Talk:Marine debris

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Why is there nothing on this page about the trash vortex, called the "Eastern Garbage Patch" or similar names? It is basically a floating island of flotsam. A Shangri-la of garbage, if you will. Here is a greenpeace article about it.[1] No picture of the mass itself, though. Fuzzform 18:30, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

See Great Pacific Garbage Patch - 82.18.44.72 (talk) 19:13, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Merge proposals

Flotsam and jetsam: essentially the exact same thing as marine debris? There shouldn't be two articles on the same thing - 82.18.44.72 (talk) 19:13, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I can't see why anyone would object, so I'll be bold and do it now - 82.18.44.72 (talk) 19:15, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I also merged the ocean dumping stub along with F&J. How about we merge nurdle too? I'll leave this one up to the community, as the term may also have other uses. - 82.18.44.72 (talk) 04:03, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Cancel that, the article could be expanded, as there is clearly an industrial use for them - 82.18.44.72 (talk) 03:57, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

A couple suggestions

• The following paragraphs are completely unreferenced: first under study (this also needs clarification), first under Legality of ocean dumping, last paragraph in article. Also, the "Source of debris" section is unreferenced.
• Also, you might want to expand the bulleted lists under "Legality of ocean dumping" into prose. delldot talk 01:36, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

GA Failure

This article has the makings of GA or FA on an interesting and overlooked subject, but it's not there yet. There are just too many problems to fix.

• Prose problems: It starts with the lede: "Marine debris, also known as marine litter, is human-created waste that has found itself floating in a lake, sea, ocean or waterway." Found itself? It's sentient? Later on, we read that "plastic comprises over 80% of all known debris ..." This is the wrong usage, and an all-too-common Wikipedia error. Near the end "Entire ships have been deliberately sunk in various attempts to do just that." Awkward, and too colloquial to be encyclopedic. And as a whole too many of the paragraphs within the article feel like they were just put together indiscriminately, as various editors added things and just left it at that. There's little narrative flow.

• Sourcing: "An example of this would be the 1987 Syringe Tide, whereby medical wastes washed ashore in New Jersey, after having blown from the Fresh Kills Landfill." " Clean-up teams around the world patrol beaches to clean up this environmental threat." Both completely uncited, absolutely unforgivable when we're referring to a specific event as in the former. " It has also been suggested that persistent organic pollutants may be collecting and magnifying on the surface of plastic debris, adsorbing permanently to its surface and making oceanic plastic debris far more deadly that it would be on land." By who? These have been tagged appropriately. Also, that bit about California's proposed legislation is sourced to an advoacy group's page. A little searching should find a more neutral source.

• Illustration: The pictures are mostly pertinent but there are some issues. I have lots of issues with the lead image. First, the picture has a huge cutline detailing everything found in that cleanup effort which goes on for several lines. Most of that information is rather trivial (and also see WP:NOT#STAT) and, if it belongs anywhere it belongs in the text. Cutlines should be short and sweet. If you go to three lines you need to have a good reason; there is no reason any cutline should be more than four lines long. Certainly it shouldn't nearly double the height of the image.

  And secondly, the very next image would be a far better one to use, as it actually shows the sea and some debris that presumably washed up from it.

  This leads to the one image that should go ... the no-dumping one from that lovely seacoast town of Colorado Springs, Colorado. This article is about marine debris. That means we're talking about debris in the oceans, not in streams over a thousand miles from the nearest seacoast.

• See Also: This section absolutely fails the Wikipedia standard. Some of the links are already in the article (ghost net, cruise ship pollution); others really aren't directly relevant (space debris, for one). I would bet that judicious editing of this article would result in this section being eliminated entirely.

I have problems with this article as even a B-class. It's a perfect example of why C-class was needed, and I will appopriately downgrade the assessment as well as adding another relevant project. Daniel Case (talk) 19:55, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Relating to marine pollution

It seems to me that this article is closely related to marine pollution, and should be developed in tandem with that article. I have transferred some examples of marine toxins from Wild fisheries#Toxins, but "marine pollution" still needs work. I also wonder whether plastic waste is shaping up as the most serious marine pollutant of all, and whether it warrants an article of it's own? --Geronimo20 (talk) 11:04, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I do agree that marine debris is definitely a form of marine pollution. However, I strongly oppose merging the articles, as the debris article a well-developed discussion (unlike pollution) of a well documented and clearly notable topic. There should be a section in marine pollution that briefly discusses debris, along with a link to this article, where it can be discussed in depth. Anxietycello (talk) 21:20, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I wasn't suggesting that we merge them – just that they are closely related, and each should be developed with an eye on the other. --Geronimo20 (talk) 09:33, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Marine debris/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

This is quite close to GA standard I think, but there a few issues that need to be addressed:

• What is the relevance of a sign warning not to pollute a stream in Colorado Springs to an article dealing with marine debris?

• "Currently, the California State Legislature is considering a host of bills ...". Currently as at when? 2008?

• "Lost, mislaid, and abandoned property can be of consequence within property law, admiralty law, and the law of the sea." I don't understand what "of consequence" means in this context.

• "... whereas some reckon it closer to the size of Africa." Who are these "some"?

• "Should any islands be unlucky enough to lie within a gyre ...". I think the "unlucky" bit should be dropped as expressing a pov.

• "... their coastlines will likely be ruined by the waste that inevitably washes ashore." Likely needs a citation.

• "Clean-up teams around the world patrol beaches to clean up this environmental threat." Not sure what environmental threat this is talking about, as the preceding sentences were talking specifically about islands within oceanic gyres.

• "More recently, reports have surfaced ...". Reports don't "surface". What are these reports? From whom?

• The Weisman book is cited three times, but no page numbers are given.

• "Law of Europe" and "Law of the United States" seems unnecessarily awkward names for sections. Why not "European law", and "United States law"?

• "Eighty percent of all known debris is plastic – a component that has been rapidly accumulating since the end of World War II.[3] Plastics accumulate because they don't biodegrade as many other substances do; although they will photodegrade on exposure to sunlight, they do so only under dry conditions, as water inhibits this process." I have a number of problems with this paragraph. What does "known debris" mean? Is there some unknown debris? Accumulating where? And this seems tautological: "they do so only under dry conditions, as water inhibits this process". Water inhibits the process of being dry?

• The first paragraph of types of debris is unreferenced. Which isn't a problem in itself, but this statement does need to be sourced: "Six pack rings, in particular, are considered a poster child of the damage that garbage can do to the marine environment." Who says so?

• Ref #27 has gone dead.

• "Marine debris ... is human-created waste ... Some forms of marine debris, such as driftwood, occur naturally". How is this, from the lead, to be reconciled? Not really a great opener.

I'm putting this article on hold to allow time for these issues to be addressed. I will check back in no less than seven days.

--Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 22:06, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

• As these issues remain outstanding, this article has not been listed as a GA. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 19:41, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Possible Vandalism

Recent edit by 91.69.154.123 is possibly vandalism, as it appears to reverse the meaning of the introductory paragraphs using hideous grammar. I haven't reversed it because I don't know the history on this, I could be mistaken. --98.196.62.134 (talk) 20:20, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Plastic particle water pollution

The article Plastic particle water pollution has some overlap with this article; perhaps the contents of that article should be merged into this one? (It contains information on microplastics, aka nurdles, that perhaps should be put into the parent article if not already there, rather than simply added here.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:05, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to one external link on Marine debris. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add {{cbignore}} after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}} to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070927174107/http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/1103/1103_feature.html to http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/1103/1103_feature.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—^{cyberbot II}_{Talk to my owner:Online} 04:45, 11 January 2016 (UTC)