Talking Rubbish About the Ocean

Op-Ed by John Guy

Just back from a lovely week sailing around the Ionian. One thing that struck me was how much cleaner the sea and coastline is now than it was when I first sailed there, almost twenty years ago. Then it was normal to find floating garbage and many small coves were full of rubbish. Each year it has got cleaner and floating plastic is now a rarity. A focus by HELMEPA and a growing awareness of the need to keep seas clean is clearly working.

But there is still a lot of rubbish talked about trash in the oceans. One of my boat crew remarked that it might be clean in the Ionian but what about the huge piles of rubbish trapped in the oceanic gyres? In her mind great swathes of the ocean are covered in floating piles of garbage. It’s a common myth, and it’s rubbish.

No-one has ever seen such an area of floating rubbish. Try googling for photos of the rubbish gyres. You get lots of pictures of dirty beaches, and lots of hypothetical maps of oceanic rubbish gyres. What you don’t get is pictures of rubbish gyres in the oceans, because they don’t exist.

There are some areas of the ocean where there are higher concentrations of suspended particles of plastic residue floating beneath the surface in the water column than in others. Up to perhaps five kg of tiny particles in a square kilometer of ocean is claimed. That’s not great but this is not the piles of trapped rubbish the public imagine and it is not a trash typhoon about to demolish our oceans.

Brave aircrews and volunteers recently spent thousands of hours overflying the Indian Ocean looking for debris from MH370. They found only a few items of floating garbage in thousands of square kilometers of ocean. They would have found more garbage in half an hour overflying any piece of land.

Ships don’t dump rubbish at sea anymore, coastal communities try harder not to throw rubbish into the sea and it is time to stop talking rubbish about our oceans.

John Guy served on merchant ships and warships for sixteen years before becoming a ship inspector and then a journalist. He advises companies and organizations working in the global shipping industry on media and crisis management. His latest novel is The Golden Tide.