Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Improved Essays
The film Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a documentary directed by Angela Sun and was released on April 22, 2014. This film dives into the desolate "island" known as the great pacific garbage patch which is actually not an island despite what people think. This "island" actually lies underneath the water's surface, which leads to it being unnoticed by the public. Plastic is the main cause of this issue and not only litters the oceans, but it is also harming the marine life. Unfortunately, there is nothing people can do to prevent this issue, except wait for the oceans to spit out all the plastic itself. What people can do though is stop the excessive use of plastic and dispose of it in a better way.
This documentary has moments when it seems as though it is just trying to shove facts in your face. As they are giving you facts and numbers one after one, it makes it hard to argue against what they are saying and disagree that the oceans have become riddled with plastic at a rapid pace. In the film, director Angela Sun states that the amount of plastic in the oceans has gone from 20 million lbs.
…show more content…
In the film, it is stated that the amount of plastic in the oceans can fill up somewhere in between twice the size of Texas to the whole surface of the United States, and that there is nothing that can be done about it except stop feeding the oceans plastic and wait for it to rid of the plastic itself. Knowing that there is that much plastic in the oceans is enough to scare people into being more cautious with their use of plastic. People continue to believe that the issue can be solved by making sure that you recycle all used plastics. According to the director of the documentary, plastic can only be downgraded when its recycled, so it is only recycled so many times until it is rejected and no longer goes into the recycling

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Earth’s soup of trash, also known as the ocean, is in a sense, suffocating in plastic litter, forming literal islands of trash. Compelling rhetoric is created frequently to delineate the horrors of plastic and trash pollution within Earth’s oceans such as ‘The Surfrider Foundation’. The foundation casted a campaign in July 2010, with a…

    • 724 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Marine debris can degrade marine habitats, endanger marine and coastal wildlife and pose threats to human health and safely. Scientists and explorers believe that the best way to accrue the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is to limit or eliminate the use of disposable plastics and increase the use of biodegradable resources in human’s everyday life. Since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so far from any country’s coastline, no nation takes the responsibility or provides the funding to clean it up.…

    • 867 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Surfrider volunteer revealed that plastic bags, bottle containers, bottle caps, kitchen utensils are the most common rubbish that is found in the ocean. Due to the mass amount of plastics in the coastlines, Surfrider specifically made small sub-unit of the foundation called Rise above Plastic. The sub-unit mainly focuses on the quantity of plastic in oceans that is harming the marine life. Rise above Plastic’s main mission is to diminish the quantities of plastics in the marine life. They try to raise awareness about the danger of plastic toxic waste.…

    • 877 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Often this includes killing plant life and posing dangers to local animals.” This shows that plastic ain’t only hurting the oceans this is hurting the land and other types of animals that live in land. For plastic to get into the ocean it doesn’t only have to be from leaving trash on the beach. Even if you throw away your trash at the beach but you still litter on the streets, plastic could get into the ocean from heavy rain, flash floods, because the water could pick up the trash and when it goes down the water drains all that trash goes into the ocean. People don’t understand how much damage just one little piece of plastic would do to the ocean and the marine…

    • 835 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Disposable plastic is so popular because it is so convenient to throw away after consumption. However, there are too many externalities. Although they are convenient, I have become much more conscious about using plastic in the past few years because of the negative effects it has on the environment. This has become a global issue; plastics have become such a staple in human lives that we are having trouble cutting back on its consumption. Plastics have spoiled us with convenience and ease that it is actually troublesome to stop using them.…

    • 1312 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Imagine a big, cloudy pile of garbage . . . Plastic pieces of all different colors, decaying shoes, dangerous fishing gear that are all rusty and jagged, car tires, truck tires, tractor tires, and even dead animals floating in the ocean. Well, that’s basically what the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is. And unfortunately, sea creatures get tangled in fishing nets, eat the garbage, and get sick from the water being contaminated.…

    • 94 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Plastic marine debris has become increasingly problematic. Angela Sun, a journalist from California, made a movie called, “Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The movie is about plastic marine debris and how it affects wildlife. Sun heard from a friend about this giant island in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Most people believe that the garbage patch is a very large, solid patch of garbage sitting in the Pacific Ocean.…

    • 1280 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    One of these incidents was after the 9.1 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which spread debris throughout the earth, some of which still washes up on North American coasts. Trash that leaves landfills can create one of the biggest problems for ecosystems, especially in oceans, as it confuses marine wildlife. One of the most prevalent examples is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gathering place of garbage that spans from 700,000 to 15 million square kilometers (“How Trash Affects the Whole Planet”). The plastic in the patch is broken down by the seawater and sunlight, however, is never fully biodegradable, only breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, making the trash difficult to collect, and therefore efforts to clean up the patch very difficult as well. This area affects wildlife, such as loggerhead sea turtles and albatrosses, as they can confuse the plastic as food, such as jellyfish and fish eggs, and eat it or feed it to their young, respectively.…

    • 1508 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Hypothesis and Objection Because it may take a couple of years for the trash to collect in areas, and due to the constant water moving, I believe we need to observe this over two years. Not much is documented in regards to water samples in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. My hypothesis after checking water samples, oxygen level and phytoplankton levels, is: a decrease in oxygen, which creates dead zones and decreases in phytoplankton and nutrients, with an increase in bacteria and other toxins. Materials and Methods 1. Master Data Sheet 2.…

    • 371 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The way we neglect our ocean with heavy amounts of pollution can potentially affect our lives in a negative manner. Driving cars and the use of plastic is essential to our daily lives, but we use them without the concern for how they are affecting the habitats on Earth. Some people think that the chance that they are doing harm to the ocean is less important to them than cost or inconvenience of fixing a pollution problem. Through sources from researchers and scientists, they have found evidence of pollution caused by the two essential commodities in our lives, plastic and burning fossil fuels. Environmentalists have found solutions to reduce the plastic waste in our ocean as well as attempting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere…

    • 1930 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the planets biggest cluster of soaring trash, there are greater than 79,000 tonnes of plastic in the ocean in just a 1.6 million square kilometer area. The sum of garbage is up to sixteen times bigger than past measurements. This essay will discuss why it is important for people to have an awareness of “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” through how it was initially discovered, how people can change it positively in many ways, and greater issues that will occur if we do not stop it. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was originally found in 1997, by a surfer, scientific researcher and sea captain, Captain Charles Moore.…

    • 703 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The video film produced by Michael J. Lutman informs the viewer of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. This video inspired by yacht racing Captain Charles Moore, includes the collaboration of Algalita Research Foundation and the 5 Gyres Institute and the goal is to raise awareness about buoyant plastics. The central goal of 5 Gyres institute is “What about the rest of the world’s oceans?” A group of 13 people created the documentary information presented as “Plasticized”.…

    • 434 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ocean Selfishness

    • 642 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Nonprofit organizations are one of the most prominent stakeholders in this crisis. People in these groups spend their time brainstorming methods to create a better environment for the sea mammals. One of those organizations is called 5 Gyres. Like most stakeholders, their ideal world is to witness the annihilation of plastic waste. According to their organization,…

    • 642 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Just by drowning an empty beverage bottle and letting it sink to the bottom and thinking, “It’s a huge ocean what’s one going to hurt?” Well that one just added to the enormous pile already in the bottom of the ocean. Claire Groden reports “There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash in the world’s oceans, and each year, 8 million tons of plastic are added to the count. That’s…

    • 834 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Municipalities in the USA and indeed around the World are generating growing numbers of plastic waste than ever before and the facts are that only a small percentage of it is recycled. In many developing countries plastics and other byproducts litter streets, drains, rivers and much of that ends up in the oceans. In the USA, the EPA estimates that the municipal solid waste stream contains more than 12 percent of plastic. This figure has grown consistently over the past fifty years, from one percent in the 1960’s. Additionally, the EPA estimates that as consumers are buying increasing amounts of plastic only 8 percent of it gets recycled because the plastics industry almost never uses recycled plastics in their products, unlike what obtains in the the glass and…

    • 1293 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays