Where is the Plastic?

By: Lisa Karjala
0708244
ENVS*1020*0102

The newspaper article I chose for analysis was found in the Globe and Mail entitled “Researchers Wonder Where Extra Plastic Trash Is” written on Thursday August 19, 2010 by Randolphe E. Schmid. This article refers to the amount of plastics recovered in the Atlantic Ocean over a series of time. In this case, the article was based off a report published in Science on September 3, 2010, written by Kara Lavender Law (et al.), a member of the Sea Education Association. The research in this report was conducted from 1986 to 2008. Despite what one may think, however, the research has shown no dramatic increase in plastics found in the Atlantic Ocean. This is contrary to what one may think considering plastic production has increased significantly over that time period, and therefore plastic waste has also increased (Law 2010). Although the article was a fairly good representation of the research, the report had a few more important details that the journalist failed to document in the article.

The report written up about this mysterious lack of plastics in the ocean actually focused more on the ocean currents themselves. The report includes a vast amount of information on where the plastics are mostly found and why they are found there. According to this research, the plastics seem to gather in a place where several ocean currents diverge. This place happens to be between 22⁰N and 38⁰N, where 83% of the total plastics were collected (Law 2010). The picture to the left shows the concentration of plastics found in the Atlantic Ocean. The explanation of ocean currents in the report may actually help to provide reasoning for why there is missing plastic. In the article the journalist makes it seem like the currents are responsible for keeping all plastics that are released into the ocean in one concentrated place, similarly to the report. The report, however also provides a potential ulterior reason for missing plastics. The report briefly mentions “… the eastern extent has not yet been determined due to a lack of direct observations”(Law 2010). This phrase is very important because it could be possible that the plastic debris being discarded into the ocean is travelling to the eastern areas of the Atlantic Ocean, due to another ocean current, that may not yet be known. After all, the Atlantic Ocean is all connected, and it is important that further research is completed with data from all of the Atlantic Ocean, not just a part of it. If more research is conducted in other areas of the Ocean, perhaps the missing plastic will be found. But what are some reasons for no increase in plastic for the area that was studied?

The article does mention other possibilities for why more plastics are not being detected in the Ocean; however the report does a much better job of expanding on those ideas. One of these ideas is that not all of the plastics are being collected by the nets (Law 2010). The article and report discuss the idea that the plastic trash is breaking down into pieces, too small to be collected by the nets. The net holes are one third of a millimeter of size, which may seem small, but the report suggests that due to the rate at which plastic can degrade, there may be much more plastic that is slipping through the holes of the net (Law 2010). Furthermore, the article fails to report about the various densities of the plastics. In the report, there is much explanation of how the density of plastic has changed over the years that the research was conducted. The plastics made and sold more recently are much denser than that of the plastics produced in the distant past. The report claims that most of the plastics that are collected by the nets contain polyethylene and polypropylene; two very buoyant plastic materials. But not all plastics contain these elements of plastics, so what happens to those plastics? The report suggests that it is possible most of the plastics without those materials sink to the bottom of the ocean (Law 2010). Also in both the article and the report the authors mention that biological growth could also be affecting the densities of plastics, therefore causing the plastics to sink. This leads to a whole other section of the report, explaining that there are no studies off the continental shelf that measure the amount of plastics on the ocean floor (Law 2010). This is also another completely valid reason for why the plastics on the surface are not increasing; the article does not mention anything of it.

Although I have mainly showed what the article has not reported on from the original research, the article is actually fairly reliable. Although the article fails to report some of the information given in the original report, the information that is given is true to the report. Also, the article provides several quotations form Kara Lavender Law, the lead author of the report. This may provide the reader with reassured reliability because the author of the report is surely going to include accurate information for the news article. Although the article does not give all the information in the report, it is very understandable considering that if the article were to document everything in the report, the article would be very long, and potentially uninteresting to the reader. Instead the author of the article includes just the basics and relevant information in the report, without twisting the data or information into something it is not (Schmid 2010).

Overall, I would say that this secondary source was a very good representation of the primary source. Although not all information from the report was included in the article, we can still deem the article to be accurate and reliable due to the accuracy of the information that was included in the article. This is lucky because often times, articles will try and twist the information from scientific reports into something they are not, by including and leaving out information, so that the facts seem more interesting, or prove the point the articles’ author is trying to make.

Resource List

Schmid, Randolphe. "Researchers wonder where extra plastic trash is." Globe and Mail 19 Aug. 2010: n. pag. Web. 22 Sep 2010. .

Kim, Lavender Law et. al. "Plastic Accumulation in the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre." Science 329.5996 (2010): 1185-1188. Web. 22 Sep 2010.