Deep Blue ... or Not
They call it ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, a ‘toxic stew of plastic trash’, a ‘floating rubbish dump twice the size of Texas’. What is going on? In the north Pacific ocean, between Japan and north America, a vast amount of floating plastic waste has drifted into the North Pacific Gyre, a relatively stationary region of the Pacific Ocean where the circular rotation around it draws in waste material. The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, each with its own version of the Garbage Patch. Together, these areas cover 40% of the sea, which corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface, making 25% of our planet a toilet that never flushes.
Where does it come from though? It is made up of bottles, toys, food containers, sports equipment, motor oil containers – in fact, pretty much anything plastic you can imagine, together with the usual fishing paraphernalia like nets and ropes. We all use and dispose of these things on a regularly basis – ever since plastic was invented 144 years ago and has become such a ubiquitous part of our lives. It is getting into our rivers and stormwater, is swept out to sea or simply dumped deliberately, and ends up in our oceans.
Discovered by chance by Captain Moore in the 1990s, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches for hundreds of kilometres and is as deep as 10 metres in parts. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning. A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.
Before plastic was invented most common household waste was biodegradable. But plastic doesn’t degrade biologically. It photodegrades, which means that only the sun can break it down … the guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use.
Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of the fact that plastic never really goes away. Except for the small amount that has been incinerated, every bit of plastic ever made still exists. It crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements, producing masses of lentil-sized plastic, called nurdles, that end up in the sea. These small pieces of plastic get eaten and form an unwanted part of the food chain. In samples taken from the North Pacific Gyre in 2001, the mass of plastic trawled in the ocean was six times more than that of zooplankton.
Worse still, plastic binds to many pollutants. Ordinarily the concentrations in the ocean have been pretty low, but fears are growing that plastics enable such pollutants to become bound and concentrated in the plastic and then passed on up the food chain. Absorbing up to a million times the concentrations of persistant organic pollutants in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbours, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. Once inside the body of a tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are heading directly to your dinner table.
These chemicals are also affecting us directly through our use of plastic, which is made from oil, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability and other qualities. These additives are implicated in causing health problems that range from cancer to liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss.
With plastic, recycling is more complicated than say glass or aluminium. Of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them – PET (labelled with #1 inside the triangle and used in coke bottles) and HDPE (labelled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs) – have much of an aftermarket. Only 3–5% of plastics are recycled in any way. ‘And recycling requires adding a new virgin layer of plastic,’ Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapours.
Durable, cheap, versatile – plastic seemed at first like a revelation. Plastic has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. But do our products have to be quite so lethal? New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived but are still not widespread.
Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as ‘cradle to cradle’ in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free and beneficial over the long haul. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities with ‘the building materials of the future’, including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, non-toxic polystyrene. Meanwhile, the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration is using satellites to identify and remove abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing.
Isn’t it time we thought twice about plastic? Do we really need it? Why don’t we support alternatives? Why don’t we reuse our containers instead of being a throwaway society? Why aren’t we forcing manufacturers and the retailers to change? We have only one planet. Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations?
Sources: www.cdnn.info/news/article/a071104.html and www.wikipedia.org
