Estimates state that 80% of the rubbish that forms these islands comes from land and 20% from boats, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme.The size of these ginormous marine tips is appalling.
GARBAGE ISLAND PATCH
The garbage patch in the North Atlantic was discovered in 2009 and is also linked to the North Atlantic Ocean Gyre. However, there are reports on plastic debris in the oceans that date back to the 1970s.įrom then, many scientists, environmentalists and others have studied it and especially carried out projects to try to discover how it affects the ecosystem and the food chain, such as the famous Project Kaisei or 5 Gyres. It was discovered in 1997 by the oceanographer Charles Moore who ignored the recommendations to avoid that area of the Pacific, not a good area to sail due to the lack of wind and currents, and decided to take a route that ended up with such a horrible finding. In order to get a grasp on how much rubbish is floating in our oceans, the entire surface area of the island of debris in the Pacific alone is 3 times as big as Spain! Unbelievable right? In total, it measures 16,000 km2. Garbage Patch is a colossal amount of non-biodegradable waste (especially plastic) found across 5 'islands' in the north and south Pacific, the north and south Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.Īt the Unesco headquarters in Paris in April 2013, these islands of rubbish became a federal state in a performance installation that aimed to provide visibility to this terrible problem.
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