Fake Plastic Sea Ocean rubbish tip
We’re polluting the planet one water bottle at a time and simply swimming past the evidence floating in our seas. But plastic marine pollution can no longer be ignored.
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On 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.
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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Fake Plastic Sea (text) by Miles Masterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (4)
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