> Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.
"only eight percent of the total tonnage"? We are talking about microplastics, that is still an incredible amount of plastic.
What's more interesting is I think this article shows how journalism about environmental destruction has some significant problems. It works as with most other human communication, we want narratives and images that evokes emotion (a kind of mythic/romantic understanding of things). That's why "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" works so well, we all mentally see an island of trash in our heads that needs "cleaning up" and along comes the hero, a young entreprenour. Other things that work well are pictures of dead birds on a beach with their stomach full of different colored plastics.
The problem is when our "romantic" idea of pollution hides/ignores the more destructive (and more complex) effects. Pictures of flooding being the poster images for climate change is an incredibly shallow view of the problem. And no part of the world is free of plastic, so basically the entire earth is a plastic garbage patch. Even worse, when an image that is built up doesn't fit what it started out as. You have basically made things worse by planting doubt about the problem in general by having an incomplete and shallow image of the problem..
Yeah, and the relative harm between microplastics and heavy chunks of garbage is also off the charts. A big chunk of stuff floating around in the open ocean can actually become a habitat for all kinds of creatures, whereas small bits of plastic are basically poison.
> Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.
"only eight percent of the total tonnage"? We are talking about microplastics, that is still an incredible amount of plastic.
What's more interesting is I think this article shows how journalism about environmental destruction has some significant problems. It works as with most other human communication, we want narratives and images that evokes emotion (a kind of mythic/romantic understanding of things). That's why "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" works so well, we all mentally see an island of trash in our heads that needs "cleaning up" and along comes the hero, a young entreprenour. Other things that work well are pictures of dead birds on a beach with their stomach full of different colored plastics.
The problem is when our "romantic" idea of pollution hides/ignores the more destructive (and more complex) effects. Pictures of flooding being the poster images for climate change is an incredibly shallow view of the problem. And no part of the world is free of plastic, so basically the entire earth is a plastic garbage patch. Even worse, when an image that is built up doesn't fit what it started out as. You have basically made things worse by planting doubt about the problem in general by having an incomplete and shallow image of the problem..