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OUR RELIANCE ON PLASTIC IS COMING HOME TO ROOST. WE’RE POLLUTING THE PLANET ONE WATER BOTTLE AT A TIME, AND SIMPLY SWIMMING PAST THE EVIDENCE FLOATING IN OUR SEAS. BUT,

AS MILES MASTERSON DISCOVERS, PLASTIC MARINE POLLUTION CAN NO LONGER BE IGNORED.

TEXT MILES MASTERSON

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n the Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) website, there is a video clip of British pro surfer Sam Lamiroy standing on a beach in South West Cornwall. He’s talking about the dire state of marine litter. “This has to stop,” he says with disgust, as the camera pans to a small pile of rubbish underneath a surfboard in the sand. Some of it is unrecognisable and there are a few tin cans, but the vast majority is obviously plastic bottles. “It’s time to call the government to action,” says a determined Lamiroy, as he writes his signature in support of the SAS marine litter campaign.

Most of us would have seen similar scenes at our own beaches. But what we might not realise is that marine litter is turning into one of the greatest post-modern environmental catastrophes. Along with global warming and carbon emissions, our reckless production and disposal of plastic – a crude oil product that’s become ingrained into our lives – is slowly suffocating the planet. “Joining plant, animal, and mineral, we must now acknowledge a new kingdom, a fourth kingdom, the kingdom of plastic,” writes US blogger and plastic trash art activist Pam Longobardi, “with an army whose members never die or decompose, and threaten to outnumber all others.”

The evidence is alarming. Scientists have found that vast quantities of throwaway plastic consumables reach the ocean, and that between 60 to 80 per cent of all marine debris is plastic. Larger plastic debris – mostly bottles but including every other commodity known to man – breaks down in the sea to join billions of tiny pre-production plastic pellets, known as nurdles or ‘mermaids’ tears’. As the raw material for almost all plastic products, these tiny pellets are produced in vast quantities and shipped around the world, but have a tendency to spill into our oceans along the way. In fact, there is so much plastic in the sea right now that the global average is 46,000 pieces per square

kilometre. The sheer volume of plastic pollution is set to have a potentially devastating effect on the marine environment, and is ultimately coming back to bite the greedy, lazy bastards who invented the substance in the first place: human beings.

Could you last even a day without consuming a product wrapped in plastic, or by not buying something containing it or made using it? It’s a mind-boggling proposal. And, unless you are a Kalahari Bushman, the answer, in all probability, is no. Those who have tried attest to this. British journalist Christine Jeavans attempted to live plastic-free for a month in 2008 with great difficulty and admits to reverting back to her old ways afterwards. US blogger Beth Terry has been collecting her own plastic waste for more than two years and recording it on her website, fakeplasticfish.com. Unable to eliminate her reliance on plastic completely, Terry has nevertheless shown that it is possible, with some considerable effort, to radically reduce plastic consumption.

Evidently, our dependence on plastic has reached a crux and the repercussions are beginning to filter through our thick skulls. But it is not something that we’ve only just tuned in to.

Rubbish Tips in the Ocean

In 1997, Californian academic, surfer and sailor-turned-activist Charles Moore made a discovery in the North Pacific that would change the way we view plastic waste. Returning from a yacht race between the US and Hawaii on his vessel, Algalita, Moore eschewed the traditional route around the windless high-pressure Doldrums of the 10 million-square mile zone known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which is usually given a wide berth by sailors and consequently left largely unexplored. Curious to see where his alternative route would take him, Moore sailed across the eastern end. Instead of being a benign aquatic void as previously surmised, the gyre, he quickly found, was the world’s largest rubbish tip. Thanks to the weather patterns and ocean currents that govern the area, flotsam and jetsam of every kind – tyres, traffic cones, fishing nets, bottles and more – were floating on or just below the surface in a vast quagmire now termed the Eastern Garbage Patch. “Here I was, in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic,” describes Moore.

Though other scientists and researchers were aware of the problem, it was Moore’s discovery that truly grabbed the world’s attention. Already

involved in marine conservation through his Algalita Foundation, Moore has since become an outspoken authority on the problem of ocean debris. Indeed, one of Algalita’s current aims is to discover and document other garbage patches, through their associated 5 Gyres project. Aside from the North Pacific, there are four more gyres – in the North and South Atlantic, South Indian and South Pacific Oceans – which remain largely unresearched, though experts anticipate even more accumulations have yet to be discovered.

One of 5 Gyres’ chief plastic hunters is Marcus Eriksen, whose path to his present vocation is at once ironic and telling. A former US Marine, Eriksen was stationed in the Middle East during the first Gulf War. While trapped in a foxhole, he had an epiphany. “I [was] in Kuwait covered by oil and soot,” Eriksen recalls. “I realised that we were fighting in that desert not just for human rights and the national security of Kuwait, but to secure access to fossil fuels.” Burdened by his enlightenment, and knowing that oil is the raw material for plastic, Eriksen soon abandoned his military career and transferred his altruistic nature to the defence of the environment instead (and has subsequently written a book about it).

For a time, Eriksen focused on his studies and other conservation projects. Then, armed with a PhD, MA and BS in Science Education, his interest in plastic debris was revived during the second Gulf conflict, and on a research trip to study birds on Midway Atoll in the Central Pacific. “I ended up seeing hundreds of carcasses of albatrosses, which were all full of plastic debris,” Eriksen says with audible bile. “Toys, toothbrushes, cigarette lighters and even medical waste, birds with syringes protruding out of their chests; thousands of unidentifiable plastic fragments and millions of microplastic fibrants more or less littered the entire island.”

Back in the US, Eriksen built a catamaran using plastic bottles and sailed it down the Mississippi to draw attention to the issue. He chose plastic bottles, which can take hundreds of years to break down, and their virtually indestructible caps as the most ubiquitous form of marine litter. He soon met Charles Moore and began to work with him. Today, as Director of Research and Education and Project Development Manager, Eriksen is guiding the 5 Gyres search with his wife and fellow academic, Dr. Anna Cummins. The couple sailed across the North Atlantic in early 2010 on a 3,000-mile trip from the Azores to Bermuda, including the Sargasso Sea. “We collected samples all the way,” says Eriksen. “Every one was full of plastic.”

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The Threat of Microplastics

While the most palpable evidence of destructive plastic is large debris (including discarded fishing nets, which have decimated sea otter populations in Alaska, for example), there is another, potentially more dangerous pollutant: plastic pellets, known as nurdles or microplastics, which are mostly invisible to the human eye. The sheer volume of these pellets in our oceans cannot be underestimated. On shores worldwide – such as Kamilo Beach in Hawaii, which is among the most polluted in the world – the number of plastic fragments now exceeds that of sand granules.

The presence of these pellets is, for many environmentalists, the most frightening aspect of plastic pollution. Apart from the mechanical repercussions they might have on the digestive systems of marine life and birds that mistake them for food, nurdles have much deeper ecological ramifications. Scientists are beginning to believe that toxic substances such as long-banned DDT (a synthetic pesticide), PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), BPA (bisphenol A) and other POPs (persistent organic pollutants), as well as chemicals used during the plastic manufacturing process, are polluting the sea and accumulating on the surface of plastic debris. Worse yet, these tiny chemical-coated pieces of plastic could be finding their way into the food chain.

Dr. Cummins recounts how during a 2008 expedition across the Pacific Gyre with Charles Moore, they discovered microplastics in lantern fish, a small, alien-looking creature with a phosphorescent appendage above its head which spends its days in the dark depths feeding on plankton and swallowing whatever else is in the ocean. “We collected 671,” says Dr. Cummins, “and of those about 35 per cent had ingested small pieces of plastic in their stomachs, some with really high levels. When you took out the juveniles, the amounts went up much higher.” Lantern fish, adds Cummins, are prey for a number of larger deep ocean fish such as tuna, mahi mahi and squid, which predictably all show alarming levels of chemicals. However, it has yet to be determined whether these fish are absorbing chemicals directly from the sea or from the prey they consume.

In the murky world of academic evidence – where naysayers and contrary outcomes abound, and a direct link has yet to be found – recent studies strongly indicate that humans are also showing alarming levels of noxious chemicals. Dr. Cummins is well known in the US for her self-administered Synthetic Me project, where she tested the chemical content of her own body. Disturbingly, she found trace elements of

chemicals including DDT and PCBs, as well as flame retardants and even CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). “We have no way of knowing where these chemicals came from,” admits Cummins, who also acknowledges that plastics are not the only possible culprit. “The flame retardants are common in California in our furniture, baby clothing and all kinds of things. The PCBs and DDT could have been through eating fish or bioaccumulation, but there is no way to tell as we are exposed to so many chemicals all the time.”

Though they have yet to conduct similar tests on ocean organisms, the next step, says Cummins, is to determine “if there is a correlation between the levels of PCBs and other POPs in their tissues to the amount of plastics being consumed.” Regardless, much research has concluded it is not just the presence of individual chemicals in our systems that is the most alarming, but their combined effects, especially at critical levels of our development. “We don’t yet know how this impacts our long-term health, or a couple of generations down the line,” agrees Cummins. “[But] we really need to adopt a cautionary approach... because this level cannot be good for our bodies and we can’t wait until it is documented that X levels of PCBs, for example, will lead to this consequence.”

To explain how these chemicals enter the food chain, Professor Richard Thompson of the University of Plymouth in the UK cites the world-renowned research of Japanese Professor Hideshige Takada. Through his International Pellet Watch – a global monitoring group that gathers beached plastic pellets – Takada has found that mermaids’ tears contain everything from DDT to BPA and POPs. This process of chemical transfer is exacerbated as fragments break down into smaller pieces, because, reveals Thompson, “the volume of the material remains the same, but the overall surface area increases exponentially.” Professor Thompson has conducted laboratory experiments on mussels and worms using microplastics as small as 1/500th of a millimetre, and has found that chemicals from plastics do transfer into the guts of organisms. “There is cause for concern,” adds Thompson cautiously, “[though] perhaps not cause for alarm, as all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are not there yet.” To make matters worse, some of these fragments are then excreted back into the environment to mop up more pollutants.

The fact that these microplastics – as well as discarded plastic sheeting and other debris – may be forming a suffocating layer on the ocean floor is another aspect of plastic pollution that is only just being looked into. Indeed, when future archaeologists are excavating our civilisation in billions of years’ time – so the dark joke in scientific circles goes – all they will

find is a layer of plastic and they might call our era, The Plastic Age.

Whatever gets proven in the future, it is clear we are only just beginning to understand the threat plastic poses to the environment and ourselves.

Flip Flops and Bottles

At the time of writing, Eriksen and Cummins have just completed a scout of the Indian Ocean, where they found similar evidence of accumulation, so it is clear the problem is as widespread across the planet as suspected. Their work is not the only research of its kind, though. Among other scientific institutions and expeditions, British millionaire activist David de Rothschild embarked in March 2010 on a global research and discovery venture using a fully eco-friendly boat made of plastic bottles called Plastiki. Vancouver-based South African ex-pat surfer brothers Bryson and Ryan Robertson and Canadian Hugh Patterson are also about to conclude a similar 56,000 km global voyage that they started planning in 2000. As long-time members of the Surfrider Foundation, they were motivated by the piles of debris washing up on their local beaches. So they collaborated with Surfrider and other Canadian environmental organisations to create OceanGybe, and finally set sail in 2007.

As research on the gyres was being paid due attention, OceanGybe sought to find out how much plastic and other marine debris was ending up on some of the world’s more remote beaches. Turns out, a lot. On the leeward shores of atolls in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, they found more plastic than they had ever anticipated, including plastic bottles, cigarette lighters, flip flops, volleyballs, fishing nets, lines and floats, laundry baskets and bleach bottles near major cruise ship routes, as well as piles of unidentifiable objects. On the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the northwest Indian Ocean, they found a beach, Bryson says, “ankle to knee-deep in hundreds of flip flops and plastic bottles.” Attempting to clean it up, Ryan adds, they soon realised was futile: “[After] you’ve been cleaning for an hour or so and turned around afterwards… You can’t even see the piece of beach that you cleaned up.”

Unfortunately, as OceanGybe shows, ridding the world’s oceans of existing plastic pollution is not the ideal fix. Large plastic accumulations may be the most tangible evidence of the problem, and cleaning them up might appeal to some as an immediate solution, but most scientists agree that energy would be better spent making sure the plastic doesn’t end up there

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five to ten nurdles deep – you had to brush them aside a few times with your foot to see the ground.”

Working with the British Plastics Federation, SAS have managed to effect legislation on nurdles. Though it currently relies largely on self-compliance, it marks a huge step in the right direction. SAS have attempted to clean up beaches and reduce discarded cigarette butts – which are made up of thousands of plastic fibres – via campaigns like their Return to Sender initiative, which encourages members to send marine litter back to manufacturers. Likewise, their UFO (Unidentifiable Floating Object) campaign is working to uncover the source of a certain plastic bung washing up on beaches all over the UK. “We don’t know where they are coming from, and we can’t identify them,” explains Andy. “We are hoping for members to help, [and] then try to change industry practice.”

In the end, of course, it comes back to us. Very few activists and environmentalists are specifically anti-plastic and all agree that the substance has a place in our world as it can help to decrease carbon emissions and waste from other fossil fuels. But it has to be used in a sustainable way. As for the ‘poster child’ of plastic pollution – the ubiquitous water bottles covering our beaches and seas – high-profile activists (such as the Jack Johnson-endorsed Get Off The Bottle campaign) are working to reduce our reliance on this unnecessary product.

As consumers and amateur activists we all need to take steps big and small, through our wallets and ballots, to ensure that the rampant pollution of plastic debris is halted. Even the surf, skate and snowboard industry, which relies so heavily on the natural environment, needs to be pressed into making the necessary changes. Boardshorts made from recycled plastic may be a start, but there is still room for big change. We can’t simply rely on full-time researchers and activists. We all need to take responsibility, get informed, spread the word and force industries and governments to tip the balance back in Mother Ocean’s favour, before it is too late and we choke on our own plastic debris

degrade in sunlight, but bio-degradable plastics take that one step further and are compostable. However, industrial compost facilities are few and far between. And critics of the plastics industry are quick to point a finger at unscrupulous companies for duping consumers into thinking these new products are wholly eco-friendly, when in reality, without the appropriate facility, they cannot be recycled or composted at all.

That’s not to say the plastics industry as a whole is totally ignorant. As consumer awareness becomes more widespread, the industry has in turn begun research into more effective recycling methods, true bio-degradable products, as well as bio-sourcing raw materials for plastic from greener materials. Academic institutions are also working hard on finding a solution to the problem, such as the Imperial College London who, in partnership with a company called BioCeramic Therapeutics, recently created a bio-renewable polymer from sugar. Agroplast, based in Denmark, are also looking at creating plastic made from – wait for it – animal urine.

Legislation, Activism and Us

As well as advances in research, new legislation is also being put in place to help combat marine debris and seaside litter. The issue has been prominent in the US ever since Moore’s shocking find, and many laws have been passed to this effect (although some would say not enough). More recently in Europe, where thanks to the North Atlantic Drift the problem is particularly severe on west-facing seaboards, a Pan-European initiative called Task Group 10 (incorporating, among others, North-East Atlantic environmental organisation OSPAR) was recently set up to monitor ocean debris levels and advise regional governments. Legislation has also been passed in Brussels to certify plastic products made from renewable resources.

Environmental organisations such as Surfrider in France and the UK’s Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) have also been highly effective in bringing attention to the issue. This year SAS won an eco award for a short video clip created in 2009 called Mermaids’ Tears. They surreptitiously filmed the goings-on at certain plastic factories and found an abundance of stray nurdles. “When rainwater pours, they go down drains and into the sea,” describes Campaigns Officer Andy Cummins. “One factory had a 20x10-foot area outside

in the first place. “The net energy costs would be almost worse in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and burnt fossil fuels to go and do it,” adds Ryan, “and then there’s the problem of where it is.”

Recycling and Bioplastics

So who is really to blame and how do we stop it? Until recently, the plastics industry placed the burden of blame on consumers for littering, and focused resources on promoting recycling as the ultimate panacea, largely absolving themselves in the process. “I find it frustrating that when I go to meetings, representatives from different levels of industry all tend to pass the buck and not accept there is combined responsibility,” says Professor Thompson. Dr. Cummins has had a similar experience in the US, where she says some plastics companies loudly promote recycling as a smokescreen to the real issues of manufacture and consumption. “As a corporation, they have money at stake and nobody wants to touch the bottom line,” she says. “They don’t want to tell consumers to stop demanding so much plastic.”

In the global economy, where plastic is used to transport and package almost everything we consume, this is a huge issue for industry and government alike. And recycling, it seems, is not making as big a dent as one may hope. According to Project Aware, a US foundation run by divers, only one billion of the 15 billion pounds of plastic manufactured annually is recycled in the States.

Even the recycling process is not as efficient as one may think. Part of the problem stems from the myriad plastics from which most products are made. A water bottle, for example, might contain one kind of polymer, the lid another, the plastic belt around it yet another and the wrapping it came in yet another. “A lack of stock, if you will, is another thing,” says one British plastics industry expert, who preferred to speak off the record. “To effectively gather something as simple as a yoghurt pot from all around the UK into one place is not profitable, and would end up affecting the environment through transportation.” Beyond that, he adds, many disposable plastic wrappers and receptacles are thrown away with food still clinging to them, making them unsuitable for recycling.

One potential solution are so-called bio-degradable plastics, which can be combined with foodstuffs in recycling. Already there are polymers that photo-

Online Resources:

www.algalita.org

www.sas.org.uk

www.lifewithoutplastic.com

www.fakeplasticfish.com

www.oceangybe.com

www.tappedthemovie.com

www.pelletwatch.com

www.solutions4plastic.co.uk

www.wrap.org.uk

www.5gyres.org

www.mindfully.org

www.theplastiki.com

www.ospar.org

www.projectaware.org

“THOUSANDS OF UNIDENTIFIABLE PLASTIC FRAGMENTS AND MILLIONS OF MICROPLASTIC FIBRANTS MORE OR LESS LITTERED THE ENTIRE ISLAND.”