9 thoughts on “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”

  1. “I think all this outlawing of plastic bags is silly.”

    True, but it’s a great way to control the sheeple.

  2. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a real thing (but not in the way that’s usually claimed), as are similar ones in other oceans (gyre patterns such as the Sargasso sea).

    I know these are real, because I’ve sailed through the aforementioned two, and seen plenty of floatsam. What they are *NOT* is what they are claimed to be – plastic refuse from land somehow making their way thousands of miles out into the Pacific.

    The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is currently an area where, if you sail through, you’ll spot flotsam, almost entirely from the Japanese tsunami. The Sargasso sea in the Atlantic is where, when you sail through, you’ll often see parallel bands of flotsam stretching from horizon to horizon. (It’s Sargasso seaweed, and was noted by Columbus, amongst many others).

    Do a google search for images of the pacific patch and you’ll find some tsunami debris, plus lots of pics of garbage-lined beaches (hint, there are no beaches, or land, within hundreds of miles of said patch).

    Is there particulate plastic in the patch? That could be, and I suspect there is. Was it there before the Japanese tsunami? I don’t know, but I very strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority currently there originates from that source, which swept millions of tons of floating debris out to sea. However, if there was significant particulate plastic pre-tsunami, a cursory look at prevailing wind and current patterns show that the majority of it originates in the northeastern, not western, pacific.

    Banning plastic bags is idiotic at best, and typical of the meddling left’s penchant for being unable to comprehend reality; that issues are interrelated, and actions have consequences. Food poisoning from bag reuse being one, the killing of trees for paper bags (or toxic chemicals from recycling paper) being another. It also ignores the salient fact that many people do exactly what I do; use plastic grocery bags for garbage bags. What that means is if there are no longer plastic grocery bags, we’ll have to buy garbage bags, thus causing far more waste than currently. (Paper bags are worse than useless for most garbage bag applications).

    1. Food poisoning is an important point. Our household reserves “that bag that had meat in it” for garbage bags.

      It was President Clinton’s Ag Secretary who warned us that with modern meat packing practices, you have to segregate raw meat from everything else. With some of the e-coli strains, we are not talking riding the ceramic Honda. We are talking toxic shock, where if you live, you can end up crippled by it.

      1. “with modern meat packing practices, you have to segregate raw meat from everything else. With some of the e-coli strains, we are not talking riding the ceramic Honda. We are talking toxic shock, where if you live, you can end up crippled by it.”

        Thank you Iowa Beef Products and deregulated agriculture.

  3. What does a fellow like me call a pair of plastic grocery bags with the same food store logo on them? Matched set of luggage!

    These things are my lunch bag, garbage bag, work-paper brief case, overnight bag, laundry sack, and harvest bag when I collect food “out of the environment” (The amelanchier trees on campus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelanchier had a bumper crop with berries as juicy as I have ever seen them — mmm, mmmm!)

  4. And, plastic bags require far, far less energy to produce and transport. I often hear, “but, they’ll take 10,000 years to decompose!” Yes, and this is a good thing, too. What you DON’T want is rapid decomposition of foreign materials into the soil.

  5. “This bag will self-destruct in 5 months . . . good luck, Jim!”

    Actually, these bags indeed decompose. Sometimes when you have a stash of them, you find that they are all crumbling and there is a bit of a cleanup involved.

    I believe some dude invented a biodegradable filler that gets blended into the plastic to prevent the Forever Bag effect.

    1. Another instance of a “cure” for a nonexistent problem being worse than the putative “disease”. Funny how people think “science” is just normal intuition dressed up in techno-jargon. Science is the antithesis of intuition, which so often leads us astray. The intuition which tells us something breaking down is better than remaining stable is an archetype.

      1. Or, perhaps “epitome” would be a better descriptive of the point I am trying to get across.

Comments are closed.