How much waste do you create in a day, a month, a year? Well if you can say you keep you waste to a minimum I applaud you. While you may be good the rest of the world isn't, it's estimated that 8 million metric tons of trash enter the sea every year (ocean.si.edu). This incredible amount of trash doesn't get cleaned up either. It gets swept away by currents into what are known as gyres. There are 5 gyres in the oceans, a gyre is a part of the ocean that two or three currents meet and make the currents spin, hold most to all the trash due to being swept up in the currents. These "plastic islands" as they're called are not very well known to the public. That is because they're relatively new to the scientific world. While there is proof that these islands have been growing for decades the ability to realize and the size of them have just recently been found out. Now I have found out that most people that know about them think they're these huge islands that are destroying everything in their path and are going to destroy the ocean in a matter of years. While they are destroying the ocean they are not anything like what major anti-waste companies are making them seem like. While the "plastic islands" are a major travesty to the ocean and to the world, but just how fast are they destroying the ocean and how big are they actually? This question I feel like is the biggest one anyone could have. Everyone is told unless they do their own research how bad the ocean is and how bad it's going to be in say 5-10 years. While yes it is bad and yes it's getting worse, I've found everything to be mostly over exaggerated. Working with the information I have found the ocean is being destroyed vastly by major consumer countries and third world countries who don't have the resources. Not having the ability to stop trash pollution properly makes the ocean a big glass tank waiting to burst.

Claim: Island size

The ocean is fragile, mainly because we know so little about it. We have no clue what's being damaged by the plastic since we don't know what's down there to be damaged. With that being said the "plastic islands" aren't as destructive as they are made to be perceived. When shown to the public they're made to be massive land like islands with dead turtles and fish all around them. While this is a good way to get followers for the cause it is not truthful in any way. To start the trash has been degraded to micro fibers and "many of them are so small as to be invisible to the human eye. There is no actual island of trash"(ocean.si.edu). When you go to google an lookup the "plastic islands" "you'll get large tons of islands with boats barging through or people stepping on them, in some places it does get this and but this is mainly coast line of  Asian countries where they do not have the waste management to control it"(pri.org). These pictures only show a very small amount of the problem though and most of the time aren't even in the gyres being studied. The plastic in the gyres have found to have 750,000 bits of micro plastic per square kilometer (education.nationalgeogrpahic.org). This still can't be seen by human eye though, and without a microscope would be hard to be found.  While it is mainly micro plastics there is some plastic floating in the middle of these gyres. That is why people like Capt. Charles Moore were able to figure out this problem in the first place (livescience.com). Moore was doing a long transpacific yacht race when he started to see lots of different trash floating all around his ship. This confused him because he hadn't seen land for hours and wasn't supposed to see land for hours to come. This got him into the problem and he has become one of the lead people conducting research on this problem (livescience.com).  With trawling for trash researchers were confused as to why there averages were showing disappearances in plastic, until the technology of drones came about and realized that the trawling just was doing enough and that there was 100X the amount of trash previously thought (livescience.com). Although there was proof of being so much more there was only one instance of actual land, and this was due to a massive natural disaster in japan that drove tons of trash, ropes, buoys, and plastic from land into the ocean. While this land mass was found it is the only known one to this day, and is still not very large.  Thus proving that the islands are not anything but lays of microfibers floating about in the ocean. 

Refutation: island size

While it is hard to refute the fact there is not islands of trash throughout the ocean. It is easy to prove that there are islands of trash in the ocean in certain places. Like the 50 foot long island with beaches and a "rocky coastline" that Capt. Charles Moore found (livescience.com). "With 29,898 particles of plastic per square kilometer"(common dreams), you would think there would be more islands like the one above, but with nothing in the ocean keeping them from the direct degradation from the sun which makes it  hard for actual plastic to build up. Although this is true for mid ocean around coasts and in rivers, there is plenty of proof of plastic land masses. These trash masses are mainly in 2nd world countries or countries that just don't have the disposal abilities like eastern countries do (pri.org).  These countries have trash just floating all around them and it doesn't seem to bother them, because they're so used to it. Which is not a good thing, and it kills hundreds of ocean life every day. Videos of turtles with straws in their noses and seagulls with soda pop plastic necklaces are starting to appear all around the internet and they are coming from countries like this. From these counties about 60 percent of plastics end up in the world's seas and only around 40 percent of the trash is collected properly (pri.org). With all of this info it is easy to refute that fact that there aren't many actual islands in the oceans, but thanks to water being the best solvent and the sun's rays degrading the plastic we don't have that. Other ways to refute the claim that the size isn't a problem is be showing the facts of ocean life. To start off of fish in the ocean are capable of eating around 24,000 tons of plastic each year. Not only does that get transferred to offspring because it doesn't decompose, but it very easily could cause severe internal damage which stops the capability of offspring altogether. This effects every fish in the ocean because if a small fish eats plastic then the big fish eats the small fish and then by just doing that eats plastic too. So plastic can travel up the food chain and keeps very easily harming as it goes up. Another animal that is being very hurt by the plastic are seabirds. Seabirds eat everything, from sea shells to rubber balls. But when they decide to eat plastic it gets caught in their stomach and makes the amount of food they can ingest smaller because the plastic just sits, making the birds eventually starve. Some birds like this on called the albatross are getting moved to the endangered list mainly due to plastic. Within the albatross bird species nearly all of them have plastic in them, around 97.5% of all have plastic in them. Moving from the birds we get to everyone's favorite sea animal the sea turtle. Sea turtles and plastic really don't go together and they like to think it's their favorite snack of jelly fish. Turtles are found all over the world full of ulcers or blockages in their guts due to plastic intake of small ropes or plastics wraps (biologicaldiversity.org). "Around 50-80% of all dead sea turtles found contain plastic (lexinexis.com)". Turtles, fish, and birds aren't the only sea life being damaged, around 20-40% of all sea life has some form of plastic in its body (biologicaldiversity.org). These facts show how the size of the problem and creates a picture of the damge its caused, but as you can see with all of those facts the plastic intake still isn't above 50% of marine life, which shows that it isn't as big as people have made seem. 

Claim:  Speed of Destruction

Trash comes in all forms, from paper cups to car wheels. While paper cups will deteriorate eventually a lot of what gets thrown into dumps all over the world just sits for years and year waiting to be burned into air pollution or be thrown into the ocean. So while the dumps leak into the ocean the ocean just carries it away and people forget about what has been done. People lose interest in this subject because it's in the middle of the ocean and doesn't affect them personally yet. Even though this may be true that at this moment it doesn't affect people, when will it get so bad that fish start ending up on the beaches by the hundreds and the water cycle gets thrown for loops because the ocean has been destroyed? Unfortunately it hasn't been predicted when that will happen, but why wait till it does.  While looking at a 11 year data plot of the amount of plastic concentration I just one portion of the ocean we can see some pretty scary sights. Starting in 2002 there was an average under 100,000 pieces per km squared. Over the next year and with the higher ability to drone and trawl the water we get to 2009 where the average has raised to almost 200,000 per km squared. This is staggering right? Well in 2012 the last year they did this study there were outliers that could reach up to 500,000 pieces of plastic per km squared. Just in 11 years we took our trash levels from >100,000 to <500,000 (resolver.edscohost.com). That's like investing 20 dollars in a stock and receiving 20,000 for it. Although these numbers are staggering they do go along with the size of the plastic. The plastic is in micro fibers unable to be seen by human eye.  Thanks to the research vessel Algolida and its Captain Charles Moore who took a 2 month long scientific look at the garbage patch, we are seeing new insight into the patch. While yes we can't see most of the plastic and trash, Captain Moore said that the patch had grown to the size of Texas and was still growing (nbcnews.com). Even though those numbers may make you think that the world is being destroyed quickly, with the size of the plastic and now with people becoming aware it's not. 

Refutation: speed of destruction

The ocean is being destroyed slowly and it has been for hundreds of years, but with the durability, low cost, and our increased use of plastic we have increased that destruction tenfold. Before plastic was put into everything the trash in the ocean would either decimate or end up back on land, but with plastic we have successfully started our own demise. Plastic doesn't decompose, it just gets turned into smaller and smaller pieces and will never fully be gone. It turns into something called a microfiber which are just microscopic pieces of plastic floating around all over the ocean (ocean.si.edu). These microfibers are a problem but it's mainly the bigger pieces of plastic that we see cause the most harm. Animals don't know the difference between a ball of plastic that looks like their normal food and their actual food, so they think they're eating and begin to starve if they already haven't gotten internal damage from the plastic (ocean.si.edu).  This is the albatross bird again who does this and helps show the extreme incline of plastic in the ocean, because 40 years ago the plastic in the bird was around 5% not 97.5% (biologicaldiversity.org). Our recent interest in plastic has possibly harmed us more than people think, it has made us waste full. This wastefulness not only hurts the albatross bird but all life. Thanks to recent studying we've found that the world makes about 300 million metric tons of trash annually and about 6 million of that gets tossed into the ocean. That isn't a large enough percentage but seeing how long plastic will survive in the ocean it is astronomical. A water bottle can take up to 450 years to decompose in the ocean (lexinexis). That number itself is pretty staggering but then you see that we waste about 50 billion water bottles annually and about 80% end up in landfills. It scary to think how many get swept up in the wind or fall out into the ocean and have been then for years (treehugger.com). Now that is a sight for sore eyes but to make it even worse all of those fishing lines that get tangled and people just toss over board can take up to 600 years to fully decompose (LexisNexis). Although these numbers are crazy scary, they have happened over a period of decades, and recently a lot of governments have been trying harder to enforce recycling and reduce waste. Making it the idea that this epidemic will not destroy the world anytime soon unrefuted. 

Why/how to help

With this problem being so big, it is hard to see how one person can help. Well on a personal level starting to recycle anything plastic will help a lot. Since when the plastic is recycled it is melted down and reused in something new for the world, and is not floating around in the ocean killing sea turtles. If you want to do more than that then it is pretty simple, reduce your waste and try to get everyone around you to do the same. Use one water battle for the week or even buy a reusable one and make this one last. Helping the helping the ocean is helping the world, because the plastic could eventually end up getting into our bodies. Thanks to the finding of plastic in species of zooplankton, which if eaten by certain fish will get carried up the food chain and could find its way into human markets. This along with Bisphenol A, which is a chemical used in plastics. This chemical helps plastic with their resistance to heat and stops them from shattering. This makes BPA very intriguing for commercial businesses, but can be pretty harmful to us. As the chemical BPA gets broken down off of the plastic into microfibers it releases the chemical into the ocean which could eventually end up in our water sources. This chemical affects our endocrine system which can damage fetuses and even the early stages of a child's life (LexisNexis). If this doesn't make you want to start recycling then idk what will, and there is so much more than that which you could be doing. Joining groups that support recycling or even going to landfills and taking a day or two to help get plastics out can help. If you fish and catch some trash don't be that person to throw it back take time to throw it away and help, because as was said before plastic fishing line can take up to 600 years to decompose (LexiNexis). 

Conclusion

The oceans have been overlooked for too long, I mean we don't even know around 80% of the ocean. Yet we are destroying it in ways we could never imagine. The plastic won't kill it in 5 years or 10 years and maybe not even 30, but what is getting damaged within that time. There are animals showing up on beaches with plastic wrapped around their necks, there are whales and seals that have lost flippers thanks to getting entangled, and even sea turtles with McDonalds straws driven deep into their noses. I mean this has to make you feel some kind of pain. Although we have not been effected by this epidemic doesn't mean hundreds of species haven't. This fact though; unfortunately, doesn't seem to bother people as long as they don't have to see or deal with it. The ocean is the most important thing to this world that it's what makes the world able to have living organisms. And yet we are destroying it without a care. There are even people like Carrie Madren who write articles like this one saying that the plastic is good, because it helps this one species thrive more than it ever has. Carrie talks about the pelagic strider, a species of water spider, who lays their eggs on floating debris. She talks about how since there are more plastic there are more of a chance for this spider to thrive and grow. She later goes on and talks about how plastic will change the ecology of the ocean possibly for the good (eds.b.edscohost.com). 
