It’s difficult to blame the denizens of the world if they incur mental whiplash on the issue of climate change. The world has long been in uproar over the unsustainable nature of a system overburdened with contradictory demands in the name of ever-expanding productivity and the externalization of costs. Media rhetoric has an astonishing way of coming full-circle through discovery, investigation, popular spin and resolution precisely in sequence with the ebb and flow of sensational news cycles. Humans are, above all else, adaptive to their environment. We are the only species to shape the planet so deliberately and dramatically. Of course, the ultimate irony of this adaptability is our constant resurveying of the long-arbitrary line in the sand regarding the environment.

With a plethora of media increasingly available around the world, it has become comfortable and normal to supplement personal experience with the vicarious pleasure of staring at glowing rectangles. There are few locations globally that remain immune to rapidly-changing environment. The scale of this shift is hidden both willfully and subconsciously by the day-to-day rigmarole of life. One of the most potent symbols of human impact on Earth has been slowly uncovered over this decade: the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Invisible to satellites for years, this agglomeration has caught the attention of media all over the world. “Patch” in the singular is a misnomer, since the Pacific debris field is partitioned into two separate entities. “East”—closer to Japan and bounded by Midway Island, and “West”—roughly one thousand miles from California and directly northeast of Hawaii. This pattern is dictated by the North Pacific Gyre, one of five major current “basins” worldwide, falling at the immobile center latitudes of the great ocean currents that are vital to Earth’s thermodynamic distribution. Altogether, the North Pacific Gyre was estimated in 2008 to contain 100 million tons of trash, spread over a total area roughly the same size as the contiguous United States.

The composition of the patches varies somewhat based on the nature of the trash that is dumped there, but they maintain a baseline and increasingly-homogeneous composition. Primarily composed of ever-degrading plastics floating between thirty feet below and surface level, the Patch has been described as “garbage soup” by those who have witnessed it firsthand. Researchers have brought back samples of its composition, chronicled by year, and in fifteen years of sampling, the rate of sea degradation has accelerated at an astonishing rate. Samples of the Patch taken in 2008 were found to have a six-to-one ratio of plastic particulates to plankton. The world’s oceans have long been used as ultimate dumping zones with infinite volume and capacity, and the fundamental, widespread altering of open ocean so far from civilization has been eye-opening to world governments. 

The “trash vortex” in the Pacific—and similar agglomerations around the world—are not something which can be addressed overnight. Modern notions of instant gratification may come into conflict with progress on the issue.  “Cleanup” is regarded to be virtually impossible. The sheer volume of garbage, coupled with its extreme remoteness and legal ambiguity, makes cleanup unpalatable to all governments concerned. Given public indifference to other environmental issues, it seems safe to say that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will keep growing proportionate to excessive, open-loop consumption in the Northern Hemisphere.

There is no effective way to degrade or reuse this disparate plastic at this point in time. To wax poetic, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch represents the sum of every externalized cost that has been deferred to the world’s waterways. Activists assert that the very existence of the Patch challenges the old axiom that human activities are inconsequential to human environs. So far, the issue of waste in international waters has been like a game of hot potato. International commerce has not been particularly encumbered, and it’s very easy to ignore the fact that the composition of the oceans has been altered by particulates with no effective “yin” to their “yang.”

However, where there are massive problems, there are ambitious solutions. One of the most promising proposed solutions to the issue of non-biodegradable waste is the engineering of microbial life which would be instrumental in biodegradation. Summer 2009 saw new milestones in the effort to effectively compost polyethylene bags. In effect, bacterial cultures from landfills are isolated and contained in an isolated chamber.

In all, the composting process took as little as three months per bag, and required very little upkeep and no expensive or outlandish equipment. One widely-circulated experiment was carried out by a sixteen year old kid in Canada. The holy grail of these efforts is the creation of an organism that could survive the pressures of the open environment—without incurring unforeseen collateral damage in its “design.”

It would not be unprecedented for humans to rely on microbial life to do its dirty work. A huge range of processes utilize the unique characteristics of a wide range of bacteria. Alcohol fermentation, baking yeast, and pharmaceutical production are common examples. The introduction of human-engineered cultures into the wider environment may pose an enormous legal quandary, however. It is virtually impossible to determine the effect any organism will have within widely-varying circumstances, and liability concerns would likely be Line-Item One for any heretofore unproposed cleanup effort.

While history has shown that it is never wise to base predictions on the inception of unforeseen technologies, individual bacterium exist which are capable of performing the biodegradation process on synthetic plastics. These qualities are not widely prevalent or competitive in bacterial cultures worldwide, however, which underpins environmentalists’ long-standing concerns about the great length of the natural process. In all, it seems clear that no costly action will be taken until it has been judged to offset the prospect of further wildly uncontrolled collateral cost. As of yet, no longitudinal study has determined what the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has directly impacted.

The dietary uptake of “plastic soup” by local fish and bird populations has been documented, and has proven fatal to many local species. The Patch in the North Pacific Gyre is not solely responsible for the introduction of synthetic chemicals into the wider food supply. In strictly economic terms, the areas affected were not the most productive for human activity, and so critics have asserted that there is a certain tolerance built into the system. Regardless of the politics involved, any future efforts by humans to curb this problem will be widely followed and unprecedented.

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