Garbage patches in the ocean pose a huge environmental threat.
For more than a week now, images of Bellandur, the burning lake in Bangalore, have played out on our television sets. The frothy and dirt-coated lake reportedly caught fire owing to the accumulation of methane gas. Just today, the Ministry of Water Resources, Environment and Forests, Law and Urban Development proposed a law penalising pollution of the Ganga that addressed the pressing issue of waste management. But inefficient waste management does not merely impact smaller water bodies.
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ContributeIndia has a coastline of about 8,000 km along the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. Several reports talk about the increasing amount of garbage, especially plastic, in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Indian Ocean, in fact, has one of the five oceanic landfills of the world – called garbage patches.
Yet there’s very little discussion in the mainstream media on this problem.
So, what exactly are oceanic landfills?
First, some gyaan about garbage. Our oceans contain ginormous amounts of litter in swirling trash zones, called garbage patches. These garbage vortexes are found in the ocean’s gyres – a large system of circular currents – that haul the garbage we produce to the calmer centers of the gyres.
Garbage patches are present in five revolving water systems in major oceans of the world: in the North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
But how did my trash end up in the middle of the ocean?
Well, you decide to play paper toss with your garbage, it ends up in the drains and travels through sewer pipes into water bodies that end up in the ocean. It then, gets carried by the ocean currents to these garbage patches. So, while all your garbage is basking in the middle of the ocean, it breaks into smaller and smaller fragments without biodegrading. Simply put, all the articles lost to or disposed of into the oceans end up in oceanic landfills.
But why all this gyaan about plastic and kachra?
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer, first brought to the public’s attention the existence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest in the world. Several reports about the Eastern Garbage Patch suggest that it is the size of Texas or Turkey or Afghanistan, but we’ll never be able to measure its size. In fact, the garbage has been broken down to such tiny fragments that the patch is not visible to the naked eye.
The tinier and more invisible the plastic fragments, the easier it would be for them to be ingested by marine life, posing a greater danger to the ecosystem because the tiny fragments of plastic attract persistent organic pollutants.
Why should we care about what’s going on in the ocean, thousands of miles away?
Selfish much? Plastic, along with other synthetic substances in the ocean, ingested by aquatic creatures enter our bodies when we consume ocean-sourced food. Next time you eat that fish off your plate, remind yourself of all the plastic you have disposed of because you just might have consumed it. Moore in an interview talks about how the composition of the ocean has been completely altered. The ratio of plastic to plankton was six parts to one when he first discovered the garbage patch in 1999. When he went back in 2009, the proportion had changed to 49 parts to one! Almost every food we consume is packaged in plastic. Documentaries and studies have suggested that every single piece of plastic that has ever been created since the nineteenth century is still somewhere on our planet.
Can we conduct a Swachcha Ocean Abhiyaan?
There’s no way to make our oceans better, it’s up to her to spit out the rubbish. However, we can definitely try and not make the situation worse. Like most other environmental problems, we should not delay addressing this one. Our perception and attitude towards the environment needs to change.
But how?
Almost 50 per cent of the objects that I’m using as I write this are made of plastic. We obviously can’t stop using things and producing garbage, but we can devise ways to dispose it in a responsible way. The problem of aquatic pollution is actually a terrestrial problem of careless waste management.
With great quantities of garbage, comes great responsibility.
Don’t like the ring of that? Anyway, we need to enlighten ourselves about all the damage we do even if we feel we can’t fix it. Search operations over the oceans like the one for the missing Flight 370 bring to notice these far away realities.
So what do we do with all this garbage?
Garbage can be converted to useable heat, electricity and fuel. Sweden recycles 99 per cent of all its household waste in some way or the other. It has 32 incineration plants that keep 810,000 households warm and produce electricity for 250,000 private houses. In fact, they import waste from other countries to run the waste-to-energy plants.
Shouldn’t first world countries like America that produce so much waste address the problem first?
Americans might have the largest carbon emissions per capita, but a news report suggests that poor and developing countries are the biggest contributors to ocean waste. India is also in the top 20 offenders with China and Indonesia on the top. Countries undergoing rapid economic development lack waste management infrastructure, which is putting enormous pressure on the global ecosystem. According to a study, India’s waste output is expected to more than double between 2010 and 2025.
Is our government aware of such energy recovery?
The Planning Commission of India published a report on May 12, 2014, about generating energy from waste, stating difficulties in and suggesting technologies for municipal solid waste management. The proposed waste management models need to be implemented and followed up, and the waste management infrastructure problem needs to be seriously addressed by our government.
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