Captain Charles Moore, a yachtsman, was sailing through the north pacific in 1997. He couldn’t believe what he saw. ”As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments”. In this lonely part of our oceans, he was the first person to observe what’s become know as the North Pacific Garbage Patch.

The garage patch is actually two patches, one on the US side of the Pacific and one on the Japanese. The US garbage patch is about the size of the state of Texas. The ocean currents form a vortex or giant whirlpool and the garbage is caught in its circling waters. Some sinks to the bottom. Other plastics break up and are consumed by fish. Fishermen avoid the area: the environmental effects mean it’s not worth venturing into it.

Ethically, it is the waste from our conspicuous consumption and addiction to plastics. Go to any beach on the beautiful Jurassic Coast of the UK (the World Heritage Site between Poole and Weymouth) and you will find the same thing. It raise an important issue – because the vortex lies outside anyone’s territorial water, no-one has the incentive or the duty to clean it up. Yet it’s effects on our planet are dreadful.

Someone once defined ethics as ’what we do when no-one’s watching’. But we could also define it as ‘how we think about what we cannot actually see”. We don’t look out on the north pacific vortex, but it is visible in photographs and to some extent by satellite imagery.

We could take the view that what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t care about. But I don’t think this is an ethical viewpoint. I take the view, which I believe we can defend, that the environment has intrinsic value. It’s value in other words does not depend upon human happiness as the utilitarians suggest. The intrinsic value can be defended in terms of two further naturalistic ideas: biodiversity and interdependence of the ecosystem. I go long with James Lovelock in arguing that we are as a matter of fact inhabiting one vast interdependent ecosystem in which the forests are our lungs and the sea is our cooling system, our carbon recylcing system (through algae) and our (potentially sustainable) food source.

The micro-plastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch make the water look in some places like a cloudy soup. This soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes. The seafloor is also be an underwater trash heap. Oceanographers and ecologists recently discovered that about 70% of marine debris actually sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

About 80% of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from activities in North America and Asia. Trash from the coast of North America takes about six years to reach it, while trash from Japan and other Asian countries takes a year.

It follows ethically that if we care about this we need to do two things: ban certain plastics and start paying to clear it up. But yet again economics and ethics come into conflict. It will cost a fortune to remove this externality (the economist’s term for a cost that no-one is willing to pay). Billionaires take note – rather than waste your money on football clubs, why not show concern for the common good and build a supertanker hoover.

http://education.nationalgeographic.co.uk/education/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/?ar_a=1