10 Million Tons Floating: Our Plastic Oceans

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 floats everywhere. Watson found plastic bottles with Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and English writing littering the beaches of even the most remote Aleutian Islands.

“Drifting in our seas are tens of thousands of miles of monofilament ghost drift nets and lines,” Watson said.  “This same netting ensnares ship props and the necks of sea lions and turtles. Over the years, my crews 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.”

Watson continued, “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 recovered. Yet this other kind of petrochemical spill is more invasive and permanent.

“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. 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.”

Captain Watson added, “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.”

We face a global problem, and for seabirds no safe places exist. For most people, the ocean provides a virtual toilet.  Unfortunately, nothing flushes away; it circulates forever.

“The oceans pulsate with powerful currents, and these currents keep plastic debris in constant circulation,” Watson said. “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.

“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. Another could not submerge from so much Styrofoam in its stomach.”

Unending amounts of plastic pellets wash onto beaches worldwide. 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,” Watson said. “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 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.”

What can we do to change this destruction of our natural world?  We need an incentive driven, 10-20 cent deposit/return on all plastics sold anywhere in the world to ensure return.  Such an economic incentive will make certain that all plastic will be returned either by the customer or an army of kids picking up plastic trash for money.  Simple, easy and effective! 

How can you take action:  www.plasticrecycling.com ; www.greenerchoices.org ; www.seasheperd.org ; www.peopleinaction.com

 
 Take action:  www.thesocialcontract.com ; www.numbersusa.com ;

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border.  In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece.  He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges.  He works to bring about sensible world population balance at his website www.frostywooldridge.com

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