Up to 80,000 tons of plastic waste are floating around in the North Pacific’s garbage whirlpool: it is the most well-known example of such garbage circles, which can be found in all major seas. However, much of the garbage in the North Pacific Garbage Patch appears to originate directly at sea and does not come from onshore sources. This is shown by a random analysis of the objects floating there, which Laurent Lebreton from The Ocean Cleanup and his team present in “Scientific Reports”.
During a measurement drive, Lebreton and Co had fished more than 570 kilograms of garbage out of the sea, which was distributed among almost 6,100 objects with a size of more than five centimeters. If possible, the working group also tried to determine the origin of the objects, provided that the inscriptions on them could still be deciphered. Around a third of the collected products could no longer be identified: the sun and salt water had destroyed them to such an extent that it was no longer possible to identify what they were or where the waste came from.
Another quarter, on the other hand, accounted for things such as fish boxes, spacers from oyster farming or eel traps that could be clearly assigned to fishing. Another three percent included floats, buoys and nets, which also came from fishing boats. These were also relatively heavy objects: they accounted for one-fifth of the weight collected.
Lebreton and Co were able to determine the origin of 232 objects: Two thirds of the garbage came from Japanese and Chinese sources, which fish intensively in the Pacific with large fleets. Almost a tenth was of South Korean origin, 6.5 percent pointed to the USA. Then came Taiwan and Canada. Modeling of oceanic currents and garbage transport subsequently suggested that waste in the North Pacific Garbage Patch is ten times more likely to be intentionally or accidentally spilled overboard than to be washed into the ocean from land-based sources and drift to the central Pacific.