Tuesday, February 05, 2008

The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

Taken from the Independent, UK

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden
Tuesday, 5 February 2008

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Click Pic to Make it larger

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region.

Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.

"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic, Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea.

These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

French court jails aid workers sent back from Chad

Taken from Yahoo News
by Reuters - Monday, January 28 2008
(Reporting by Thierry Leveque; writing by Francois Murphy; Editing by Anna Willard)

CRETEIL, France (Reuters) - Six French activists sentenced in Chad to eight years' hard labour for trying to kidnap dozens of children had their sentences converted into French jail terms of the same length by a court on Monday.

The six members of the aid group Zoe's Ark were arrested in Chad in October and found guilty last month of trying to kidnap 103 African children. They were later flown back to France under a cooperation agreement between the two countries.

The group said they were rescuing orphans from Sudan's Darfur region, a conflict zone across Chad's eastern border, and they intended to fly them to Europe for fostering there.

Most of the children were found to have come from families in Chadian border villages who were persuaded to give up their offspring in exchange for promises of education.

French law does not recognise hard labour and the court in the Paris suburb of Creteil converted their sentences into normal prison terms of eight years at a hearing that did not examine the merits of the case against them in Chad.

The court said that, under French law, the case amounted to "illegal confinement of minors under the age of 15".

Defence lawyers said before the hearing opened earlier this month that the Chadian sentences were not valid because they were imposed in what they described as an undemocratic state after a trial they said was not fair.

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Well done to the French courts for delivering a reasonably tough sentence and exposing these Child Traffickers.

This group of Traffickers said it wanted to place orphaned Darfuri children aged under five in foster care with French families, invoking its right to do so under international law - Yet they did so without the consent of any international body and the UN have said that many of the children were from Chad, not Sudan, and there is no evidence that they are orphans.