As the continued search for flight MH370 becomes increasingly transfixed on ‘debris’ in the ocean, are we just highlighting the shocking state of our oceans?
Over the past few weeks, as the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has taken on an increasingly desperate tone, the shocking state of our oceans has been revealed. It has come to epitomise the search – grainy satellite imagery taken from a plethora of different satellites all honing in what is reported to be fragments of the missing plane.
As anticipation levels rise at yet another lead, search and rescue ships converge on the area only to spend spent days fishing out flip-flops, bits of boat, discarded fishing equipment, cargo container parts and plastic shopping bags – depressing extras in a story which has had the world on tenterhooks. It is a sad reality that the search has turned a singular tragic event into the sudden, dark realisation that in a generation we have turned the once pristine oceans into a giant version of the Manchester ship canal: full of plastic bags, shoes and shit.
The problem of sea pollution is a big one. One report estimates, quite staggeringly, that three times as much rubbish is dumped into the world’s oceans as the weight of fish caught by every single fishing vessel in every country in the world. It is an unimaginable amount of waste, an amount that isn’t limited to the coast of Majorca in the height of the summer holidays, where the changing afternoon tide brings in cigarette butts and Cornetto wrappers.
So how did it get there?
Well, this is just a small part of an island of garbage, a flotilla of waste that is floating around the world’s oceans like some large, rotten invading army. However, when we spoke to Leila Monroe, Senior Attorney at The Natural Resources Defence Program, she point out that this fact is somewhat misleading:
“Many people have heard that there is a garbage patch of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of the state of Texas. While it can be helpful to refer to a land mass to conceptualize the size of the problem, this description can be misleading. Plastic pollution is found in all of the world’s oceans.”
Rubbish, it would seem, is everywhere, but climate and geography play its part in funnelling these problems into something far more dramatic, but no less problematic. “Ocean currents throughout the globe converge in five large gyres, one of which is located in the Pacific Ocean. Plastic pollution gets concentrated in all of these gyres, but these are not the only places in the ocean that plastic is found.”
She continues, “Referring to ocean plastic pollution as ‘garbage patches’ may give the inaccurate impression that there are floating islands of plastic in the oceans, while the reality is that most of the plastic materials in the ocean are very small – more like ‘garbage soup’. While we are still learning about how plastics are distributed throughout the water column and where they accumulate, this is clearly a global problem. There is plastic waste, dispersed and degraded, in just about every ocean and water body on earth.”
Even so, these large, elongated areas of ocean debris, some thousands of miles long, harbour many thousand tonnes of waste. Most of it, despite being a long way from the nearest Continent actually comes from land: from poorly run landfill sites and industrial waste, but some of the rubbish, according a to a BBC report, is illegally tipped into the sea, from merchant ships and more worryingly, from cruise liners.
According to one source, an average cruise ship will produce seven tonnes of garbage and solid waste every day. In a year, approximately seven billion kilograms of rubbish is dumped into the oceans, on top of the 150,000 litres of human waste which an average cruise ship dumps into the sea each day.
Industrialising countries will take much of the blame for the high levels of sea pollution due to, arguably, a lack of environmental awareness. However, it is consumer packaging - plastic drinking bottles, plastic bags, and bottle tops mostly from developed world which is the biggest contributor to the rubbish in our oceans. Literal mountains of material which, in the most part, could take thousands of years to bio degrade.
But, it would seem, an increasing number of organisations are now proactively trying to do something about it.
Tom Hirshberg is from Coorc.org, an organization built upon volunteers around the world participating in a world wide effort to clean up our beaches that are littered with plastic and debris. He said, “We are not interested in fighting the plastic manufacturer just would like their support in our team of volunteers to help clean up the problem we all have participated in creating. The ocean is the world’s largest dumping ground on earth. It’s time we do something about it.”
However, with only limited legislation to protect against pollution our oceans are effectively at the mercy of a continued and relentless show of ignorance. As citizens we are equally to blame. We have no way of conceptualising how much rubbish is actually out there. We drink our bottled water and continue to pack our shopping away in numerous plastic bags with little or no regard that eventually these items could end up in the ocean.
As our planet continues its relentless march towards population meltdown, there will inevitably be bi-products that will enter the ocean as a result. However, we need to protect our oceans, not just from an ethical standpoint but out of a realisation that without a fundamental change in the way we treat our oceans we will irreversibly change its bio-diversity and ecology. And if we don’t start protecting it soon, it will put yet more strain on the world’s ability to heal itself as a result of human mistreatment. The battle against sea pollution has been going on for decades. Maybe the silver lining in the search for flight MH370 is that people can no longer ignore it.
Images: Chris Jordan, NOAA, Algalita.org, Via The Guardian
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