The Plastic seas by Capt Paul Watson

[SpaceShark]

I think it would be nice if this forum had an environmental board to discuss issues like this

 

By Captain Paul Watson

 

"On the beach on San Juan Island, Washington, Allison

Lance walks her dogs every morning. She carries a

plastic bag in her hand to carry the bits and pieces

of plastic debris she picks up. Each morning she fills

the bag, but by the next morning there is always

another bag to be filled. Joey Racano does the same in

Huntington Beach further south in California. The

harvest of plastic waste is never-ending. Allison's

and Joey's beaches, and practically every beach around

the world is similarly cursed.

 

Recently in the Galapagos I retrieved plastic motor

oil bottles and garbage bags from a remote beach on

Santa Cruz island. Every year during crossings of the

Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, spotting plastic

is a daily and regular occurrence.

 

A June 2006 a United Nations Environmental Program

report estimated that there are an average of 46,000

pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the

surface of every square mile of ocean.

 

We live in a plastic convenience culture; virtually

every human being on this planet uses plastic

materials directly and indirectly every single day.

Our babies begin life on Earth by using some 210

million pounds of plastic diaper liners each year; we

give them plastic milk bottles, plastic toys, and buy

their food in plastic jars, paying with a plastic

credit card. Even avoiding those babies by using

contraceptives results in mass disposal of billions of

latex condoms, diaphragms, and hard plastic birth

control pill containers each year.

 

Every year we eat and drink from some thirty-four

billion newly manufactured bottles and containers. We

patronize fast food restaurants and buy products that

consume another fourteen billion pounds of plastic. In

total, our societies produce an estimated sixty

billion tons of plastic material every year.

 

Each of us on average uses 190 pounds of plastic

annually: bottled water, fast food packaging,

furniture, syringes, computers and computer diskettes,

packing materials, garbage bags and so much more. When

you consider that this plastic does not biodegrade and

remains in our ecosystems permanently, we are looking

at an incredibly high volume of accumulated plastic

trash that has been built up since the mid-twentieth

century.

 

Where does it go? There are only three places it can

go: our earth, our air, and our oceans.

 

All the plastic that has ever been produced has been

buried in landfills, incinerated, and dumped into

lakes, rivers, and oceans. When incinerated, the

plastics disperse non-biodegradable pollutants, much

of which inevitably find their way into marine

ecosystems as microscopic particles.

 

Back in 1991, my ship, the Sea Shepherd , was anchored

in the harbor of Port of Spain, Trinidad. It began to

rain a hard steady downpour. A few hours later, the

entire surface area of the harbor was dirty white, as

if an ice floe had entered this tropical port. The

"floe" consisted of Styrofoam, plastic bottles, and

assorted plastic materials, as far as the eye could

see, and it had come down from the streets, gutters,

and streams into the harbor. And, of course, it was

all washing out to sea, dispersed by wind and tide.

 

What happened to it after that? The sun and the brine

broke it down into little pellets of Styrofoam and

little pieces of plastic - each an insidious,

floating, deadly mine set adrift in an ocean of life.

 

And over the years these little nodules have drifted.

Many have been ingested by birds and fish. Weeks or

months later, their victims decompose on the surface

of the water or on a beach, re-exposing the nodules to

the light of the sun, to be blown by the winds back

into the sea. These vicious little inorganic parasites

continue to maim and kill in an endless assault upon

life in our oceans.

 

The simple fact is that when you drop a Styrofoam cup

onto the street, you're causing more damage than you

would by dropping a stick of dynamite into the ocean.

You set in motion an invasion of thousands of killer

plastibots that will cause death and destruction for

centuries to come.

 

Eighteen billion of those disposable diapers end up in

the oceans each year; Americans alone toss 2.5 million

plastic bottles into the sea every hour. Our oceans

are full of floating plastic debris. There is no place

in the oceans where a fine trawl will not reveal

plastic nodules. Studies by Captain Charles Moore and

the Algalita Foundation found that even in the middle

of the Pacific Ocean, plastic nodules have been found

to outweigh plankton by a ratio of six to one. Similar

studies in the Atlantic have revealed the same ratio.

 

In the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks, marooned on a desert

island in the South Pacific, finds a plastic siding of

a portable outhouse washed up on the beach. The stuff

is everywhere. I have found plastic bottles with

Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and English writing

littering the beaches of even the most remote Aleutian

Islands.

 

And yet we give this global threat very little thought

at all. It is out of the sight of land-dwelling

humanity, and thus out of mind. The only industry that

seems concerned about plastic pollution is the marine

insurance business. The intake of plastics into the

cooling systems of engines is one of the leading

causes of maritime engine failures. Last year,

Japanese insurance companies paid $50 million in

claims involving plastic-related engine and prop

damage.

 

Drifting in our seas are tens of thousands of miles of

monofilament ghost drift nets and lines. This same

netting ensnares ship props and the necks of sea lions

and turtles. Over the years, my crew have retrieved

hundreds of floating monofilament nets from the sea.

All of them contained the rotting corpses of fish and

birds.

 

In a well-documented beach clean-up in Orange County,

California, volunteers collected 106 million items,

weighing thirteen tons. The debris included

preproduction plastic pellets, foamed plastics, and

hard plastics; plastic constituted 99 percent of the

total material collected. The most abundant item found

on the beaches of Orange County was preproduction

plastic pellets, most of which originated from

transport losses. Approximately one quadrillion of

these pellets, or 60 billion pounds, are annually

manufactured in the United States alone. You never

hear about these spillages in the newspaper, and there

is not a single plastic pellet spillage response crew

anywhere in the world.

 

The plastic products that end up in the sea from

consumers constitute less than 30 percent of the total

plastics dumped into the oceans each year. The greater

amount comes from accidental spillage of plastic resin

pellets produced by the petrochemical industry for the

purpose of manufacturing consumer plastic products, or

the breakdown of finished products into Styrofoam

nodules or hard plastic particles. Plastic nodules are

lost routinely in both the shipping and manufacturing

stages, spilling from shipboard containers or from

trucks onto streets and into storm drains.

 

Oil spills occur every day in our oceans, and major

spills occur on average every two weeks somewhere in

the world's marine ecosystem. Although these oil

spills are notorious killers of marine wildlife, their

deadly impact is confined to relatively small areas

geographically, and the impact is reduced with time.

The Exxon Valdez spill, for example, was confined to

Alaska's Prince William Sound, and although the impact

on wildlife was felt for many years, the ecosystem is

slowly recovering. Yet this other kind of

petrochemical spill is more invasive and permanent.

This type of spill is cumulative. The spillage is

never cleaned up and removed, but accumulates

perpetually.

 

I don't think that I am exaggerating when I say that

the spillage of plastic resin pellets poses a

significant and unappreciated threat to survival of

sea life. The oceans are becoming plasticized. This

threat becomes more lethal each year as the cumulative

amount increases. The impact of this spillage

contributes to more casualties than all of the world's

annual oil spills, yet we know very little about the

problem. In fact, the public does not even recognize

plastic resin pellet spillage as a problem at all.

 

Plastic pellets also pose an additional threat. They

act as a transport medium for toxic chemicals. Many of

these pellets contain polychlorinated biphenyl's

(PCB). The chemicals were either absorbed from ambient

seawater or used in the manufacture of plasticizers

prior to the 1970's. This transfer of PCB's from

ingested pellets into birds was conclusively proven

and documented in the fatty tissues of great

shearwaters (Puffinus gravis). Studies have shown that

75 percent of all shearwaters examined contained

ingested plastic.

 

Of 312 species of seabirds, some 111 species, or 36

percent, are known to mistakenly ingest plastic. In

Hawaii, sixteen of the eighteen resident seabird

species are plastic ingestors, and 70 percent of this

ingestion is of floating plastic resin pellets.

Seabirds in Alaska have been found to have stomachs

entirely filled with indigestible plastic. Penguins on

South African beaches have suffered high chick

mortality from eating plastic regurgitated by the

parents, and 90 percent of blue petrel chicks examined

on South Africa's remote Marion Island had plastic

particles in their stomachs.

 

It is a global problem, and for seabirds there are no

safe places. For most people, the ocean is a big

toilet. The belief is that garbage, sewage, and

plastics are dispersed and taken away.

 

Unfortunately, nothing is really ever "taken away"; it

is simply perpetually circulated. The oceans are

pulsating with powerful currents, and these currents

keep plastic debris in constant circulation. As a

result, debris travels in what are called "gyres." The

gyre concentrates the garbage in areas where currents

meet. For example, one of the largest of these

movements in the Atlantic is called the central gyre,

and it moves in a clockwise circular pattern driven by

the Gulf Stream. The central gyre concentrates heavily

in the northern Sargasso Sea, a place that is also

host to numerous spawning fish species.

 

The number of floating plastic pellets found in the

Sargasso Sea has been measured in excess of 3,500

parts per square kilometer. The same ratio of 3,500

parts per square kilometer was found in the waters of

the southern coasts of Africa. This study found that

plastic pollution had increased in South African

waters from 1989 to the present by 190 percent.

 

Birds, turtles, and fish mistake the tiny nodules for

fish eggs. Garbage bags, plastic soda rings, and

Styrofoam particles are regularly eaten by sea

turtles. A floating garbage bag looks like a jellyfish

to a turtle. The plastic clogs the turtles'

intestines, robbing the animals of vital nutrients,

and it has been the cause of untold turtle losses to

starvation. All seven of the world's sea turtle

species suffer mortality from both plastic ingestion

and plastic entanglement. One turtle found dead off

Hawaii carried over 1,000 pieces of plastic in its

stomach and intestines. And recently, a land-based

turtle rescued in a Florida waterway by Stephen

Nordlinger was unable to submerge due to the amount of

Styrofoam trapped in its body, making it permanently

buoyant.

 

The amount of plastic pellets present on beaches is

astonishingly high. In New Zealand, one beach was

found to contain over 100,000 pellets per square

meter. Thus, it is not so farfetched to suggest that

people are in fact sunbathing on plastic beaches -

literally. I have stopped my ship in mid-ocean and

found flip-flops, suntan oil bottles, plastic Coke

bottles, garbage bags, and even large floating

industrial plastic sheets. In each place sampled, we

have also found plastic pellets.

 

Once, on the bottom of the Mediterranean off France, I

witnessed a scene that appalled me. The entire bottom

was made of plastic. Bottles and plastic bags swaying

with the tide, replacing the sea grasses and algae. It

was especially sad to see one little fish scurry from

behind a white plastic bag to take cover from me in a

sunken automobile tire.

 

Brushing aside another drifting white bag, I spied a

flicker of red on the bottom. What I found was a

plastic face staring up at me with a great big smile

and two enormous plastic ears. It was the decapitated

head of a Mickey Mouse doll.

 

It's a plastic sea out there."

 

Permission is hereby given by the author for this

essay to be freely distributed and/or published.