Tag Archive for "plastic"
In the middle of the northern parts Pacific Ocean the currents create a big vortex where a lot of the trash the we dump into the ocean get trapped. This place has been dubbed as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” and there is even a Wikipedia page about it. This would not be a very big problem if all we did was dumping organic waste, but every single day we throw tons of plastic and other toxic materials into the ocean.
A site called vbs.tv decided to sail into this remote part of the ocean and see for themselves what the garbage patch looked like. They also had some scientists with them to test the contents of the ocean.
They have created a 12 part video series about the trip that you can see here.
I have embed part 1 of the video into this blog post, but check out the rest of the parts too. Be warned, there is some cussing in the videos.
We need to put heavy pressure on our governments so they will clean up this patch and the rest of the oceans for that matter. We also need to figure out how to change the common view of the ocean being a big waste dump. One thing that we can do ourselves is start picking up all the trash that litter our coastline. Every little thing helps 🙂
This is some really great news! According to an article on the therecord.com Daniel Burd, a 16 year old student from Canada, has isolated some microbes that are able to decompose plastic bags in a matter of 3 months. He added yeast to water to make a good growth medium for microbes. Then he tried to isolate the microbes using agar dishes and he found out that a combination of two different microbes worked best for degrading plastic bags.
Plastic bags is a big problem for the environment so kudos to Daniel Burd for caring. My only worry is if the dissolved plastics bags contains harmful toxins making that a waste problem too.
Of course we could always stop using plastic bags and instead use bags made out of organic cotton or hemp.
