Great Pacific Garbage Patch Pacific Trash Vortex North Pacific Gyre Pacific Garbage Island which is growing at a tremendous pace.
The garbage island has been talked about for more than half a century, but little action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being done to the environment, and entire species of animals are dying out. There is a high probability that a moment will come when nothing can be fixed ...

Pollution has been around since the invention of plastic. On the one hand, an irreplaceable thing that has made life incredibly easier for people. She made it easier until the plastic product was thrown away: plastic decomposes for more than a hundred years, and thanks to ocean currents it gets lost in huge islands. One such island, larger than the US state of Texas, floats between California, Hawaii and Alaska - millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly, with ~2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris dumped into the ocean every day from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean dwellers) suffer the most. Plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean kills more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these items, mistaking them for food.

Garbage Island has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the peculiarities of the North Pacific current system, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, at present, the mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and the area is more than a million square kilometers.
The “island” has a number of unofficial names: “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Eastern Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, etc. In Russian it is sometimes called also a garbage iceberg. In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island zone by six times.

This huge pile of floating garbage - in fact, the largest dumping ground on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of undercurrents that have eddies. The "soup" strip stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California across the North Pacific past Hawaii and narrowly misses distant Japan.

The American oceanologist Charles Moore, the discoverer of this "great Pacific garbage patch", also known as the "garbage cycle", believes that about 100 million tons of floating rubbish are circling in this region. Marcus Eriksen, director of science at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA), founded by Moore, said yesterday: “Initially, people assumed that this is an island of plastic garbage that you can almost walk on. This representation is inaccurate. The consistency of the stain is very similar to plastic soup. It is simply endless - in area, perhaps twice the size of the continental United States. The history of the discovery of the garbage patch by Moore is quite interesting:
14 years ago, young playboy and yachtsman Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to take a vacation in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to try out his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he swam into the trash.
“During the week, whenever I went on deck, some plastic junk floated by,” Moore wrote in his book Plastics are Forever? - I could not believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge water area? I had to swim through this garbage dump day after day, and there was no end in sight ... "
Swimming through tons of household waste turned Moore's life upside down. He sold all his shares and, with the proceeds, founded the environmental organization Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), which began to study the ecological state of the Pacific Ocean. His reports and warnings were often brushed aside and not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would have awaited the current AMRF report, but here nature itself helped environmentalists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic garbage onto the beaches of the islands of Kauai and Niihau.
They say that the son of the famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who went to Hawaii to shoot a new film, almost got a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic not only ruined the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, the name Moore has not left the pages of the American media. Last week, the founder of AMRF warned that if consumers do not limit the use of plastic that is not recycled, in the next 10 years the surface area of ​​"junk soup" will double and become a threat not only to Hawaii, but to all countries of the Pacific region.

But in general, they try to “not notice” the problem. After all, the landfill does not look like an ordinary island, in its consistency it resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that enters here sinks into the bottom layers, so we can’t even imagine exactly how much rubbish can accumulate there. Since the plastic is transparent and lies directly under the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from the satellite. Garbage can only be seen from the bow of the ship or diving into the water with scuba gear. But sea vessels are infrequent in this area, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains have laid routes away from this section of the Pacific Ocean, known for that there is never wind here. In addition, the North Pacific whirlpool is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is nobody's.

Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a leading authority on floating debris, has been monitoring the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for more than 15 years. He compares the garbage cycle with a living being: “It moves around the planet like a large animal off a leash.” When this animal approaches land—and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago this is the case—the results are quite dramatic. “When a garbage patch burps, the whole beach is covered in this plastic confetti,” says Ebbesmeyer.

According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, rife with garbage, creates a danger to human health as well. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, the raw material of the plastics industry, are lost every year and end up in the sea over time. They pollute the environment by acting like chemical sponges that attract man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. Then this dirt enters the stomachs along with food. “What goes into the ocean ends up in the stomachs of the ocean dwellers and then on your plate. Everything is very simple".

The main ocean pollutants are China and India. It is considered in the order of things to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water. Below is a photo that does not make sense to comment ...

A powerful North Pacific subtropical whirlpool is located here, formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio current, the northern trade wind currents and the intertrade countercurrents. The North Pacific whirlpool is a kind of desert in the oceans, where the most diverse rubbish has been carried for centuries from all over the world - algae, animal corpses, wood, shipwrecks. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of rotting mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, so the North Pacific whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, mammals, or birds. No one but zooplankton colonies. Therefore, fishing vessels do not come here either, even military and merchant ships try to bypass this place, where high altitude almost always reigns. Atmosphere pressure and fetid calm.

Since the beginning of the 50s of the last century, plastic bags, bottles and packaging have been added to rotting algae, which, unlike algae and other organic matter, are poorly biodegradable and do not go anywhere. Today the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 percent plastic, total weight which is six times the mass of natural plankton. Today, the area of ​​all garbage patches exceeds even the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of ​​this colossal landfill increases by an order of magnitude.

A similar island can be found in the Sargasso Sea - it is part of the famous Bermuda Triangle. There used to be legends about an island of shipwrecks and masts that drifts in those waters, now the wooden debris has been replaced by plastic bottles and bags, and nowadays we meet the most real garbage islands. According to Green Peace, more than 100 million tons are produced annually in the world. plastic products and 10% of them end up in the world's oceans. Garbage islands are growing every year faster and faster. And only you and I can stop their growth by abandoning plastic and switching to reusable bags and bags made from biodegradable materials. At the very least, try to at least buy juice and water in glass containers or in tetra packs.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Eng. Eastern Garbage Patch - Eastern Garbage Continent) is a huge accumulation of garbage in the North Pacific Ocean. The slick is made up of plastic and other man-made waste that has been swept up by the circulating current in the North Pacific Ocean. Despite its size and considerable density, the spot is not visible on satellite photographs because it is composed of small particles. In addition, most of the garbage floats in a slightly drowned state, hiding under water.

The existence of a garbage continent was theoretically predicted back in 1988. The forecast was based on data obtained in Alaska between 1985 and 1988. A study of the amount of drifting plastic in the surface waters of the North Pacific revealed that areas subject to certain ocean currents accumulate a lot of debris. Data from the Sea of ​​Japan led the researchers to speculate that similar accumulations could be found in other parts of the Pacific Ocean, where prevailing currents contribute to the formation of a relatively calm water surface. In particular, scientists pointed to the North Pacific system of currents. A few years later, the existence of a huge garbage patch was documented by Charles Moore, a California captain and sea explorer. Sailing through the North Pacific Current System after participating in the regatta, Moore discovered a huge accumulation of debris on the surface of the ocean. Captain Moore reported his find to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who later named the area the Eastern Garbage Continent. The fact of the existence of a garbage patch has attracted the attention of the public and scientific circles after the publication of several articles by Charles Moore. Since then, a large garbage patch has been considered largest example human pollution of the marine environment.

Like other areas of the world's oceans with a high content of garbage, the great Pacific garbage patch was formed by ocean currents, gradually concentrating garbage thrown into the ocean in one area. The garbage patch occupies a large, relatively stable area in the north Pacific Ocean, bounded by the North Pacific Current System (an area often referred to as "horse latitudes", or latitudes of the calm belt). The system's whirlpool collects debris from throughout the North Pacific, including the coastal waters of North America and Japan. Waste is picked up by surface currents and gradually moves to the center of the whirlpool, which does not release garbage beyond its limits.

The exact size of the large spot is unknown. It is impossible to estimate its size from the ship, and the stain is not visible from the aircraft. Most of the information about a garbage patch can only be gleaned from theoretical calculations. Estimates of its area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million km² or more (from 0.41% to 8.1% total area Pacific Ocean). There are probably more than a hundred million tons of garbage in this area. There are also suggestions that the garbage continent consists of two combined sites.

According to Charles Moore's calculations, 80% of the garbage in the slick comes from land sources, 20% is thrown from the decks of ships in the open sea. Moore argues that waste from the east coast of Asia moves to the center of the whirlpool in about five years, and from the west coast of North America in a year or less.

A garbage patch is not a continuous layer of debris floating on the surface itself. The decomposed plastic particles are mostly too small to be seen visually. For a rough estimate of the density of pollution, scientists examine water samples. In 2001, scientists (including Moore) found that in certain areas of the garbage patch, the concentration of plastic already reached a million particles per square mile. On the square meter there were 3.34 pieces of plastic with an average weight of 5.1 milligrams. In many places in the infected region, the total concentration of plastic exceeded the concentration of zooplankton by seven times. In samples taken at greater depths, the level of plastic waste was significantly lower (mainly fishing line). Thus, previous observations were confirmed, according to which most of the plastic debris is collected in the upper water layers.

Some plastic particles resemble zooplankton and may be mistaken for food by jellyfish or fish. A large number of hard-to-decompose plastic (bottle caps and rings, disposable lighters) ends up in the stomachs of sea birds and animals, in particular, sea turtles and black-footed albatrosses.

Thus, humanity has once again created a problem for itself. Much of the plastic decomposes very slowly. For example, it takes about two hundred years for the biological decomposition of polyethylene, while polyvinyl chloride releases unsafe products during decomposition. Activities are planned to clean up the surface of the ocean using fleets of specially equipped ships, but this is difficult to implement in practice, and, in addition, the collected garbage still needs to be processed. If we can't solve the problem, we shouldn't at least exacerbate it. The first thing to do is to reduce the flow of garbage into the ocean and increase the production of packaging from biodegradable plastics.

Regarding garbage patches in the ocean, people, relying on shocking photographs of "garbage continents", may think that entire islands consisting of garbage move across the sea.

In fact, these patches are large areas of the water surface with a high concentration of plastic in the upper layer of the ocean. On average, there are about three pieces of plastic weighing several milligrams per square meter.

Increasing consumption of the population, the growth of the world economy accelerate the global ocean. Floating in the ocean is no surprise to anyone.

Garbage patches are formed by ocean currents and whirlpools. In each of the oceans - the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic - there are the most polluted territories - garbage areas.

Garbage "catch" of the marine expedition

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The largest "plastic soup" called the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is located in the North Pacific Ocean.

In the upper layers of this spot, the highest concentration of plastic debris compared to other spots. These are small pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. As a result of the photodegradation process, large pieces of plastic break down into smaller pieces while maintaining the polymer structure.

According to the researchers, plastic waste in the area covers an area of ​​about 5 million square miles, with a total waste weight of more than 11 million tons. And this spot, as a result of constant recharge from the continents, is only increasing.

Garbage patches in other oceans

In 2010, a garbage patch was discovered in the Indian Ocean. The stain is debris particles in the upper layer of water. Located in the central part of the Indian Ocean. The process of degradation of pieces of plastic is the same as in other oceans - decay into smaller particles while maintaining the polymer structure.

The area of ​​the garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean is estimated at hundreds of kilometers. The density of garbage particles is more than 200 thousand pieces per square kilometer.

The danger of plastic debris to marine life

Fish and other creatures living in the water may be injured or even die as a result of interaction with floating debris. Fish may mistakenly eat plastic pieces, mistaking them for food. The plastic remains inside their bodies and ends up on the table of the person who bought the fish from the store. So a person receives retribution for his consumer attitude to nature. How plastic will affect human health is another serious problem.

It is necessary to take care of the cleanliness of ocean waters and try to look for ways to eliminate negative impact human activities on ocean ecology.

Ways to solve the problem of garbage in the oceans

One of the options for cleansing the ocean of plastic is the use of special technical means, which would collect plastic offline. So, Boyan Slet from the University of Technology (Netherlands) presented a project to create platforms that would collect ocean debris.

But the effectiveness of this idea is questionable due to the area of ​​the world's oceans, covering 70% of the Earth's surface. How many such platforms need to be built that would fish objects out of the water?

The most effective and at the same time time-consuming way to solve the problem is to take measures against the uncontrolled spread of plastic waste while still on earth, to look for ways to replace plastics in production with more environmentally friendly materials.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Eng. Eastern Garbage Patch - Eastern Garbage Continent, or Pacific Trash Vortex - Pacific "garbage swirl") - a giant accumulation of anthropogenic debris in the North Pacific Ocean, where deposits of plastic and other waste brought by the waters of the North Pacific system are concentrated currents. Approximate estimates of the area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million square meters. km and more, (from 0.41% to 8.1% of the total area of ​​the Pacific Ocean). There are probably more than a hundred million tons of garbage in this area.

There are also suggestions that the garbage continent consists of two combined sites. According to scientists, about 80% of garbage comes from land-based sources (the east coast of Asia and the west coast of North America), 20% is thrown from the decks of ships in the open sea.

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The concentration of small plastic particles in the upper layers of the garbage continent is one of the highest in the oceans. Unlike biodegradable waste, plastic only breaks down into small particles under the action of light, while maintaining the polymer structure.

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Smaller and smaller particles are concentrated in the surface layer of the ocean, and as a result, marine organisms that live here begin to eat them, confusing them with plankton. Large amounts of durable plastic end up in the stomachs of seabirds and animals such as sea turtles and black-footed albatrosses.

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Remains of a dark-backed (Laysan) albatross chick fed plastic by its parents; the chick could not remove it from the body, which led to death either from hunger or from suffocation

On the right is a turtle that, as a child, fell into a plastic ring and grew up in it.

In addition to causing direct harm to animals, floating wastes can absorb organic pollutants from the water, including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloromethylmethane) and PAHs (polyaromatic hydrocarbons). Some of these substances are not only toxic - their structure is similar to the hormone estradiol, which leads to hormonal failure in a poisoned animal. Ultimately, toxic substances can also enter the body of a person who has eaten poisoned fish.

In addition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there are four giant garbage patches in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, each of which, together with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, corresponds to one of the five major ocean current systems.

Maldives! Heaven on earth, isn't it? Remember how everyone cheered together! Who would have thought that the photo below is also the Maldives.

I will tell you about the famous garbage island in the Pacific Ocean below, but it is hard to imagine that a similar island, only in the direct sense of the word, is located in the very center of a paradise called the Maldives. The tourism industry here is one of the most developed in the world, so it is not surprising that a lot of garbage is generated. And how do you think the government of the Maldives has solved this problem? Garbage is simply taken out to a separate island - Thilafushi

And maybe no one would have known about this if it weren’t for the news that the export of garbage to this island was suspended, since a huge amount of it accumulated there, and ocean pollution began. Waste gets into the water, and replenishes the famous dump of the Pacific garbage island

More interestingly, this artificial island called Thilafushi is located just 7 kilometers from the capital of the Maldives. But this is not a resort at all, there is no snow-white sand and clear water - instead, you can see only mountains of garbage

The main suppliers of waste stored here are luxury hotels. Locals scavenge through piles of rubbish trying to find something edible or salable. And there is often a cloud of dirty smog over the island. Now the government is trying to take measures to remove and dispose of excess garbage. What will it be? Perhaps they will find some new suitable island

In general, the rules require the delivery of garbage in sorted form for further processing, but hotels simply unload it into a common pile, and unscrupulous boaters, who are too lazy to wait several hours in line for garbage disposal, simply throw it into the water. The garbage that still ends up on the island is burned right in the open air, but it still doesn’t work out to burn and recycle everything.

For many years, the promises of the authorities to build a waste processing plant here have remained promises, and now the problem of pollution environment worth more than ever

And now about the now famous, Pacific garbage island.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch Pacific Trash Vortex North Pacific Gyre Pacific Garbage Island which is growing at a tremendous pace. The garbage island has been talked about for more than half a century, but little action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being done to the environment, and entire species of animals are dying out. There is a high probability that the moment will come when nothing can be fixed. So, read more about the problem of ocean pollution below

Pollution has been around since the invention of plastic. On the one hand, an irreplaceable thing that has made life incredibly easier for people. She made it easier until the plastic product was thrown away: plastic decomposes for more than a hundred years, and thanks to ocean currents it gets lost in huge islands. One such island, larger than the US state of Texas, floats between California, Hawaii, and Alaska—millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly, with ~2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris dumped into the ocean every day from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean dwellers) suffer the most. Plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean kills more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these items, mistaking them for food.

"Garbage Island"has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the peculiarities of the North Pacific current system, the center of which, where all the garbage enters, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, at present, the mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and the area - more than a million square kilometers. "Island" has a number of unofficial names: "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", "Eastern Garbage Patch", "Pacific Trash Vortex", etc. In Russian, it is sometimes also called “garbage iceberg.” In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island zone by six times.

This huge pile of floating rubbish - in fact, the largest landfill on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of undercurrents that have eddies. The "soup" strip stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California across the North Pacific past Hawaii and narrowly misses distant Japan.

The American oceanologist Charles Moore, the discoverer of this "great Pacific garbage patch", also known as the "garbage cycle", believes that about 100 million tons of floating rubbish are circling in this region. Marcus Eriksen, director of science at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA), founded by Moore, said yesterday: "Initially, people assumed that this is an island of plastic debris that you can almost walk on. This representation is inaccurate. The consistency of the stain is very similar to plastic soup. It's just endless - perhaps twice the size of the continental United States." The story of Moore's discovery of the garbage patch is quite interesting: 14 years ago, a young playboy and yachtsman, Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to relax in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to try out his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he swam into the trash.

“During the week, whenever I went on deck, some plastic junk floated by,” Moore wrote in his book Plastics are Forever? - I could not believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge water area? I had to swim through this garbage dump day after day, and there was no end in sight ... "

Swimming through tons of household waste turned Moore's life upside down. He sold all his shares and, with the proceeds, founded the environmental organization Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), which began to study the ecological state of the Pacific Ocean. His reports and warnings were often brushed aside and not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would have awaited the current AMRF report, but here nature itself helped environmentalists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic garbage onto the beaches of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. They say that the son of the famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who went to Hawaii to shoot a new film, almost got a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic not only ruined the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, the name Moore has not left the pages of the American media. Last week, the founder of AMRF warned that if consumers do not limit the use of plastic that is not recycled, in the next 10 years the surface area of ​​"junk soup" will double and become a threat not only to Hawaii, but to all countries of the Pacific region.

But in general, they try to “not notice” the problem. After all, the landfill does not look like an ordinary island, in its consistency it resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in water at a depth of one to a hundred meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that enters here sinks into the bottom layers, so we can’t even imagine exactly how much rubbish can accumulate there. Since the plastic is transparent and lies directly under the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from the satellite. Garbage can only be seen from the bow of the ship or diving into the water with scuba gear. But ships don't come to this area often, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains have laid routes away from this part of the Pacific Ocean, known for never having a wind. In addition, the North Pacific whirlpool is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is nobody's.

Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a leading authority on floating debris, has been monitoring the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for more than 15 years. He compares the garbage cycle with a living being: "It moves around the planet like a large animal off a leash." When this animal approaches land - and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago this is the case - the results are quite dramatic. "When a garbage patch burps, the whole beach is covered in this plastic confetti," says Ebbesmeyer.

According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, rife with garbage, creates a danger to human health as well. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic granules - the raw material of the plastics industry - are lost every year and eventually end up in the sea. They pollute the environment by acting like chemical sponges that attract man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. Then this dirt enters the stomachs along with food. "What goes into the ocean ends up in the stomachs of the ocean dwellers, and then on your plate. It's very simple"

The main ocean pollutants are China and India. It is considered in the order of things to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water. Below is a photo that does not make sense to comment ..

A powerful North Pacific subtropical whirlpool is located here, formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio current, the northern trade wind currents and the intertrade countercurrents. The North Pacific whirlpool is a kind of desert in the oceans, where the most diverse rubbish has been carried for centuries from all over the world - algae, animal corpses, wood, shipwrecks. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of decaying mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, so the North Pacific Whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, mammals, or birds. No one but zooplankton colonies. Therefore, fishing vessels do not come here either, even military and merchant ships try to bypass this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.

Since the beginning of the 50s of the last century, plastic bags, bottles and packaging have been added to rotting algae, which, unlike algae and other organic matter, are poorly biodegradable and do not go anywhere. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 percent plastic, with a total mass six times that of natural plankton. Today, the area of ​​all garbage patches exceeds even the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of ​​this colossal landfill increases by an order of magnitude.

A similar island can be found in the Sargasso Sea - it is part of the famous Bermuda Triangle. There used to be legends about an island of shipwrecks and masts that drifts in those waters, now the wooden debris has been replaced by plastic bottles and bags, and now we meet real garbage islands. According to Green Peace, more than 100 million tons of plastic products are produced annually in the world and 10% of them end up in the world's oceans. Garbage islands are growing every year faster and faster. And only you and I can stop their growth by abandoning plastic and switching to reusable bags and bags made from biodegradable materials. At the very least, try to at least buy juice and water in glass containers or in tetra packs. A bright future for the world's oceans:

But there are also garbage cities on the planet!

Manshit Nasser is a garbage community in Egypt, where garbage from all major cities flows. People actually live here and dig their own tunnels in search of something that could be resold. They actually resell about 80% of all garbage in the end.

Getting here is easy. In just half an hour you can walk from the Citadel of Saladin, one of the most visited tourist sites in Cairo.

Already from the walls of the Citadel, you can see a quarter with houses of an unusual red-violet color on the boundless panorama of a ten-million metropolis.

According to statistics, Cairo generates 6.5 thousand tons of garbage per day, of which 3-3.5 thousand tons are collected by zaballins, as representatives of a special social group of about 40 thousand people living in the Medina Zebela area are called. For many years they have been engaged in the only thing that has been passed down from generation to generation - the collection, sorting and processing of garbage.

The area appeared in 1969, when the city administration of Cairo decided to concentrate all garbage collectors in one place.

Garbage is brought here by dump trucks, then bags of garbage are transported by smaller cars to yards and houses, where already families - from children to the elderly - are all sorting it.

Heaps of garbage hanging from balconies and roofs, bags of waste blocking the already narrow streets - this is the first thingflashes in the eyes when you get into the territory of this gloomy quarter.

Garbage littered all the first floors of buildings. You can get to the second (residential) floor only through a narrow passage. The smell is appropriate, insects and clouds of flies too.

Metal, paper and cardboard, rags and plastic - everything is put in separate bags. Something is then simply burned, which gives off a heavy smell of burnt plastic over the block, something is taken away to processing plants. Organic waste goes to animal feed.

Meanwhile the streets are coming usual life. Children play and make noise, men sit decorously and smoke a hookah, they immediately sell fruits and baked cakes, on the first floors of houses there are ordinary food stalls and eateries.

In addition to people, the streets are full of animals - these are goats and chickens, dogs, cats, and also pigs, which also contribute to the destruction of garbage.

And no one pays any attention to the huge bales that are already blocking the passage in places, hanging from all the balconies, lying on the roofs of houses and in courtyards.

If you add to this myriads of buzzing flies, dead rats and cats underfoot, and most importantly the smell that accompanies all this, there will be a very real picture of the apocalypse.

The main population of the quarter are Copts, supporters of one of the branches of the Christian church. The Copts became scavengers even during the time of Caliph Al-Hakim. It was a ruler from the Fatimid dynasty who conquered Egypt. He put an end to the relatively peaceful life of all Christians and Muslims living in the country. The Copts, in particular, lost everything. They were supposed to do the dirtiest and hardest work. So the garbage became their life.

Soaring in the openings between the houses, the chapels are made of plywood and cardboard. They are pasted over with pictures depicting the Creator, decorated with crosses and electric bulbs.

The meaning of such structures is quite understandable - the holy faces of Jesus should not touch the dirt. And how to do it in a city that seems to consist only of it.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Preventing Pollution of the Planet

• Popular science

Probably, few people have heard of this phenomenon, but this is not surprising. The human race tends to easily forget about their mistakes and sweep the trash under the carpet. So, about garbage - did you know that there is a Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it is also the Eastern Garbage Continent, it is also the Pacific Garbage Patch? This is a collection of debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Garbage created, of course, by people. In ancient times, the ocean seemed endless, it was impossible to overcome it in a few days, so the distant shores and waters were always inhabited by various monsters. Those times are gone, there are only white spots left, but humanity still thinks that their planet is so huge that it will endure any treatment.

Many scientists are sounding the alarm, calling for a reduction in CO 2 emissions, which, in their opinion, lead to the greenhouse effect and global warming, which threatens to flood many coastal regions with water from the melted poles. Others report the problem of launching satellites into orbit due to the huge amount of debris accumulated there and the spent satellites of the old generation. But few pay attention to another danger - the world's oceans can hardly cope with the millions of tons of plastic garbage that has been accumulating there for the past fifty years.

This problem was first predicted back in 1988 by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States. And the existence of a garbage patch was made public by Charles Moore, a California Navy captain and oceanographer, whose articles described this phenomenon. Sailing through the North Pacific Current System after participating in the regatta, Moore discovered a huge accumulation of debris on the surface of the ocean. He reported his find to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who later named the area the "Eastern Garbage Continent".

A spot is formed by established currents that swirl around a specific area. Its exact size is unknown. Approximate estimates of the area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million km² or more (from 0.41% to 8.1% of the total area of ​​the Pacific Ocean). There are probably more than a hundred million tons of garbage in this area. It is known that plastic decomposes very poorly, in the ocean it simply floats close to the surface, gradually breaking down physically and breaking up into small fragments, but not degrading chemically.

Ocean animals eat pieces of plastic, confusing it with plankton, and thus it enters the food chain - if the animals do not die of suffocation or starvation after eating plastic. In addition to causing direct harm to animals, floating wastes can absorb organic pollutants from the water, including PCBs, DDTs and PAHs. Some of these substances are not only toxic - their structure is similar to the hormone estradiol, which leads to hormonal failure in a poisoned animal. The consequences of these phenomena, how they will affect the ecosystem in general and humans in particular, is not even fully understood yet.

Unfortunately, there is neither international recognition of the problem (on the same level as, for example, an agreement to limit CO 2 emissions into the atmosphere), nor proven technologies for cleaning up the ocean from pollution. In 2008, Richard Owen, a scuba instructor, formed the Environmental Cleanup Coalition (ECC) to tackle pollution in the Pacific North. The ECC organization is calling for the formation of a fleet of ships to clear the water area and the opening of the Gyre Island laboratory for the processing of garbage.

In 2009, the 5 Gyres Institute was formed by oceanographer Dr. Markus Eriksen and his wife Anna Cummins. The Institute is studying the problems of pollution of the World Ocean, already discovered garbage patches, and is also looking for new ones.

In 2014, a team of scientists with the support of National Geographic plied the ocean for nine months, collecting information about ocean pollution and compiling a "plastic" map of the ocean.

In 2014, 19-year-old Bojan Slat, a student at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, introduced an ocean cleanup system with autonomous platforms that float freely in the ocean and catch debris using water barriers. Three years earlier, Slat had been diving off the coast of Greece and was very excited by the fact that a more packages than jellyfish. He decided to devote his life to solving the problem of ocean cleanup, and together with a team of like-minded people, he conducted a comprehensive study and raised more than $ 2 million through crowdfunding to continue the work.

Their method uses natural ocean currents and winds to passively carry debris to a collection platform. Solid floating barriers are then used to trap and concentrate debris from the ocean, eliminating the risk of entanglement for fish and other living creatures that occurs when other methods such as nets collect debris. Although the method is not cheap (it requires about 32 million euros per year to implement), it is many times cheaper than other proposed cleaning methods.

The Ocean Cleanup is constantly accepting donations and volunteers. In November, the organization assembled the second