Welcome back to cheddar news wrap. Everyone today is
thursday july 28th. I'm Manitoba in new york city
and I'm ken buffet, thank you so much for
joining us. It's time for today explained where we
break down some of the biggest stories in the news
, how we got here and where we go next
. Every year, millions of tons of plastic waste
we produce enters the ocean. A portion of this
plastic gets swept up in a vortex of currents and
end up in areas known as ocean garbage patches.
The largest build up and the most well known is
called the great pacific garbage patch. So what is
it exactly? Right. Also known as the pacific
trash vortex that spans waters from the west coast of
north America to Japan and it's compromised at the western
garbage patch located near Japan in the eastern garbage patch
located between hawaii and California. And most people referred
to the Eastern Patch as the great pacific. It's
estimated to be twice the size of texas, wow
! Unlike the name suggests, it's not a giant
floating island of debris, Much of it is actually
made. This is so sad. Microplastics that are
invisible to the naked eye. It's because in the
ocean, the sun breaks plastic down into tinier and
tinier pieces. That process is called photo degradation.
They simply make the water look like a cloudy soap
that is intermixed with larger items like fishing gear and
even shoes Now this debris can be very harmful to
marine life. Obviously sea turtles often mistake plastic bags
for jellies, their favorite food. Seabirds mistake plastic
pellets for fish, eggs and feed them to chicks
, which then die of starvation, seals can get
entangled and abandoned fishing nets and microplastics blocks sunlight from
reaching planting and algae down below, threatening entire ring
ecosystems by the way. And because the great pacific
garbage patch is so far from any country's coastline,
no nation will take responsibility or provide the funding to
clean it up. But one nonprofit called Ocean Cleanup
has taken on this mama task. It uses a
special technology that first gathers this scattered plastic in one
place, then extracts it for recycling. Since its
deployment in august of last year, ocean Cleanup has
sweeped an area the size of Rhode island. In
45 extractions, removing more thanÂŁ220,000 of trash,
but it says it needs to do another 1000 halls
, 1000 halls to get rid of all the plastics
in the great pacific garbage patch. And if you
are interested in finding out more about ocean cleanup or
want to make a donation, I might be doing
that, visit their website at the ocean cleanup dot 00:02:38.405 --> com.