So I ran across this image yesterday about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I have read about this a few other times but this is the first time that I paid attention to the size of the garbage patch. According to the details in the image, the garbage patch is about 1.76 million square kilometers in size.
To give a comparison, the image states that that is about the size of three Spain’s and Portugal’s combined. To give me a better comparison, I looked up the size of states in square kilometers and found that the garbage patch is a little bigger in size than Arizona + New Mexico + California + Texas. Yes all 4 freakin’ states! Another size match would be Alaska + Arizona.
To make matters worse, the garbage is about 10 meters thick throughout the whole patch. This means the garbage is taking up a volume of 17,600 cubic kilometers or 17.6 trillion cubic meters. To put this into perspective, if you would take out all of the water in the Great Lakes in North America and replace it with this garbage, you could fill up Lake Superior, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and just under half of Lake Michigan-Huron. That is about 77% of the total volume of the Great Lakes!
And this stuff is just floating out there, potentially forever for plastic does not decompose.
I tried to think of some nice way to end this post, but unfortunately, there just isn’t one.