Assignment 2 : Natural Resource economics
Chosen article:
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
A) Description of the issue
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is an environmental issue characterized by
the accumulation of significant amounts of plastic waste in the North Pacific Ocean. The
buoyant plastics that end up in the ocean are transported by currents, winds and waves into a
convergence zone known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (see figure). Much of the
plastics that are introduced to the marine environment are not biodegradable and will likely
break down into tinier plastic particles. This degradation process from macroplastics into
microplastics can be the result of sun exposure, temperature variations, waves and marine
life, and this significantly complicates the task of cleaning up marine debris. (The Ocean
Cleanup, 2022).
Figure from NOAA Marine Debris Program
, The abundance, durability and persistence of plastic waste in the oceans is of
particular concern to the marine environment and its biodiversity. The interaction between
marine life with discarded fishing nets, plastic bags or other forms of plastic waste often
results in ingestion or entanglement with fatalities being documented for birds, turtles, fish
and marine mammals (Gall & Thompson, 2015). Moreover, the accumulation of debris in the
marine environment, specifically within vulnerable coral reef ecosystems, can induce habitat
loss by obstructing sunlight, impeding water circulation and hindering the growth of
organisms.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch exemplifies a market failure within the
environmental realm known as the tragedy of the commons. This market failure arises due
to the absence of well-defined property rights over an open-access resource, resulting in the
lack of incentives for firms, institutions and governments to take responsibility for the
management and conservation of the oceans. In the case of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
the tragedy of the commons manifests as a collective action problem, in which individual
agents find themselves in a situation where the group would be better off if all of them
contributed to waste management of plastics. However, since every individual agent is driven
by self-interest and has incentives to free-ride on the efforts of others, they often neglect the
negative externalities imposed on the marine ecosystem. This produces a collectively
suboptimal outcome, often referred to as the prisoners’ dilemma. Ultimately, this leads to the
overexploitation of oceans and the pollution of the marine ecosystem.
A study conducted by Lebreton et al. (2019) provided projections regarding the
accumulation of buoyant micro- and macroplastics in the world’s oceans under three ‘plastic
emissions’ scenarios. In their paper, macroplastics are defined as buoyant plastic material
with a diameter exceeding 0.5 centimeters, while microplastics are defined as buoyant plastic
material with a diameter smaller than 0.5 centimeters. We attempted to replicate their
findings, utilizing a dataset sourced from Our World in Data covering the years 1980 to 2050,
extending the temporal range employed by the original authors when constructing their
graphs (2000 to 2050). The three emissions scenarios for accumulated mass of buoyant
microplastics and macroplastics in the graph are defined as follows: (red) emissions continue
to grow until 2050 in accordance with historic growth rates, (blue) emissions continue to
grow until 2020 and then stagnate and (grey) emissions are halted from 2020 onwards. Based
on the recreated projections, it can be inferred that without any efforts to mitigate plastic
pollution, the mass of buoyant micro- and macroplastics could more than triple by the year
2050. If the emission rates of plastics into the oceans stagnate from 2020 onwards, the mass
of buoyant micro- and macroplastics could more than double by the year 2050. If emissions
are completely ceased from 2020 onwards, the mass of buoyant macroplastics will slightly
decrease. The mass of microplastics, however, will more than double from 2020 levels as
larger plastic materials persist in the environment and gradually degrade into microplastic
particles. These findings from our recreated projections highlight the importance of
implementing immediate measures in order to prevent the further accumulation of micro- and
macroplastics in the marine ecosystems.
