Plastic Page 15
The leaden skies were threatening rain on the day I visited Kehoe Beach. I zipped my jacket tight, turned my eyes to the ground, and started walking. It took a few minutes to recalibrate my inner treasure hunter, to make myself ignore the pretty shells and stones and cables of kelp and focus instead on all the junk. As my viewpoint adjusted, I realized the beach was covered with plastic castaways that had clearly come from all over the Bay Area. There were black rubber tubes used by oyster farmers in nearby Tomales Bay; green chains used to stake grapevines in Napa Valley, some thirty-five miles to the east; shotgun waddings from inland shooting ranges; nibs of escaped balloons; hanks of nylon fishing rope; and, of course, the litter classics, such as bottles, bottle caps, plastic spoons, food packages, and a few plastic bags. I pulled half of a green monobloc chair from the sand and soon spotted not one but two plastic lighters, each rusty around the metal top but still as brightly colored as a circus tent.
Plastic makes up only about 10 percent of all the garbage the world produces, yet unlike most other trash, it is stubbornly persistent. As a result, beach surveys around the world consistently show that 60 to 80 percent of the debris that collects on the shore is plastic. Every year, the Ocean Conservancy sponsors an international beach-cleanup day in which more than a hundred countries now take part. Afterward, the group publishes a detailed inventory of every item of debris that's been collected. The list itself is a powerful testament to the degree to which plastics serve as "the lubricant of globalization," in the words of ocean activist-researcher Charles Moore. But what's also striking is the uniformity of what's collected. Whether they're working a beach in Chile, France, or China, volunteers inevitably come across much the same stuff: plastic bottles, cutlery, plates, and cups; straws and stirrers, fast-food wrappers, and packaging. Smoking-related items are among the most common. Indeed, cigarette butts—each made up of thousands of fibers of the semisynthetic polymer cellulose acetate —top every list. Disposable lighters aren't far behind: in 2008, volunteers collected 55,491 beached lighters, more than double the number collected just five years earlier.
If nothing else, the detritus collected each year is testament to the degree to which the whole world is becoming addicted to the conveniences of throwaway living. But to really appreciate the toll that this is taking on the planet, you have to head away from the coast and out into the deep reaches of the ocean.
In 1997, Charles Moore, a California-based sailor, was returning home from Hawaii after a race and decided to try a new route that would take him through the northeastern corner of a ten-million-square-mile area known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. The gyre is a huge oval loop that spans the Pacific and comprises four powerful currents that move from the coast of Washington to the coast of Mexico to the coast of Japan and back again.
On that sunny August day, Moore steered his boat into a remote part of the gyre sailors normally avoid. The winds there are weak, the fish are few, and a perpetual mountain of high pressure hangs overhead, pressing down and making the currents spin in a slow, clockwise vortex, like water circling the drain in a bathtub. Except that here, the vortex never runs out. A lifelong sailor, Moore was used to seeing the odd fishing buoy or soda bottle off the side of his boat. But he'd never seen anything like what he encountered in the vortex. "As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic," he later wrote. For a full week, he wrote, "no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments."
This was the feeding ground of the Laysan albatross.
Moore's find wasn't news to those who study the ocean's currents. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer, has made a career of tracking flotsam, debris, and the contents of cargo containers lost at sea, such as rubber ducks and sneakers, to better understand the movements of the ocean. He found that debris from North America and Asia is caught up in the gyre currents where it can circle the northern Pacific Rim for decades. But some gets spun into the center, where there is neither wind nor the strong arm of a current to push it back out; it gets trapped. The technical term for the area is the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, but Ebbesmeyer was the one who bestowed the more colorful name—and the one that has stuck—the Pacific garbage patch. (There's also another debris-dense convergence zone at the other end of the gyre, in the western Pacific near Japan.) To Moore, patch didn't begin to describe what he was seeing: an area that he then estimated was about the size of Texas and swimming with three million pounds of debris—the amount deposited every year in Los Angeles's largest landfill.
That detour through the gyre changed the direction of Moore's life. He quit his furniture-refinishing business and turned his attention full-time to researching and documenting the plasticization of the oceans. His alarming dispatches from repeated trips back to the gyre helped bring public attention to the problem. But that awareness, unfortunately, has been shaped by a host of misperceptions, some fed by Moore's initial descriptions.
By now the plastic vortex has taken on an almost mythic quality in the public imagination. In news reports and the blogosphere it is often portrayed as a huge floating island of trash or, as the New York Times recently called it, an "eighth continent." When Oprah Winfrey did a show about it—which was hailed by marine-debris activists as a sign that their issue was finally getting the recognition it deserved—she showcased photos of a messy swamp of bottles and bags and wrappers.
Yet the images are a far cry from the reality. The vortex isn't filled with floes of debris. Instead, as voyagers there have discovered, it's a place of singular beauty, where on a calm day the waters are a clear, fathomless cerulean blue, and at night the surface shimmers with ghostly green bioluminescent trails traced by fish coming up to feed. It's not uncommon to come across bobbing detergent bottles, runaway buoys, or the occasional car-sized clumps of drift nets packed with all types of smaller debris, from toys to toothbrushes. But they're not omnipresent. Doug Woodring, a Hong Kong businessman and ocean activist, spent a month in the vortex during the summer of 2009 as part of a scientific expedition, and he was struck by the absence of plastic bags. He's used to seeing them all over the Hong Kong harbor, but he saw none in the vortex; it's so far from land they would have long since been sunk or smashed to smithereens by the ocean's currents. Mostly what he saw was something far more insidious: gazillions of tiny bits and pieces suspended, like the flakes in a snow globe, throughout the water column, from the surface to the visible depths. Researchers on his ship trawled the waters twice a day with surface skimming nets, and every single time the nets were brought up, they were covered with this plastic confetti. A floating trash island would be a far easier problem to take care of. Ironically, that horrific image actually understates the problem, making it sound containable, amenable to an open-sea version of a beach cleanup.
But unlike a beach, the vortex "is not a static environment," said Seba Sheavly, a Virginia-based consultant who has worked on marine-debris issues since 1993. "It changes with the seasons. It moves. It's very dynamic. To call it a 'garbage patch' insinuates it has boundaries and can be measured. It cannot." In a place as vast as the Pacific Ocean, said Sheavly, the concentration of debris in the vortex is on the order of a few grains of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Sheavly serves as adviser to Project Kaisei, a group that was originally organized by Woodring and other activists in 2009 with the admirable, if naive, goal of using ships equipped with nets and scoops to "capture the plastic vortex." But the group's leaders quickly recognized that there was no way to capture any but the biggest pieces of debris, such as drifting nets. And one scientist warned Woodring that trying to pull out all the tiny floating bits could cause more harm than good. "You can't just scoop out all the plastic from the ocean without pulling out phytoplankton and zooplankton species," organisms that are the foundation of the marine food web. "If you ruin t
hat basis, you'll have a tumbling effect, like taking out bottom bricks from a pyramid."
Indeed, the challenge of clearing debris from the ocean becomes even more stark when you realize that the North Pacific vortex is not the only place on the globe accumulating plastic. Gyres and high-pressure vortices are natural features of the earth's oceans. There are at least five, all centered around the thirtieth parallels north and south, regions known as the horse latitudes, supposedly because the windless conditions there so slowed down Spanish sailors that they had to throw their horses overboard to conserve water. One gyre can be found in the North Atlantic east of Bermuda, where converging currents trap huge mats of sargassum weed, creating the Sargasso Sea. Researchers have been finding plastic debris there since the 1980s; during a six-week survey in 2010, researchers picked up forty-eight thousand pieces of plastic from the area. Other gyres circle the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, east of Africa. The largest is in the South Pacific, the windless doldrums where Ahab's crew in Moby-Dick had to resort to rowing.
Until recently, little was known about the accumulation of debris in any of the gyres. But in 2009 and 2010, at least half a dozen groups mounted trips to parts of the North Pacific and the Atlantic gyres to publicize the problem and gather information, including Project Kaisei, Moore's Algalita Marine Research Foundation, and the Plastiki expedition, in which eco-activist David de Rothschild sailed a boat built of used soda bottles from San Francisco to Sydney. And a new organization, the 5 Gyres, is gearing up to conduct research trips to the less explored southern gyres as well.
These currents have probably always carried and accumulated human-generated flotsam and trash. But before the age of plastics, the trash consisted of materials that marine microorganisms could quickly break down. Now the gyres are swirling with stuff that, at best, breaks up into small morsels that are too tough for nature to chew. As Midway biologist John Klavitter observed, "It will take decades for all that plastic to get out of the system. Even if people stopped putting plastic in the oceans today, we'll have plastic coming on to Midway for many more years."
The Laysan albatross's proximity to the garbage patch has made it the poster child for the hazards of plastic marine debris. But the birds are hardly the only animals affected by the increasing presence of plastics in the deep ocean. Other sea birds, fish, seals, whales, sea turtles, penguins, manatees, sea otters, and crustaceans have reportedly ingested or become entangled in plastic debris, resulting, as one researcher put it, "in impaired movement and feeding, reduced reproductive output, lacerations, ulcers and death." How many are killed a year? No one can say for certain. The oft-cited statistic—that debris kills a hundred thousand marine animals annually—is a misquote from a 1984 paper about northern fur seals, which estimated that at least fifty thousand were dying from entanglement in lost fishing gear. (And there is no documented basis for the much-cited statistic that marine debris kills one million sea birds a year.)
But even though they do not have a precise toll, researchers have reported significant casualties. Plastic debris has been identified as the cause of injury or death in 267 different species, including 86 percent of all species of sea turtles, 44 percent of all sea birds, and 43 percent of all marine mammals. Researchers have found animals ingesting plastic from one end of the globe to the other, ranging from fulmars, sea birds that scavenge the Arctic waters of the North Sea, to southern fur seals, which inhabit islands near Antarctica. Even animals that we don't know about know of us through our trash: the first reported specimen of a new whale species, the Peruvian beaked whale, was found in 1991 with a plastic bag wedged in its throat.
Plastic debris may also be exacerbating the fragile state of species that are endangered for other reasons. The population of playful monk seals in the northern Hawaiian islands, already down to twelve hundred, is dwindling even faster because of the dangerous ghost nets that entangle and drown them. Leatherback turtles, a species that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, is now threatened, in part from choking on plastic bags that they mistake for jellyfish; necropsies of dead turtles found since 1968 show one-third had ingested plastic bags. Endangered humpback whales that migrate between Antarctica and tropical waters to the north have been repeatedly spotted towing tangles of rope and other debris.
British biologist David Barnes fears that plastic debris may wreak even broader havoc by contributing to the spread of invasive species. Organisms can easily hitch a ride on a drifting net or cigarette lighter—and such objects may be even more effective vehicles for transporting species around the planet than ship hulls or ballast water, he said. There's more debris than ships in the oceans, and it travels everywhere, reaching places never visited by boats, such as the far-flung Antarctic Ocean islands, where the same flora and fauna have existed for eons, untouched by the rest of the world's restless mingling. When researchers stepped ashore on the aptly named Inaccessible Island, a tiny volcanic upthrow deep in the Antarctic Ocean, Barnes said they found fishing buoys, plastic bottles, and disposable lighters, any of which could be harboring unwelcome 'migr's. The first new species to arrive in such a place could have a massive impact on the system. "Plastic is not just an aesthetic problem," he said. "It can actually change entire ecosystems."
But there also are organisms that may be benefiting from the ever-growing flotilla of plastic, underscoring the complexities of how the natural world is coping with the synthetic assault. The oceans are filled with microorganisms—diatoms, bacteria, and plankton—continually searching for surfaces to glom on to. For them, plastic debris may be an incredible windfall—a veritable shower of FEMA trailers, according to David Karl, a University of Hawaii researcher. Karl's research crew was the one that found the Hong Kong lighter floating in the gyre. The lighter, like every other piece of plastic debris they hauled up in their nets, was coated with a fine slime of microbes, including bacteria and phytoplankton—organisms that are essential to the health of the ocean. To his surprise, Karl found that the plants attached to such plastic objects are copious producers of oxygen, churning out even more from their polymer platforms than is normally produced in open ocean. The finding suggests that, at some level, the multitude of plastic debris may be "improving the efficiency of the ocean to harvest and scavenge nutrients and produce food and oxygen," said Karl. Though given all the harm plastics cause, he was careful to say that he was not advocating more plastic in the ocean.
For all the dangers posed by floating bags, castaway lighters, and abandoned nets, the most profound and insidious threat may well be the trillions upon trillions of tiny pieces of plastic speckled across the world's beaches and scattered through its oceans. These itsy bits, collectively known as microdebris, were scarcely on experts' radar until recently. (The first conference devoted to microdebris was held in 2008.) But now they're what many researchers are most concerned about.
For one thing, their presence is increasing, say scientists who have been tracking marine debris over the decades. Microdebris has been accumulating on beaches around the world, even in remote nonindustrialized spots such as Tonga and Fiji. On my trip to Kehoe Beach, I was surprised to see that the sand was suffused with tiny pink, blue, yellow, and white shards of who knows what, as well as the smooth opaque beads that I recognized as preproduction pellets. How had industrial pellets gotten onto this rural beach? They might have leaked out of a shipping container carrying pellets overseas. But more likely, they came from a plastics-processing plant somewhere in the Bay Area, where they may have spilled from a storage silo or loading dock or railcar delivery area and then been blown or washed into storm drains and finally swept out to sea, only to be thrown back up on the beach.
The rise in microdebris is partly due to rising plastics production, which leads to an increase in pellets that can get into the environment: they're now thought to constitute about 10 percent of all ocean debris. It's also due to the growing use of teensy plastic beads as scrubbers in household and cosmetic cleaning products and for blas
ting dirt off ships. (I recently noticed that there are tiny protective beads affixed to the tips of new pens.) But the main source of microdebris is likely macrodebris: the larger pieces of junked plastic that have been fragmented by the sun and waves. Increasingly, experts fear that these bits are just as dangerous to marine wildlife as the lethal necklaces of packing straps and nylon netting that can choke seals and sharks and even whales.
The poster child for this kind of threat will be nowhere near as charismatic as the Laysan albatross. Instead it might be a lowly invertebrate, like the lugworm, a long reddish-brown creature that burrows in coastal sediment.
That's one of the animals Richard Thompson, a marine ecologist at the University of Plymouth in England, works with. Thompson trained to study minute marine organisms, like diatoms, algae, and plankton, but in the past decade his research has come to focus on the impact of minute marine debris. In one series of lab experiments, he fed micro-sized plastic particles and fibers to three different bottom-feeding creatures: lugworms, barnacles, and sand fleas, all of which eat various types of beach detritus. They all promptly ingested their synthetic meals. Sometimes the particles blocked their intestines, which was fatal. But if the bits were small enough, they passed through the animals' digestive tracts without consequence. Another researcher did a similar feeding study with mussels: not only did the mussels eat the plastic bits, but forty-eight days later, the bits were still in the mussels' systems.