Trashing The Ocean

When you throw away plastic bottles, bags, empty

containers, etc. do you ever think about its journey beyond reaching the bottom of the trash can?
If you throw away plastic versus recycling it you need to reconsider your very harmful habit.
There is no excuse for discarding plastics. Make sure that your plastic waste ends up in a recycle
bin somewhere, otherwise it will most likely end up poisoning our soil and water supply, killing
wildlife or attaching itself to one of the “Great Garbage Patches” floating around in our oceans.

Article as seen on MNN.com written by Russell McLendon

Photos courtesy NOAA

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches for hundreds of miles across the North Pacific Ocean,
forming a nebulous, floating junk yard on the high seas. It’s the poster child for a worldwide
problem: plastic that begins in human hands yet ends up in the ocean, often inside animals’
stomachs or around their necks. This marine debris has sloshed into the public spotlight recently,
thanks to growing media coverage as well as scientists and explorers who are increasingly
visiting the North Pacific to see plastic pollution in action.

What’s it made of?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has sometimes been

described as a “trash island,” but that’s a misconception, says Holly Bamford, director of
NOAA’s Marine Debris Program. If only things were that simple.
“We could just go out there and scoop up an island,” Bamford says. “If it was one big mass, it
would make our jobs a whole lot easier.”

Instead, it’s like a galaxy of garbage, populated by billions of smaller trash islands that may be
hidden underwater or spread out over many miles. That can make it maddeningly difficult to
study — Bamford says we still don’t know how big the garbage patch is, despite the oft-cited
claim that it’s as big as Texas.

“You see these quotes that it’s the size of Texas, then it’s the size of France, and I even heard
one description of it as a continent,” she says. “That alone should lend some concern that there’s
not consistency in our idea of its size. It’s these hot spots, not one big mass. Maybe if you added
them all up it’s the size of Texas, but we still don’t know. It could be bigger than Texas.”

While there’s still much we don’t understand about the garbage patch, we do know that most of
it’s made of plastic. And that’s where the problems begin.

Unlike most other trash, plastic isn’t biodegradable — i.e., the microbes that break down other
substances don’t recognize plastic as food, leaving it to float there forever. Sunlight does
eventually “photodegrade” the bonds in plastic polymers, reducing it to smaller and smaller
pieces, but that just makes matters worse. The plastic still never goes away; it just becomes
microscopic and may be eaten by tiny marine organisms, entering the food chain.

About 80 percent of debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from land, much of which
is plastic bags, bottles and various other consumer products. Free-floating fishing nets make up
another 10 percent of all marine litter, or about 705,000 tons, according to U.N. estimates. The
rest comes largely from recreational boaters, offshore oil rigs and large cargo ships, which drop
about 10,000 steel containers into the sea each year full of things like hockey pads, computer
monitors, resin pellets and LEGO octopuses. But despite such diversity — and plenty of metal,
glass and rubber in the garbage patch — the majority of material is still plastic, since most
everything else sinks or biodegrades before it gets there.

What’s the problem?

Marine debris threatens environmental health in several ways. Here are the main ones:

• Entanglement: The growing number of abandoned plastic fishing nets is one of the greatest
dangers from marine debris, Bamford says. The nets entangle seals, sea turtles and other animals
in a phenomenon known as “ghost fishing,” often drowning them. With more fishermen from
developing countries now using plastic for its low cost and high durability, many abandoned nets
can continue fishing on their own for months or years. One of the most controversial types are
bottom-set gill nets, which are buoyed by floats and anchored to the sea floor, sometimes
stretching for thousands of feet.
Virtually any marine life can be endangered by plastic, but sea turtles seem especially
susceptible. In addition to being entangled by fishing nets, they often swallow plastic bags,
mistaking them for jellyfish, their main prey. They can also get caught up in a variety of other
objects, such as the snapping turtle that grew up constricted by a plastic ring around its body
(pictured at top).

• Small surface debris: Plastic resin pellets are another common piece of marine debris; the tiny,
industrial-use granules are shipped in bulk around the world, melted down at manufacturing sites
and remolded into commercial plastics. Being so small and plentiful, they can easily get lost
along the way, washing through the watershed with other plastics and into the sea. They tend to
float there and eventually photodegrade, but that takes many years. In the meantime, they wreak
havoc with sea birds such as the short-tailed albatross.

Albatross parents leave their chicks on land in Pacific

islands to go scour the ocean surface for food, namely protein-rich fish eggs. These are small
dots bobbing just below the surface, and look unfortunately similar to resin pellets. Well-
meaning albatrosses scoop up these pellets — along with other floating trash such as cigarette
lighters — and return to feed the indigestible plastic to their chicks, which eventually die of
starvation or ruptured organs. Decaying albatross chicks are frequently found with stomachs full
of plastic debris (see photo above).

• Photodegradation: As sunlight breaks down floating debris, the surface water thickens with
suspended plastic bits. This is bad for a couple of reasons. First, Bamford says, is plastic’s
“inherent toxicity”: It often contains colorants and chemicals like bisphenol-A, which studies
have linked to various environmental and health problems, and these toxins may leach out into
the seawater. Plastic has also been shown to absorb pre-existing organic pollutants like PCBs
from the surrounding seawater, which can enter the food chain — along with BPA and other
inherent toxins — if the plastic bits are accidentally ingested by marine life.

What can we do?

The discoverer of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Capt. Charles Moore, once said a cleanup
effort “would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went.”

“He makes a really good point there,” Bamford says. “It’s very difficult.”

Still, NOAA conducts flyovers to study the garbage patch, and two research teams sailed there
last summer to collect debris and water samples. Scientists from the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography held a press conference after returning from their three-week voyage in August,
describing the amount of trash as “shocking.” They found large and small items as well as a vast
underwater haze of photodegraded plastic flakes, and are now analyzing their samples to figure
out how the plastic interacts with its marine environment.

Meanwhile, the international Project Kaisei team also spent last August in the garbage patch,
studying its contents in hopes of eventually recycling them or turning them into fuel. And
“adventure ecologist” David de Rothschild is pushing on with plans to sail around the garbage
patch in a boat made entirely of recycled plastics, taking a test voyage earlier this month after a
long delay due to construction trouble. Called “Plastiki,” the ship is intended to highlight the
connection between plastic trash on land and plastic trash at sea — an increasingly evident link,
thanks not only to media attention for the Pacific patch, but also the recent discovery of a similar
patch in the North Atlantic.

Ultimately, more plastic recycling and wider use of biodegradable materials is the best hope for
controlling these garbage patches, Bamford says, but that’s an uphill battle.

“We need to turn off the taps at the source. We need to educate people on the proper disposal of
things that do not break up, like plastics,” she says. “Opportunities for recycling have to
increase, but, you know, some people buy three bottles of water a day. As a society, we have
to get better at reusing what we buy.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO BE PART OF THE SOLUTION AND NOT THE PROBLEM
• NEVER THROW AWAY PLASTIC RINGS, 6-PACK RINGS, ETC WITHOUT FIRST
CUTTING THEM. Always recycle but if you do throw it in the trash, cutting the rings
will prevent sea life and animals from becoming entangled in them.
• Do not buy bottled water. Often the quality of the water is no better than regular tap and
it creates massive amounts of excess plastic. 90% of plastic water bottles are NOT
recycled and thrown in the trash. Purchase something you can reuse and take with you
daily.
• Always recycle whatever you can! There is no excuse for throwing recyclable waste in
the trash.
• Use products that use less packaging, such as: buying a soap dispenser and using one
large refill container that will last for a long time as opposed to buying one that you will
throw away once it is empty. Little things like this will save a whole lot of waste!