Is it true or false that the oceans are a good dumping ground for waste?

Answer 1

It is false that the oceans are a good dumping ground for waste. Currently, all oceans and seas are referred to as a giant garbage dump. With deliberate planning beginning in the 1800s, humans loaded flat barges and ships with a city's garbage and the barges/ships dumped this into deep rivers and ocean waters just off-shore. Without thinking, people aboard ships and boats add tons of glass, cans, plastics, netting, food wastes, and human wastes to our waters.

According to the LA Times newspaper, "The oceans absorbed 4.8 million to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic trash in 2010, with China leading the list of contributors, according to a first-ever report card on plastic waste published Friday in the journal Science."

It is well-known that immense amounts of garbage get caught in areas where currents make circular routes, pushed by winds to continue in large circles between major countries and islands. The garbage does not sink (like humans thought it would) According to Wikipedia sources, "The Indian Ocean garbage patch, discovered in 2010, is a gyre of marine litter suspended in the upper water column of the central Indian ocean, specifically the Indian Ocean Gyre, one of the five major oceanic gyres." In other words, if you were traveling in one of the 5 major gyres, you would see a mass of floating garbage right on the surface of the ocean.

Obviously, waterways are connected. Creeks lead to Streams, Streams to Rivers, and Rivers to Harbors and Gulfs, and Harbors and Gulfs into the oceans. So while deliberate dumping into the oceans is one issue, so is dumping at inland sites of creeks and rivers. Dumping into Lakes and Dams can also lead outward to end in oceans. Remember, it only takes 2 inches of fast moving water to knock a full grown man down or to push a car sideways. So if you dump a soda pop bottle, a plastic ring from a 6-pack of Pepsi, or even a sheet of paper into water you would see these carried on the water surface.

A good way to create an experiment is, with your parents' permission, collect some items like:

1. 1 empty 8 ounce bottle of soda pop
2. 1 piece of paper
3. 1 piece of paper that you cut into 4 pieces
4. a couple LARGE container lids.
5. a plastic small bowl
6. 1 pencil

Fill the bathtub with water, e.g. about 3 to 4 inches deep. One by one put an item into the water, but don't push on it. See if it floats and observe how it floats. After a few minutes, add another item. Continue with the other items, observing what each one does. Then, put the bowl on top of the sheet of paper; what happens to the paper? Put the bottles into the bowl; what happens to the paper? Does it submerge a little into the water? What happens if you put items on one of the 4 smaller pieces of paper? What happens to the items if you use your hand to swirl the water around? *Remember when done to throw the papers away in the trash and dry off the items your parents want kept. Let the water drain out from the tub.

As you saw from your experiment, some items float longer than others. These would stay on the surface of the water and create a floating garbage patch. Even winds or movement cannot make all the items submerge.

Besides these reasons to not use the oceans as garbage dumps, marine life gets caught up in nets, plastic rings, and plastic bags. Though YouTube and Social Media shows videos of fishermen rescuing turtles and even whales from human's plastic wastes, we have no idea how many are killed each year from these hazards.