Cleaner, Safer Beaches and Coasts

NOAA’s Marine Debris Program

By Craig Collins

In January of 2017, the Ellen

MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, released a report with a jarring prediction: By 2050, plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish. Every year, 8 mil- lion tons of plastic enter the ocean, a rate equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck every minute. Garbage patches of varying sizes are now circulating in each of the five rotating ocean currents, or gyres.

Lt. Cmdr. Marc Pickett and Lt. Mark Sarmek wrestle to free an entangled Hawaiian monk seal at French Frigate Shoals, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, during a marine debris survey and removal cruise. The seal survived.

NOAA scientists and others are still studying how these garbage patches may impact human and animal health. In the meantime, because about 80 percent of pollution to the marine environment comes from land, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program – since 2006, the federal lead for addressing the problem of marine debris – focuses on prevention and removal of plastics and other debris from shorelines and coastal areas.

While the effects of marine debris on public health aren’t yet fully understood, the Marine Debris Program has begun to calculate the economic impact of the trash, lost and damaged fishing gear, and other solid and human-made materials found in our ocean and Great Lakes.

In 2016, a study in the Chesapeake Bay determined that the estimated 145,000 derelict crab pots lying at the bottom of the bay were cutting into the blue crab harvest, killing approximately 3.3 million blue crabs every year. Models estimated that removing derelict crab traps could increase harvests by more than 38 million pounds over a sixyear period. A 2019 study aimed to understand impacts to the largest employer in coastal and Great Lakes economies – the tourism and recreation sector, which accounts for $124 billion of the nation’s gross domestic product. The study found that coastal communities could benefit substantially from the removal of marine debris. For example, the study found that if marine debris were eliminated on beaches in Orange County, California, the number of visits by tourists and recreational users would increase, boosting tourism spending by $187 million over the three-month summer season.

Marine debris can degrade the coastal environment, interfere with the safety of navigable waters, and injure or kill marine and coastal wildlife. Given these ecological and economic impacts, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program has adopted a multi-pronged approach to attacking the problem.

According to Nancy Wallace, director of the Marine Debris Program, the program’s prevention efforts are nonregulatory, focusing on local and regional outreach and education. For example, she said, “We’ve supported partners in Virginia to encourage people to stop releasing balloons.” The program, the Joyful Send-off campaign, focuses on positive alternatives to the custom, during weddings or other celebratory events, of releasing balloons into the air. Balloons eventually come back down to Earth, often in water, where animals such as turtles, whales, seabirds, and dolphins can confuse them with prey, swallow them, become sick, and even die.

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Another prevention program, conducted in partnership with the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is Turtle Trash Collectors, an elementary school program in which students are able to visualize what ingesting debris does to turtles using stuffed toys. “It’s about learning that our behaviors can really impact wildlife,” said Wallace. The Marine Debris Program also works on a macro-scale, with federal and international partners, to raise awareness about the impacts of marine debris and how to prevent it, through events such as the International Marine Debris Conference.

The Marine Debris Program helps to lead and support removal efforts around the country. The program has supported more than 165 removal projects that have cleared more than 17,400 metric tons of debris from U.S. coasts and waters.

With its Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project, the program attempts to characterize the scope of the nation’s marine debris problem and how it changes over time. The program enlists the efforts of citizen scientists around the country, who increase the reach of the program’s resources and provide a persistent presence in coastal communities, monitoring more than 400 sites in 20 states and internationally.

Plastic debris littering the Hawaiian shoreline. Hawaii is located near the center of the North Pacific gyre, where debris tends to concentrate.

Marine Debris Program activities are informed by a vigorous research program. “We have a few different aspects of our research program,” said Wallace. “The first is really trying to understand what the impacts of marine debris are.” The program is supporting investigations into the effects of microplastics on the growth and physiology of commercially valuable seafood species, such as black sea bass, blue crab larvae, and steelhead trout. Another research focus is on pathways – how debris ends up on beaches and in the water. “We are interested in learning more about how marine debris travels to our oceans so that we can work upstream to stop it,” Wallace said. “The information we learn from the research we support helps us identify ways to prevent marine debris, and helps to improve the environment and the economy in these areas.”