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 (NOAA). 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, which holds almost all the trash due to being swept up in these currents. These "plastic islands" as they're called are not very well known to the public, 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 the size of them have just recently been found out. In my research there were findings that most people that know about them think they're these huge islands that are destroying everything in their path. While this is not necessarily true it does get the public interested in an otherwise boring subject. Within this paper I will show the truth about the islands and how they are destroying the ocean. The ocean is important and needs to be taken care of but, the world doesn't seem to mind throwing trash where is doesn't directly hurt them. So now we must fix our mistake or face the consequences. 

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" are being very destructive with the parts of the ocean we do know about. When shown to the public they're portrayed to be massive land like islands with dead turtles and fish all around them. This isn't necessarily the most truthful portrayal; because, 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 islands of trash" (NOAA). When you go to google and 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"(Winn). 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. Though those pictures show horrific amounts of trash the plastic in the gyres have found to have 750,000 bits of micro plastic per square kilometer (Great Pacific). Which in most cases can't be seen by human eye though, and without a microscope would be hard to find.  

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 was able to find and discover this problem in the first place (Ghose). Moore was doing a long transpacific yacht race when he started to see different trash floating all around his ship. This confused him because he hadn't seen land for hours. Which really got him into the problem and he has become one of the lead people conducting research on the plastics (Ghose).   When researchers like Moore were trawling for trash they were confused as to why there averages were showing disappearances in plastic. Until the funding allowed to get drones and they realized that the trawling just wasn't doing enough and there was 100X the amount of trash previously thought (Ghose). Although there was proof of being 100x the amount thought 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. This may be the only instance of an island, but it shows that islands can form where people can walk on them, and now that this one has been formed who knows how big it will grow.

Proving that the islands that have been found and the patches discovered are destroying the ocean is easy. First let's take a look at the 50 foot long island with beaches and a "rocky coastline" that Capt. Charles Moore found (Ghose). This island was formed after a natural disaster, but it had manmade consequences that now plague the ocean. This one island is growing and becoming a larger problem every day thanks to currents and trash still being thrown in the ocean. The trash being thrown in mainly comes from 3nd world countries or countries that don't have the disposal abilities like eastern countries do. While North America is and eastern country, we are unfortunately right up there with those 3rd world countries (Winn). Which is not a good thing, because the trash 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 not only from those shores but our own. Though North America is a major contributor these 3rd world counties contribute around 60 percent of the plastics that end up in the World's seas, because only around 40 percent of the trash is collected properly (Winn). The trash and plastic is just destroying the ocean and everything living there. With each gyre steadily getting more and more trash, we need to hit upon the speed upon which it is growing.

Claim:  Speed of Growth/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 by the wind into the ocean. So while the dumps leak into the ocean to be carried away by the waves, people move onto more pressing matters and 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. Unfortunately it hasn't been predicted when the effects of the plastic will affect people personally. While looking at an 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 (Distribution of Surface). Those numbers themselves should show that we a polluting the ocean in disastrous rates. 

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 (Large Garbage Patch). That is just one patch of the ocean out of 5, who knows how big others are and how fast they are growing too. The size of the problem is astronomical and it's all because no one can see it. 

Refutation: size/speed

There are many claims on my topic as to why it is not a major problem for the world. One is how people say that the size is not large enough and there is not enough information to say that it is a problem worth putting money into. This is because the island size is very controversial, mainly because of the size of the plastics in the oceans. Now with "29,898 pieces of plastic per square kilometer" (McCauley), 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. Along with the sun they use the info that there is no way with today's trawling abilities to ever get a full concept of how much trash there is on the ocean's surface (Great Pacific). This is a strong claim and one of the most widely used facts, but can be proven useless. By the article written by Kara Lavender (ET all), showed plenty of information proving the devastating facts of the plastic. The 11 year study showed in this source, was of different research vessels trawling through the Great pacific Garbage patch, which showed incredible info no discovered before (Distribution of Surface). The researchers used   "the nonparametric Mann -- Whitney test to determine whether plastic concentrations measured in the second half of the data set were larger than those in the first half. Plastic concentrations measured from 2007 to 2011 were significantly higher than those from 2002 to 2006" (Distribution of Surface). This article took one of the mainly used arguments and made it child's play by just showing facts on how going through on part of the ocean can prove enough.

Another part to this refutation is the time it is going to take to make the plastic a major problem for the world. So we look at how the ocean is being destroyed slowly and it has been for hundreds of years, with the durability, low cost, and our increased use of plastic we have increased that destruction tenfold (Plastic Accumulation). 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 microfibers which are just microscopic pieces of plastic floating around all over the ocean (NOAA). 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 but begin to starve if they already haven't gotten internal damage from the plastic (Ghose).  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 (McCauley). 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 the plastic taking a long time unfortunately not true. 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. We don't know if the plastic will kill the ocean in 5 years or 10 years or maybe 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. The albatross bird who is well known for eating the plastics 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% (Winn). 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. Most of all the see life, 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. Yet 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 eat plastic too. Plastic can travel up the food chain and keeps 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.. 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 (Ghose). "Around 50-80% of all dead sea turtles found contain plastic (NOAA)". 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 (Great Pacific Garbage). These facts show how the size of the problem and creates a picture of the damage 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.  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 because it is what makes the world capable for living organisms to survive. And yet we are destroying it without a care. 

