced by the large central Atlantic gyre that moves in a clockwise pattern driven by the Gulf Stream. This central gyre concentrates heavily in the northern Sargasso Sea, an area that is host to numerous spawning marine species.
The Northern Pacific gyre stretches for almost 500 nautical miles off the California coast, across the Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. This gyre covers an area twice the size of the continental United States and is estimated to be 300 feet deep it is known as the ‘plastic sea’. It is estimated that about a fifth of the garbage is thrown off ships or oil platforms but the remainder comes from land. Sea samples from this ìplastic seaî have shown that plastic outweighs plankton by 6:1 in this area. This is a staggering statistic.
Bermuda is blessed with some of the world’s most beautiful beaches, and our Works and Engineering Department does an admirable job of keeping our beaches clean. However I encourage all of you to take a walk on one of our beaches. Take a garbage bag with you. You will be stunned by the amount of plastic you will find. A trash-collecting walk along our south shore beaches will yield yards of polypropylene rope, glow sticks, plastic oil containers, scores of plastic bottles and bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tires, detergent bottles and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of broken plastic. Last week we found a large plastic back scrubber while walking on Warwick Long Beach! If we pick up this trash it will prevent it from being swept back out to sea with the next high tide.
In February of this year Marks & Spencers, one of Britain’s largest retail stores announced that it would no longer give away free plastic bags to shoppers. Marks & Spencers did a pilot project in 50 of their stores in Northern Ireland and South West England. They started charging 5 pence for each plastic bag, and found that demand for plastic bags dropped 70% in those stores. Marks and Spencerís executives say they hope to reduce the use of plastic bags by 280 million bags per year.
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