The Great Pacific Garbage Patch or Synthetic Sea is the afterlife for the trash we don’t recycle or put in landfills. Currents in the Pacific Ocean carry and concentrate human waste into a soup. This soup is known as the Synthetic Sea, and the area has become a concern for conservationists and environmentalists, since human waste is having adverse impacts on marine ecosystems.

It is important that we either recycle unwanted materials or place them in a trash container, because plastic and other trash can end up in the ocean, and become consumed by marine birds such as albatrosses. Albatrosses will feed plastic—mistaken for marine food—to their chicks, which die slowly from a diet of indigestible trash.

Other marine life suffers from anthropogenic waste. Sea turtles can die from ingesting plastic, because the plastic impacts within their gut. Marine debris also impacts other marine life such as fish.

Do you need proof that trash such as plastic adversely impacts marine wildlife? Check out the images below of albatross chicks that died after being fed marine debris by their unknowing parents. Obviously, constantly being fed indigestible trash is a painful, pitiful, and slow way to die (perhaps a kind of punishment for sinners against the environment in a modern version of Dante’s Inferno), so recycle or throw away your trash in a bin. For more information visit here and here.

On the Net: Marine Debris: Cigarette Lighters and the Plastic Problem on Midway Atoll
On the Net: Remote Waters Offer No Refuge from Plastic Trash

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Updates: (24 April 09)

Small fish living within the synthetic sea are consuming plastic:

Oprah Shines Light On Great Pacific Garbage Patch (VIDEO)
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Synthetic Sea Images Found Here. Albatross images taken from here, here, here and here.

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