There seems to be no end to the absurdities spread by the “Green” movement in concert with the media. Your patience with their scams may have let you ignore it. Nevertheless, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been well publicized as another of the great environmental tragedies of our time. They, including CNN, have said it is twice the size of Texas, and that the central Pacific Ocean is completely covered by garbage, mostly plastics. Few folks could ever see it in person, so it was easy to photoshop entire fake pictures on ther Internet. And they claim images of ocean debris such as that which existed following the tsunami off the coast of Fukushima, Japan, in 2011are actually of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
A photo shopped picture of what is said to be floating plastic garbage.
Satellite photos of the area of the Pacific said to be full of garbage. It is not actually there.
We are often confronted by hostile audiences that are completely taken in by this fraud because of the realistic but fake pictures. Some insist it is likely floating just beneath the surface so we can’t see it from a plane or satellite. But nearly all plastic either floats or sinks. Pieces of plastic do not each have buoyancy-compensation devices attached to them.
A tremendous effort continues to make plastic a negative term. Similar to fossil fuels being called “dirty”, plastics are often referred to as “toxic”. Polystyrene and polypropylene are made from oil and polyethylene is made from natural gas. Polyvinylchloride (PVC) is made from natural gas and sodium chloride (table salt). So the war on plastic is actually a proxy for the war on fossil fuels.
The anti-plastic movement has been very successful at portraying plastic as extremely negative from an environmental perspective. Damage to fish and birds is constantly shown as being at the hands of plastics, which is actually a rare occurrence. It is true that plastic can cause harm in the oceans, for example discarded fishnets continuing to catch fish and entangle other marine species. There is now a continuing international campaign to convince fisherman to bring their damaged nets back to the dock for recycling or disposal.
The biggest misconception about plastics is that they leach toxic chemicals into the oceans and into marine life. There is a good reason why we keep our foods in plastic containers and wraps. It protects from contamination and spoilage as it is sterile and contains absolutely nothing toxic. Sadly, on a web site hosted by the Smithsonian Institute, the aforementioned lies are repeated, for which they should be ashamed. Greenpeace has been at the center of this disinformation campaign, which it has used for fund raising among the many lovers of ocean wildlife, who cannot see the truth for themselves.
All birds swallow hard objects like pebbles to aid in the digestion of food in the gizzard. But there are no pebbles in the ocean. So albatrosses and other seabirds purposefully feed their chicks small hard particles, such as floating pumice, wood, and hard nuts, and nowadays bits of hard plastic, to help in their digestion. most of this is regurgited before they first take flight. But all birds must continue to ingest hard objects of the correct size throughout their lives.
When the ingestion of plastic in seabirds was discovered in the 1960s, scientists at first thought it might cause harm. This led to a great deal of research that proved sharp plastic fragments do not harm the birds, do not give them a false sense of being full and do not prevent them from flying. Beyond this they have learned that plastic is a beneficial alternative to the naturally occurring hard indigestible objects that seabirds have been using for millions of years.
Greenpeace has totally ignored all this research and doubled down on their description of a growing crisis. You can find this statement on their web site.
“Our oceans are slowly turning into a plastic soup and the effects on ocean life are chilling. Big pieces of plastic are choking and entangling turtles and seabirds, and tiny pieces are clogging the stomachs of creatures who mistake it for food, from tiny zooplankton to whales. Plastic is now entering every level of the ocean chain and even ending up in the seafood on our plates.”
You should not believe a single word they say.