PLASTIC OCEAN PART ONE - DUMPED AT SEA
PLASTIC OCEAN PART ONE - DUMPED AT SEA Plastic polluted oceans; How did our seas come to have so much plastic in them?
THIS IS THE WORLD’S LARGEST RUBBISH DUMP Our oceans cover 70% of the planets surface, an area so vast that for generations we’ve believed it can clean itself. To a certain degree this is true but what is the true extent of our plastic disposable lifestyle? The oceans are beautiful and we depend on their infinite resources but what lies within the top 10 metres of the oceans surface is something man-made and plastic. A century of discarded plastic, dumped or blown out to sea has taken its toll on our environment. The Great Oceans cannot make plastic pollution disappear it can only break it down into millions and millions of tiny pieces. A single plastic bottle can degrade into enough tiny pieces to leave a polymer on each of the worlds beaches from Huntington, California to our very own Gyllngvase in Falmouth. Is it time to live a life less disposable?
HOW DID OUR OCEANS COME TO COLLECT BITS OF PLASTIC?
In our quest to live a convenient lifestyle we have become obsessed with plastic, its cheap, disposable and durable. You can find it in even the most remote areas of the world. Richard Grant explains how we became to love plastic. The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio observed that every new technology opens the possibility for a new form of accident. By inventing the train, you also invent derailments. By inventing the aeroplane, you create plane crashes and midair collisions. When Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist, started tinkering around in his garage in New York, working on the first synthetic polymer, who could have foreseen that a hundred years later plastic would outweigh plankton sixto-one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Baekeland was trying to mimic shellac, a natural polymer secreted by the Asian scale beetle and used at the time to coat electrical wires. In 1909 he patented a mouldable hard plastic that he called Bakelite, and which made him very rich indeed. Chemists were soon experimenting with variations, breaking down the long hydrocarbon chains in crude petroleum into smaller ones and mixing them together, adding chlorine to get PVC, introducing gas to get polystyrene. Nylon was invented in 1935 and found its first application in stockings, and then after the Second World War came acrylics, foam rubber,
polythene, polyurethane, Plexi¬glass and more: an incredible outpouring of new plastic products and the revolution of clear plastic food wraps and containers, which preserved food longer and allowed people to live much further away from where it was produced.
LOOK AROUND YOU. START COUNTING THINGS MADE OF PLASTIC AND DON’T FORGET YOUR BUTTONS, THE ELASTIC IN YOUR UNDERWEAR, THE LITTLE CAPS ON THE ENDS OF YOUR SHOELACES. Single-use plastic bags first appeared in British supermarkets in the late 1960s; worldwide there are more than a trillion manufactured every year, although the upward trend is now levelling off and falling in many countries, including Britain. We reduced our plastic bag use by 26% last year, to 9.9 billion. Bottled water entered the mass market in the mid-1980s. Global consumption is now 200 billion litres a year and only one in five of those plastic bottles is recycled.
Look around you. Start counting things made of plastic and don’t forget your buttons, the elastic in your underwear, the little caps on the end of your shoelaces. The stuff is absolutely ubiquitous, forming the most basic infrastructure of modern consumer society. We are scarily out of the womb when we meet our first plastic: wristband, aspirator, thermometer, nappy. We gnaw on plastic teething rings and for the rest of our lives scarcely pass a moment away from plastics. The benefits of plastic, most of which relate to convenience, consumer choice and profit, have been phenomenal. But except for the small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic that has ever been manufactured is still somewhere in the environment, and some 100 million tons of it are floating in the oceans. Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are five major gyres in the world’s oceans and that their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earth’s surface, they are all accumulating a thick nasty plastic soup. ●
HOW MUCH PLASTIC CAN TWO PEOPLE PICK IN 15 MINUTES, FROM THIS SMALL AREA? 29 APRIL 2011 - PORTHTOWAN BEACH, CORNWALL, UK
=-09-=099-=]-091 =-09-=099-=]-091
TOTAL 621
WHICH INCLUDES: 16 COTTON BUDS, 11 BOTTLE CAPS, A BUCKLE, PEG AND A PEN LID.
The United Nation’s Environmental Programme says that 80% of plastic pollution in the ocean comes from land, while the remaining 20% is dumped at sea by boats and ships.
WHERE DOES PLASTIC POLLUTION COME FROM? Plastic is consumed and discarded on a daily basis worldwide. In the UK we use 275,000 tonnes of the stuff every year which includes an astonishing 500 plastic carrier bags per person. The problem is that although most discarded plastic is sent to landfill, a proportion of it will end up in our oceans either by being dumped at sea or making its way their from land. Take a look around you; most of what we eat, drink, or use in any way comes packaged in petroleum plastic; a material designed to last forever, yet used for products that we then throw away.
PLASTIC IS A MATERIAL DESIGNED TO LAST FOREVER, YET WE USE IT FOR PRODUCTS THAT WE THEN THROW AWAY. This throwaway mentality is a relatively recent phenomenon. Just a generation ago, we packaged our products in reusable or recyclable materials like glass, metals, and paper, and designed products that would last. Today, our landfills and beaches are awash in plastic packaging, and expendable products that have no value at the end of their short life cycle.
TAKE A LOOK AROUND YOU; MOST OF WHAT WE EAT, DRINK, OR USE IN ANY WAY COMES PACKAGED IN PETROLEUM PLASTIC. The short-term convenience of using and throwing away plastic products carries a very inconvenient long-term truth. These plastic water
bottles, cups, utensils, electronics, and gadgets we dispose of daily are rarely recycled in a closed loop. Marcus Eriksen of the 5 Gyres project says “We currently recover only 5% of the plastics we produce. What happens to the rest of it? Roughly 50% is buried in landfills, some is remade into durable goods, and much of it remains ’unaccounted for’, lost in the environment where it ultimately washes out to sea.”
WE RECYCLE 5% OF PLASTICS. WHAT HAPPENS TO THE REST? The United Nations Environmental Programme says that 20% of the plastic debris in the ocean is from sea while the other 80% comes from land, from our watersheds.
50% IS BURIED IN LANDFILLS, SOME IS MADE INTO DURABLE GOODS AND MUCH OF IT REMAINS ’UNACCOUNTED FOR’, LOST IN THE ENVIRONMENT WHERE IT ULTIMATELY WASHES OUT TO SEA. The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets, lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter left behind at the beach is also a major contributor as well as the fishing industry. ●
THERE IS AN ESTIMATED 100 MILLION TONS OF PLASTIC FLOATING IN THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH. 1 ton of plastic is equivalent to approximately 20,000 2 litre plastic bottles.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of (plastic) flotsam are circulating in the region between China and the US. Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the Doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.
“EVERY TIME I CAME ON DECK TO SURVEY THE HORIZON, I SAW A SOAP BOTTLE, BOTTLE CAP OR A SHARD OF PLASTIC BOBBING BY.” Captain Charles Moore
Captain Charles Moore came across something strange when returning from a yacht race to Hawaii in 1997. On his return voyage, Captain Moore veered from the usual sea route and saw an ocean he had never known.
“HERE I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN AND THERE WAS NOWHERE I COULD GO TO AVOID THE PLASTIC.” Captain Charles Moore
For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that
seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable, now it’s 90% plastic. “Every time I came on deck to survey the horizon, I saw a soap bottle, bottle cap or a shard of plastic waste bobbing by. Here I was in the middle of the ocean and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.” He had discovered what some have since deemed the world’s largest landfill, The Trash Islands or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
THESE ISLANDS ARE NOT ONES YOU CAN STAND ON WITH YOUR OWN TWO FEET NOR ARE THEY ISLANDS YOU CAN SEE FROM SPACE. In reality these islands are not ones you can stand on with your own two feet nor are they islands you can see from space but vast oceans. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, said “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that.
It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”
“THE ORIGINAL IDEA THAT PEOPLE HAD WAS THAT IT WAS AN ISLAND OF PLASTIC GARBAGE THAT YOU COULD ALMOST WALK ON... Moore has since dedicated his time and resources to understanding and remediating the oceans plastic load. Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and went back to the North Pacific Gyre two years after the initial discovery to find out more. “Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind boggling discovery” says Moore.
more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,’ he says. ‘No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.’ So ended Moore’s retirement. He turned his small volunteer environmental monitoring group into the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, enlisted scientists, launched public awareness campaigns and devoted all his considerable energies to exploring what would become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and studying the broader problem of marine plastic pollution, which is accumulating in all the world’s oceans. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now been tentatively mapped into an east and west section and the combined weight of plastic there is estimated at three million tons and increasing steadily, with predictions of 100,000,000 tons. It appears to be the big daddy of them all, but we do not know for sure.
IT’S NOT QUITE LIKE THAT. IT’S LIKE A PLASTIC SOUP. IT’S ENDLESS FOR AN AREA THAT IS MAYBE TWICE THE SIZE OF THE UNITED STATES.” WHAT THEY DISCOVERED WAS THAT Marcus Eriksen FLOATING BENEATH THE SURFACE What they discovered was that floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth OF THE WATER, TO A DEPTH OF of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic 10 METRES, WAS A MULTITUDE flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. ‘Bottle caps, OF SMALL PLASTIC FLECKS AND toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, PARTICLES, IN MANY COLOURS, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn’t SWIRLING LIKE SNOWFLAKES OR identify. It wasn’t a revelation so much as a FISH FOOD. gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here.’ An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn’t even close. ‘We found six times
Dr Pearn Niiler of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, the world’s leading authority on ocean currents, thinks that there is an even bigger garbage patch in the South Pacific, in the vicinity of Easter Island, but no scientists have yet gone to look. ●
THE PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH IS ESTIMATED TO BE TWICE THE SIZE OF THE UNITED STATES.
Labrador Current
North Atlantic Drift
Gulf Stream
NORTH ATLANTIC GYRE A. K. A. THE NORTH ATLANTIC GARBAGE PATCH
North Equatorial Current
Equatorial Counter South Equatorial Current
East Greenland Current
Norwegian Current
SO, WHAT ARE THESE OCEANIC GYRES? Canary Current
Ocean currents and the earths trade winds move warm and cold water and marine debris around the oceans. At the centre of these currents and winds are the oceanic gyres; vast areas of open oceans where marine debris collects. Except it’s not just organic matter migrating along these currents, it’s now the motorways for plastic pollution.
29,000 RUBBER DUCKS SWIMMING THE GLOBE They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child’s bath - but so far they have floated halfway around the world. The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship nearly 20 years ago.
1992
29,000 RUBBER DUCKS, ARE SPILLED FROM A CARGO SHIP IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN.
1995–00
1995
SOME DUCKS ESCAPE THE PACIFIC GYRE AND HEAD NORTH, TO THE ARCTIC. FROZEN INTO THE ICE THE DUCKS TRAVEL SLOWLY ACROSS THE POLE, MOVING EAST.
CAUGHT IN THE SUBPOLAR GYRE THE DUCKS TAKE 10 MONTHS TO BEGIN LANDING ON THE SHORES OF ALASKA.
2000
1992–95
DUCKS BEGIN REACHING THE NORTH ATLANTIC WHERE THEY BEGIN TO THAW AND MOVE SOUTHWARD.
THE DUCKS TAKE THREE YEARS TO CIRCLE AROUND THE PACIFIC GYRE.
2003–07 DUCKS FOUND IN SCOTLAND AND LATER, IN DEVON.
1992–95
SOME HEADED SOUTH TO AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AMERICA AND NEW ZEALAND.
THE DUCKS HAVE SPENT TWENTY YEARS TRAVELLING THE SEAS Since 1992 when a cargo ship lost the container at sea during a storm, the plastic toys have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack, and have even been spotted in Britain. While the ducks are undoubtedly a loss to the bath-time fun of thousands of children, their adventures at sea have proved an invaluable aid to science, helping researchers to chart the Great Ocean Currents.id to science, helping researchers to chart the great ocean currents.
North Pacific Gyre
North Atlantic Gyre
South Pacific Gyre South Atlantic Gyre
THE FIVE SUBTROPICAL GYRES COVER QUARTER OF EARTHS SURFACE
Indian Ocean Gyre
There are five major subtropical gyres in the world’s oceans... and they are all accumulating plastic. Gyres are areas of the ocean where marine debris collates due to ocean currents and the earths blustery winds. Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are five major subtropical gyres in the world’s oceans of which their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earth’s surface. All of the gyres have a higher concentration of plastic than the rest of the ocean, creating a nasty plastic soup. ●
THILAFUSHI ISLAND: AN UNSPOILT CORAL REEF IS NOW GROWING BY ONE SQUARE METRE EVERY DAY WITH RUBBISH.
THIS ISN’T A GARBAGE PATCH, THIS IS A MAN MADE GARBAGE ISLAND How does a remote island community deal with it’s waste? The Maldives are an archipelago of 1,192 islands in the Indian Ocean, grouped into 26 atolls. Tourism is the country’s most important source of income. The country has a population of 270,000. But last year 650,000 tourists visited the islands, and they produce waste which needs to be disposed of... somewhere.
THIS IS PARADISE? THILAFUSHI ISLAND Thilafushi receives hundreds of tons of rubbish from other islands in the Maldives every day. Sixteen years ago it was an unspoilt coral reef. But it is now growing by one square metre every day with rubbish. Boats travel to and forth Thilafushi all day, transporting two or three trucks of waste every trip. The photographer Lasse W. Fosshaug said, “This fire was constantly burning, and everything was thrown on it... the fumes were horrifying. The drivers drove straight into it with their loads, not even wearing scarfs in front of their mouths.� What will it take for global communities to change their attitudes towards waste and consumption?
PLASTIC OCEAN
PART TWO - DEATH BY PLASTIC
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