VOYAGE INTO OCEAN PLASTICS
eXXpedition is an all-female sailing voyage and scientific research mission investigating the causes of and solutions to ocean plastic pollution. In a rare epoch when Emily Penn is landbound (due to lockdown), Libby Munford took the chance to interview the co-founder and mission director, to discover all about the mission, ethos of the project, and how the packaging industry can get involved and benefit from the findings. LM: Can you tell me a bit about your background and explain what eXXpedition is all about?
EP: I had a job lined up in Australia, and I wanted to get there from England without taking an aeroplane, partly to minimize my carbon footprint but also because I didn’t want to miss all of the bits in between. I ended up finding a place on a boat that was going around the world and set off on this amazing adventure across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. What I wasn’t expecting to find was plastic thousands of miles from land, and I started seeing plastic as an issue at a time when people weren’t really talking about it. From there, I was led off in a completely different career direction. First, I set up a waste management system on a small island in Tonga, then I went to investigate the accumulation zones where a lot of ocean plastic ends up, before setting up eXXpedition a few years later.
LM: Could you tell me a bit more about how the project itself works? EP: When I originally started, I realized that plastics were breaking up into microplastics, and we weren’t finding these big islands of trash that we thought we were going out there to look for. This brought up the realization that they might be getting into the food chain and made me think about how we could clean this up. For example, after a blood test, I found that chemicals used in the production of plastic were actually inside my body. Some of these chemicals are endocrine disruptors that mimic hormones and can particularly impact women when we’re pregnant, giving birth, or breastfeeding – which can affect future generations. This is what led me to the idea of trying to tackle this problem with a team of women. Our first expedition set out across the north Atlantic Ocean in 2014 to do more research into a pile of unanswered questions around health and microplastics. Our aim is to sail around the world to four of the accumulation zones and the Arctic with a multi-disciplined team of 300 women from across the world. Our first aim is to conduct scientific research to try and learn about the kinds of plastics that are out there. To do this, we collect samples and analyse them onboard, allowing us to determine the polymer type of the Packaging Europe | 11 |
