We are only just beginning to understand the extent of damage caused by overproduction of plastics. In the quest to produce a material that transports and stores effectively, we have accidentally created a range of products made from a substance that is totally incompatible with the environment. Having consumers in the palm of their hands and taking over the land, plastics are now taking over the planet's greatest oceans. Look around you. Start counting things made of plastic and don't forget your buttons, the stretch in your underwear, the little caps on the end of your shoelaces. The stuff is everywhere, forming the most basic means of modern consumer culture. As soon as we are born we meet encounter our first plastic: wristband, aspirator, and thermometers. We gnaw on plastic teething rings and for the rest of our lives scarcely pass a moment away from plastics. "Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging " (Grant, Richard). During their loadings and unloading, however, nurdles have a gift for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in the wind. They float as well as a buoy and can now be found in every ocean in the world (Grant, Richard). The amount of material in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch accumulates because much of it is not biodegradable. Many plastics, for instance, do not wear down; they simply break into tinier and tinier pieces (National Geographic).
Concession- Though no one thinks there is any kind of benefit for this vortex of plastic, Prof. Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, argued some positive aspects of the patch.
