I used to be embarrassed about spending time rinsing out plastic sandwich bags and reusing them. It’s the kind of thing I’d do furtively at home, hanging the plastic to dry in the basement where nobody would see. But lately I discovered a good rationale for my obsession: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
This stew of plastic and marine debris, at least twice the size of Texas by some estimates, is floating in the Pacific Ocean some 1,000 miles off the West Coast. In an intriguing (and nauseating) San Francisco Chronicle article, I found out that marine researcher Charles Moore has been studying this 3 million-ton waste dump in an area known as the North Pacific Gyre, which captures cast-off, wind-blown junk and spins it around in clockwise trade winds that circulate along the Pacific Rim. Moore, who’s been tracking the mass for more than 10 years, says it’s too remote and difficult to clean up. Besides, where would it go?
Overall, some 90 percent of floating marine litter is plastics like polyethylene, polypropylene, Styrofoam, nylon and saran, according to a Los Angeles Times report. About four-fifths of that trash comes from land, swept by wind or washed by rain off highways and streets and into the sea. The rest of the junk — including nets, synthetic floats and other gear — comes from ships.
This alphabet soup, as Moore calls it, isn’t just confined to the Garbage Patch. It’s one of six or so similar trash gyres on the planet. The U.N. Environment Program has calculated that 46,000 pieces of plastic litter float on every square mile of the oceans. By some estimates, 8 million pieces of litter enter oceans and seas every day. Even plastic from land-locked Colorado may end up blowing into the oceans.
And it’s going nowhere in a hurry. Instead of biodegrading, plastic in the ocean photodegrades, which means UV rays from the sun eventually break it down into smaller pieces. But that still takes a long time. Meanwhile, creatures flying above and living in the oceans think this colorful plastic — whatever the state of decomposition — is food, when in fact it’s lethal. Albatross chicks on Midway, an atoll halfway between North America and Japan, are fed clothespins, lighters, bottle caps, pens and other debris by adult birds who don’t know any better. This trash feast is killing hundreds of thousands of chicks every year. A study by the EPA found that chicks that died from dehydration or starvation had twice as much plastic in their stomachs as those that died from other causes.
That’s just one small example. Our refuse is being consumed by whales, turtles, fish, bottom feeders, zooplankton. It’s a planetary experiment with lethal consequences we’re waging in the innards of countless species.
It’s hard to spin anything positive from this. The amount of plastic in the oceans is largely underestimated and, by any measure, increasing. But there is some good news. People have known about the mess for quite awhile and are trying to work out solutions. Moore was so affected by the garbage he first sailed through in 1997 that he gave up retirement and founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to help protect marine environments and watersheds through research, education and restoration. His effort is echoed by marine researchers from just about every continent on the globe. And summits on marine plastic are held to exchange ideas and research to grapple with the planet’s choking junk.
Standing at my kitchen sink, rinsing another bag, I feel like I’m handling a toxic creature squirming to escape and float on the high seas. Such is the paradox of the human condition: We create stuff to make our lives easier, but end up working harder to get rid of it. The miracle of plastic has been around only 50 years, but some forms of it may take 100,000 years to fully degrade. I should stop using plastic bags altogether, but . . . oh, the convenience.
I wonder how it would feel to have colorful bits of plastic rumbling around in my stomach. In the end, this destructive trash isn’t just floating in some far-off ocean. It’s right here in my hands.
Paul Miller (paul.g.miller@colostate.edu) of Fort Collins is editor of Colorado State University Magazien and editor for public relations at Colorado State University.
For more on Charles Moore and the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which helps protect marine environments, visit www.algalita.org.
Tips to reduce the risk of sending plastic into the oceans:
• What doesn’t come into your home can’t go back out as waste. Do you really need a plastic bag for those small purchases?
• Love those sandwich bags to death. Wrapping lunch in plastic is convenient, but don’t throw out the bag when you’re done. Wash and reuse it until it dies a noble death.
• Invention is the mother of a greener planet. Those sturdy bags that line cereal boxes? Use them to carry, store or hold lots of things, like compost (until you’re ready to take it outside).
• Buy in bulk — or not at all. Bulk purchases tend to cut the amount of excessive packaging that’s wearing out the planet. But before buying that 50-pound box of saran wrap, ask yourself: Do I really need this?
• Use alternatives, such as cloth bags. One durable set of cloth bags will last years and can resolve the agonizing problem of using paper or plastic.
• Scour the Web for more on reducing/reusing/recycling, such as www.recyclenow.com, which shows you how to recycle dozens of items.
– By Paul Miller
