There Is No Away To Throw To

Reno News & Review, May 6, 2010.

But these days I know that the cleansing power of the ocean is increasingly imaginary, as the plastic shopping bags and soda bottles we use end up floating through the Pacific in a giant swirling mass variously called the “North Pacific Gyre,” “Garbage Patch” or “Trash Soup.” Estimates rattling around the Internet peg the size at 3.5 million tons and twice the size of Texas. Because it floats and swirls, precise figures are difficult to establish, but since researchers analyze it through water sample collections, they can tell us that the ratio of plastic bits to plankton is 6-1 and climbing exponentially.

Some of the plastics in this floating mass are 50 years old—reminding us that plastic is nonbiodegradable—and while the pieces break apart and get smaller, they remain (often toxic) polymers down to the molecular level. Animals consume this garbage, many die from the toxics or from blocked digestive systems. Albatross parents mistake plastic bottle caps for food and feed them to their babies, with fatal results.

What does any of this have to do with us, Coloradoans in a landlocked state, indeed the only state whose waters do not run to the ocean? At the most basic and direct level, many of us consume ocean-caught fish, and that fish has consumed plastic, so we are putting the trash of a half-century back into our own bodies.

At a more ethereal but equally important level, the ocean gyre is a potent reminder that there is no “away” to which we throw things. We have all seen plastic bags ballooning through the Washoe zephyrs, caught in tree branches, or riding atmospheric thermals into the stratosphere. Our playa-borne thermals carry minerals into the atmosphere to impact biozones all over the planet. Our lightweight plastics get into the ocean through the same breezy currents.

Some in our community are working to change this. Last year, the Washoe County Health Department launched the “I Refill” campaign to encourage the use of re-usable water bottles. Prior to the economic meltdown, city of Reno staffers were researching the feasibility of a ban on plastic bags. But we could do better. In Germany a few years ago, the government enacted a tax on waste, so consumers started throwing away packaging at the store. Retailers didn’t want to pay the tax, so they pressured suppliers to stop packaging in plastic, and the manufacturers did. This is the kind of upstream problem-solving we really need.

A plastic bag or bottle may seem convenient but next time you are faced with the choice, remember the immense hassle of removing pea-sized bits from miles of rolling ocean, or plastic molecules from your sushi.

Paradise Recycled: Reinventing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

What to do with all that plastic? Make a habitable floating island.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a jumble of plastic trash that spans hundreds of miles northwest of Hawaii, has gotten lots of attention ever since billionaire adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild announced his plans to visit the trash mass on the Plastiki, a boat constructed from recycled waste and webs of plastic. Now the Plastiki has launched, and a group of architects from Rotterdam have already come up with another way to draw attention to the plastic gyre: a Hawaii-sized island made entirely out of recycled plastic.

Recycled Island is a research project on the potential of realizing a habitable floating island in the Pacific Ocean made from all the plastic waste that is momentarily floating around in the ocean. The proposal has three main aims; Cleaning our oceans from a gigantic amount of plastic waste; Creating new land; And constructing a sustainable habitat. Recycled island seeks the possibilities to recycle the plastic waste on the spot and to recycle it into a floating entity. The constructive and marine technical aspects take part in the project of creating a sea worthy island.

It sounds crazy — and maybe it is — but the idea makes sense. WHIM points out that the biggest concentration of plastic in the ocean has a footprint as large as France and Spain combined. That means there is plenty of plastic already floating around to make an island. And wouldn't it be nice to provide future climate change refugees with a new sustainable home? Not that anyone would necessarily want to live on a hunk of floating plastic, but the idea of taking trash and turning it into something useful is always thought-provoking.

 

A 2nd garbage patch: Plastic soup seen in Atlantic

The floating garbage — hard to spot from the surface and spun together by a vortex of currents — was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores islands.

The studies describe a soup of micro-particles similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a phenomenon discovered a decade ago between Hawaii and California that researchers say is likely to exist in other places around the globe."We found the great Atlantic garbage patch," said Anna Cummins, who collected plastic samples on a sailing voyage in February.

The debris is harmful for fish, sea mammals — and at the top of the food chain, potentially humans — even though much of the plastic has broken into such tiny pieces they are nearly invisible.

Since there is no realistic way of cleaning the oceans, advocates say the key is to keep more plastic out by raising awareness and, wherever possible, challenging a throwaway culture that uses non-biodegradable materials for disposable products. "Our job now is to let people know that plastic ocean pollution is a global problem — it unfortunately is not confined to a single patch," Cummins said.

The research teams presented their findings in February at the 2010 Oceans Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon. While scientists have reported finding plastic in parts of the Atlantic since the 1970s, the researchers say they have taken important steps toward mapping the extent of the pollution.

Cummins and her husband, Marcus Eriksen, of Santa Monica, California, sailed across the Atlantic for their research project. They plan similar studies in the South Atlantic in November and the South Pacific next spring. On the voyage from Bermuda to the Azores, they crossed the Sargasso Sea, an area bounded by ocean currents including the Gulf Stream. They took samples every 100 miles (160 kilometers) with one interruption caused by a major storm. Each time they pulled up the trawl, it was full of plastic.

A separate study by undergraduates with the Woods Hole, Massachusetts-based Sea Education Association collected more than 6,000 samples on trips between Canada and the Caribbean over two decades. The lead investigator, Kara Lavendar Law, said they found the highest concentrations of plastics between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude, an offshore patch equivalent to the area between roughly Cuba and Washington, D.C.

Long trails of seaweed, mixed with bottles, crates and other flotsam, drift in the still waters of the area, known as the North Atlantic Subtropical Convergence Zone. Cummins' team even netted a Trigger fish trapped alive inside a plastic bucket.

But the most nettlesome trash is nearly invisible: countless specks of plastic, often smaller than pencil erasers, suspended near the surface of the deep blue Atlantic. "It's shocking to see it firsthand," Cummins said. "Nothing compares to being out there. We've managed to leave our footprint really everywhere." Still more data are needed to assess the dimensions of the North Atlantic patch.

Charles Moore, an ocean researcher credited with discovering the Pacific garbage patch in 1997, said the Atlantic undoubtedly has comparable amounts of plastic. The east coast of the United States has more people and more rivers to funnel garbage into the sea. But since the Atlantic is stormier, debris there likely is more diffuse, he said.

Whatever the difference between the two regions, plastics are devastating the environment across the world, said Moore, whose Algalita Marine Research Foundation based in Long Beach, California, was among the sponsors for Cummins and Eriksen.

"Humanity's plastic footprint is probably more dangerous than its carbon footprint," he said.

Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish: A paper cited by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says as many as 100,000 marine mammals could die trash-related deaths each year.

The plastic bits, which can be impossible for fish to distinguish from plankton, are dangerous in part because they sponge up potentially harmful chemicals that are also circulating in the ocean, said Jacqueline Savitz, a marine scientist at Oceana, an ocean conservation group based in Washington.

As much as 80 percent of marine debris comes from land, according to the United Nations Environmental Program.

The U.S. government is concerned the pollution could hurt its vital interests.

"That plastic has the potential to impact our resources and impact our economy," said Lisa DiPinto, acting director of NOAA's marine debris program. "It's great to raise awareness so the public can see the plastics we use can eventually land in the ocean."

DiPinto said the federal agency is co-sponsoring a new voyage this summer by the Sea Education Association to measure plastic pollution southeast of Bermuda. NOAA is also involved in research on the Pacific patch.

"Unfortunately, the kinds of things we use plastic for are the kinds of things we don't dispose of carefully," Savitz said. "We've got to use less of it, and if we're going to use it, we have to make sure we dispose of it well."

 

Written by Lindsay Crowder
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Great Pacific Garbage Patch In the United States, we generate over 400 million tons of trash each year. Some of that waste biodegrades, some of that waste can be recycled, but some of it sits around for hundreds of years with nowhere to go. Some of the most stubborn waste is plastic. Americans alone throw out about 60 million plastic water bottles everyday, use about 20,000 plastic bags in their lifetime, and produce enough plastic to shrink wrap the state of Texas every year. The scary part is that all of that plastic takes over a thousand years to biodegrade and a good amount of it is left lingering in our oceans. Over the past 50 years, as we have transitioned from debris that can be broken down by microorganisms to the almost indestructible and abundant use of plastics. Now, every piece of plastic waste that has made it into our oceans is swirling around in patches that together form a small continent. The largest of this unfortunate mess has been referred to as the “Pacific Trash Vortex” or the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” but it is most widely known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” A crew of researchers led by Charles Moore went to explore the Patch a few years back and decided to take back some of the debris they found, including the following:1 * A drum of hazardous chemicals; * An inflated volleyball, half covered in gooseneck barnacles; * A plastic coat hanger with a swivel hook; * A cathode-ray tube for a nineteen-inch TV; * An inflated truck tire mounted on a steel rim; * Numerous plastic, and some glass, fishing floats; * A gallon bleach bottle that was so brittle it crumbled in our hands; and * A menacing medusa of tangled net lines and hawsers. The plastic to sea life ratios are 6:1. Currently, there are no cohesive plans to clean up the mess. Charles Moore estimates that 80% of the garbage comes from land-based sources, and 20% from ships at sea.2 Unfortunately, all of that garbage works harmoniously with the North Pacific currents to keep it out at sea. The Formation Picture the large stretch of the Pacific Ocean that lies between the coast of California and Hawaii. The Patch resides in this part of the Pacific; a relatively stationary part of the ocean that is characterized by clockwise currents and light winds known as the North Pacific Gyre. The rotational pattern described by the North Pacific Gyre draws in waste material from the shorelines of the North Pacific Ocean, including the coastal waters off North America and Japan. As material circulates in the current, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center-taking up to 15 years to make it from shore to center.3The increase in plastic consumption is directly contributing to the growth of the Patch. Plastic is light, it floats, and it is essentially indestructible. Although it does not biodegrade, it does photo-degrade. Photo-degrading is a process in which plastic is broken down by sunlight into smaller and smaller pieces, all of which are still plastic polymers, eventually becoming individual molecules of plastic, still too tough for any organism to naturally digest.4 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch will continue to grow as we continue to throw away plastic. The Effects on Wildlife The area in the ocean where the Patch lies is not heavily populated or frequented by humans, making wildlife directly vulnerable to its threats. The floating debris is mistaken as zooplankton by jellyfish, sea turtles, Black-footed Albatross, and other marine birds and animals. Organic pollutants, such as PCBs, DDT and PAHs, can be absorbed in the debris and later ingested. The ingested debris is not only impossible for the wildlife to digest, but it also adds toxic pollutants into the food chain. Hormone receptors cannot distinguish these toxics from the natural estrogenic hormone, estradiol, and when the pollutants dock at these receptors instead of the natural hormone, they have been shown to have a number of negative effects in everything from birds and fish to humans.5 When not eating the garbage, many marine birds, fish, and other animals are also found entangled in the mess. Is there an End? If we somehow managed to stop all use of plastic and pick up every bit of garbage that is improperly disposed of, then we may put the growth of the massive Great Pacific Garbage Patch on hold. Charles Moore says, “The levels of plastic particulates in the Pacific have at least tripled in the last 10 years and a tenfold increase in the next decade is not unreasonable. Then, 60 times more plastic than plankton will float on its surface.”6 We must learn to reduce our use of plastics, reuse what we can, and recycle what cannot be reused. Without an organized effort to clean up the mess, it is up to the individual to make an effort to minimize the mess. For more information and how to help, check out http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/.