JUICE Heart

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Posted June 24th, 2009 at 12:30 pm by Ben Liew

One can only speculate if Bradley Nowell, the deceased frontman of popular 90s ska punk outfit Sublime, knew about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch when he wrote the lines “I swim but I wish I’d never learned / The water’s too polluted with germs” on their hit single ‘Badfish’.

Knowingly or otherwise, the singer-songwriter foreshadowed a growing environmental tragedy which was recently highlighted again, ironically, by another disaster, the ill-fated Air France Flight 447 that crashed into the Pacific in early June? Initially, investigators thought that they had found pieces of the wreckage but later discovered that it was just plain old ocean garbage. 

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, scientists are saying that our oceans are increasingly filled with junk - everything from large items like refrigerators and abandoned yachts to fishing nets and plastic bottles. Much of the ocean trash is plastic, which means it won’t go away for hundreds of years, if ever. And while the Air France mix-up happened in the Atlantic, these watery rubbish plots have been surfacing all over the globe.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, however, remains the largest concentration of trash in the ocean. Although its actual size is unknown - researchers have been studying it for years - some claim that it could be bigger than the continent of North America!

What is known is that the garbage, spread out over many miles, is both afloat on the ocean’s surface AND submerged deep below in the ocean’s bed. This reason alone makes the problem extremely hard to study.

So what can we do about this monumental human f*ck up? Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the garbage patch by accident in 1997 whilst sailing the Pacific, once said a cleanup effort “would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went.”

Ultimately, more plastic recycling and increased use of biodegradable materials is the best hope for controlling the garbage patch. It’s a simple solution but it seems like the best we can do for now. We need to turn off the taps at the source. Less than 5% of the world’s plastic is recycled and some people buy 3-4 bottled drinks a day. With proper education on the subject, we’d be able to tackle the problem at the core.

To learn more about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and clean-up efforts by environmental activists, please log on to www.pop.ly/1pdg and watch the youtube below. Changing our behaviour is the first step and as we would imagine Bradley Nowell looking down from his cloud at his beloved ocean would go, “Are you a Badfish too?”

YouTube Preview Image

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Comments(13)

  1. yup, and every time you tuck into some ‘organic’ ocean fish, this is the shit they’ve been dining on. researchers have found large amounts of plastic and even a fire extinguisher in the belly of great white shark corpses, so don’t think your tuna is any better off

    by YabbaGabba (June 24th, 2009 at 3:17 pm)

  2. I am a little more than disgusted with the fact that you labeled your picture of the so-called ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, ‘ocean-trash’ when two things occur to me:

    1. There is land in the background.

    2. Your picture has NOTHING to do with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch other than the fact that there is garbage in there.

    The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not something that is completely tangible or necessarily visible to the naked eye as you make it out to be. Instead of presenting the facts (such that most of the plastics in the water are too small to see as they have broken down to the molecular level) and allowing the reader to interpret the article, you use fear-mongering tactics with images unrelated to the original article and opinion throughout.

    I believe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a problem and should be dealt with as soon as we can (read: NOW!), however I think that by using fear-inducing tactics and misrepresentation, you underestimate the intelligence of the reader and even though there is a problem, your lack of honesty causes them to read into the article that there is no truth and hence: no problem.

    Fear is the mind-killer, but dishonesty is a killer of civility and society.

    by Scott (April 16th, 2010 at 7:39 am)

  3. I grew up with money but was raised to feel guilty about throwing food away and not recycling. Yet, I find myself picking up my friends’ plastic bottles to recycle them myself because after we exercise together on the beach, they simply throw them away with a “it’s only 1 bottle” comment! In California, I watch people – about 90% Hispanics - leave their trash on the sand after a pick-nick! (I’ve never seen this in Australia, New Zealand, or the South Pacific where I vacation…) I walk over, pick it up in front of them and put it in the trash 3 feet away (and recycle plastics) with my own comment: PIGS! I’m forced to do more than my part because others don’t do theirs. I see it as irresponsibility and a lack of education about environmental issues (I’m a scientist). Furthermore, people who don’t care to recycle are basically advertising themselves as being irresponsible and having no CONCEPT THAT THE REST OF THE WORLD ISN’T SO FAR AFTER ALL OR UNAFFECTED BY WHAT WE DO - which means they’re not very traveled, worldly and sophisticated.

    by MensaBabe10 (April 16th, 2010 at 10:16 am)

  4. I just read “The Lowdown” on the top right of this page. WHILE ABIDING BY THE RULES WHEN IT COMES TO RECYCLING AND USING BIO-DEGRADABLE MATERIALS SHOWS KNOWLEDGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES, THE ANTI-FUR ATTITUDE DOES NOT: Anyone who has spent time in Greenland or other Nordic countries knows that nothing works to keep a Human warm the way furs do. Furthermore, CLOTHING IS NOT BIO-DEGRADABLE, a concept that directly threatens this website’s environmental stand. I researched the fur issue in great detail after visiting Greenland and changed my mind greatly. They kill seals in a fast and humane manner - in Northern Canada, they do not always though - and only as many as needed. Every part gets used, down to the bones, and seals reproduce so fast and are so numbered that we will be endangered before they are! These people - and the ones in Northern Siberia - have no access to winter clothing. Those of you who want to force them to stop clothing themselves with animal furs put your $ where your mouth is and send them winter clothing! (Which, there, won’t work anyway…) A little education on this matter goes a long way, and there is a lot of IGNORANCE in the U.S. I disagree with what I call “furs for bragging” in California, but I own 2 that I do wear in cold countries when I travel. Stop trying to force people (with your rules and laws) in those places to live YOUR way. They would die without it. What a sad situation when people care about animals only and not animals AND people…

    by MensaBabe10 (April 16th, 2010 at 10:35 am)

  5. Okay before we start an eco-terrorist shootout, I’d like to apologies for the picture. In my haste to publish the story I made a bad decision and misrepresented the piece. And thank you for informing me about the plastic in the water that has broken down to molecular level, something that I neglected to mention as well.

    I understand that this is published over the internet, however, I am writing this for a specific audience. The Malaysian People. And while I totally understand the pitfalls of generalising and fear-inducing (trust me, that’s something that the powers-that-be here do on a daily basis) I feel it is all the more important as a jolted wake up call.

    Let’s face it. Before we even start to debate about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, more visible problems (which not necessarily are more pressing) are prevalent like in the photo. It is to my honest opinion that the people here need a slap in their face. And that cannot be accomplished by just words and facts as Malaysians are highly skeptical beings (although some do believe in vampires).

    I can understand your stance on fur use as well. That message in the Lowdown was to address the legions of mistresses and plastic whores that parade around with it at night in our tropical-inferno weather. Just like the aboriginals in Malaysia I think the important thing to note is that humane-killing with purpose and strict regulations is the closest we can come to a compromise.

    by Ben Liew (April 16th, 2010 at 2:28 pm)

  6. And am not too sure about your “90% of Hispanics leave their trash behind” part…. that sounds pretty bigot of a MensaBabe….

    by Ben Liew (April 16th, 2010 at 3:05 pm)

  7. Ben Liew obviously doesn’t know much about Sublime. Badfish is not about pollution its about being addicted to drugs. Sublime wasn’t foreshadowing anything with that lyric. Maybe Mr. Liew should have taken the time to read the following line and he’d realize what the song is about.

    “I dive deep when it’s ten feet overhead
    Grab the reef underneath my bed
    It’s underneath my bed”

    I’ll give you a hit. The thing he keeps stashed under his bed is in no way related to environmentalism.

    I bet next he’ll claim “Pawn Shop” foresaw the economic crisis.

    by patrick (July 6th, 2010 at 4:48 am)

  8. Well, you certainly got me there! Give yourself a big starfish pat on the back, Pat!

    I know that Bradley Nowell was a junkie and most of his lyrics were drug related… But I’ve always found lyrics in general to be intangible so it’s up to you to get what you want from it, whether it is the original intent of the artist or not. Yes, Badfish was about addiction. But isn’t there a possibility that he could have wrote that song with a secondary message slipped in some of the lines? It’s kinda like Green Day’s ‘When Sept Ends’ can be interpreted as a call to stop the ludicrous “War On Terrorism”, yet Billie Joe actually wrote the song for his father who was at the last leg of his life that month…

    by Ben Liew (July 6th, 2010 at 9:25 am)

  9. @MensaBabe10 - Unfortunately I have seen mindless littering in Australia and New Zealand in many towns and cities however I have never been so disgusted to see it as at Manly Beach in Sydney. During the week this idyllic beach is beautiful, however it is a different story on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon after the hundreds of visitors have left - leaving all their rubbish behind. It is heart wrenching to see bottles and wrappers strewn across the sand, a lot of it no doubt ending up in the ocean. I believe most Australians and New Zealanders realise the effects littering has on our clean, green environment - it is just a shame that some of the tourists we happily share our countries with, don’t.

    by BambooVillage (November 15th, 2010 at 1:59 pm)

  10. If it’s the size of Texas, why hasn’t anyone photographed it? I would think it would be quite easy to get a good pic of it from an airplane? I see tons of washed up garbage, and samples in jars, but no images of the mass on the ocean surface. Anyone have a link or an image?

    by TomRoberts (November 27th, 2010 at 5:58 pm)

  11. by BambooVillage (November 15th, 2010 at 1:59 pm) said: “I believe most Australians and New Zealanders realise the effects littering has on our clean, green environment - it is just a shame that some of the tourists we happily share our countries with, don’t.”

    Yeah, and the littering done by Australians and New Zealanders here in Japan is also heart-wrenching and shameful. So yes, I guess you’re right, it is always the foreigners, isn’t it?

    by LL (November 27th, 2010 at 6:02 pm)

  12. [...] Beavis and Butt-head drops their third album, whose environmentally-conscious title refers to the plastic islands of the Pacific. Clearly, environmentalism is where it’s at – guest stars on Plastic [...]

    by UGA » Of Mice and Men and Music (December 13th, 2010 at 3:41 pm)

  13. All we can do is take steps in our personal lives. Fully commit yourself to being aware of everything you do and how convenient the world has become. How many people do you know that grow there own food? How many of your friends recycle everytime they have a drink in a plastic bottle? How many of your teacher’s ever taught you anything about the importance of recycling? Take a moment to think of every single thing you have wasted in the world, even take the waste of an environmentally conscious person and multiply that by 6.7 billion. That equals destruction.
    Infect every person you encounter with knowledge.
    The world has provided you with a voice, mind and heart. Use all of those and stancd up for your mother.

    by michelle (September 9th, 2011 at 12:00 am)

Drop your 2 sen here!





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