A plastic bottle used for motor oil produced by CPC Corp, Taiwan, (CPC) was among the garbage collected by US Greenpeace campaigners in the North Pacific Ocean, and might have been adrift there for more than a decade, Greenpeace Taiwan said yesterday.
The bottle bears the company’s previous Chinese-language mark, “Chinese Petroleum Corp,” before it changed its name in 2007, a testament to its having been drifting in the ocean for at least 11 years, Greenpeace Taiwan said.
The bottle was discovered by a group of US Greenpeace members whose ocean cleanup in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ended earlier this month, it said.
Located halfway between California and Hawaii, the patch covers 1.6 million square kilometers and consists of 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic garbage, according to a study published by scientists affiliated with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation in the March issue of Scientific Reports.
During the cleanup, Greenpeace members found plastic bottles produced by beverage makers such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Wahaha and Kang Shi Fu as well as chemical developers Bayer, Cloralex and Kao Bleach, it said.
Microplastics — small plastic pieces less than 5mm in diameter — can absorb toxic chemicals and heavy metal substances, and might affect the health of animals when they ingest the particles along with food, it said.
The amount of plastic debris that it found in the patch was 11 times more than its previous samplings off the coast of US major cities such as Los Angles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York and Miami, US Greenpeace said in a news release on Oct. 17.
“Coca-Cola was the worst corporate plastic polluter, found in 40 of 42 countries overall. Greenpeace found a Coca-Cola bottle from China, produced more than 1,000 miles [1,609km] from where it was found in the garbage patch,” it said.
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