Posted on January 19, 2022
An Earth-changing development took place in New York City in 1907 when plastic was first synthesized. It had all the right properties for a huge range of uses, including lightweight, flexible, strong, moisture resistant, relatively inexpensive, and a quality that has plagued us ever since, durability. This stuff just doesn’t break down, decompose or go away very quickly. Throughout the 20th century, the development and use of new kinds of plastics and new products and uses proliferated rapidly.
The widespread use and then disposal of plastic as well as other debris now contaminates the oceans far from land, and also every coastline on the planet, from Alaska to Antarctica, Madagascar to Mexico, and Taiwan to Tahiti. Sad but true. With the durability of plastic beverage bottles, plastic bags, detergent and food containers, we believe that about 60% to 80% of all marine debris in the ocean is plastic.
Despite a gradually expanding effort to reduce plastic use and consumption, single-use plastic bags and water bottles in particular, globally we produce about 360 million tons of plastic annually, without about one-third of that going into disposable, single-use items. Estimates are that about 1% is recycled globally, with most of the rest ending up in landfills, or often transported or blown into coastal waters or into rivers that empty into the ocean.
An estimated 9 million tons of plastic waste gets into the ocean every year, which is the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. Every minute, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. If present practices continue, the quantity of plastic getting into the ocean could reach 58 million tons per year by 2030, about half of the total weight of the fish caught annually from the ocean.
Americans are major contributors to this sea of plastic. While the United States has just 4.3% of the global population, we were the top generator (as of 2016) of plastic waste, producing 46 million tons annually or 286 pounds per person. That’s us.
While cleaning up beaches is helpful and beneficial, the ultimate solution to the problem of plastic proliferation along our shorelines and in the oceans isn’t clean up and removal, but in prevention- cutting off or eliminating the plastic, Styrofoam and other marine debris at the sources. It means taking every action necessary to keep the trash from getting into our rivers, waterways and oceans to begin with.
In 1997, a sailboat returning to California from Hawaii took a more northerly route, across the less traveled North Pacific Gyre. As Charles Moore and his crew crossed this large stretch of ocean, they noticed that a sea of plastic often surrounded them. In the week that it took the sailboat to cross the gyre they rarely saw a patch of ocean without plastic and other marine debris. Shampoo and detergent bottles, plastic bags and water bottles, fishing floats and Styrofoam, as far as they could see.
One of the crewmembers called this “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” and the name stuck. Combined with the press conference Moore held when they arrived back in California, global attention began to focus on the issue of plastic in the ocean. While his crew wasn’t the first to notice the plastic accumulation, they were the first to announce this to the media.
The initial media reports described the patch as larger than the state of Texas, which led to the impression that the plastic literally covered the entire sea surface that they had sailed through. Several oceanographic voyages subsequently traversed the gyre and sampled the water along the way. They discovered that there wasn’t a big island or mound of plastic and other debris, but they did recover plastic in virtually every net tow they took across 1,500 miles of ocean. Most of the plastic was in small pieces, however, a few millimeters across, like confetti, and much of it was actually sinking beneath the surface.
Additional investigation of the plastic and other particles revealed that as this material breaks down and degrades, it releases an entire cocktail of constituent chemicals that may prove be harmful to marine organisms. Some of the debris is also absorbing or concentrating other contaminants in seawater, chemicals such as DDT and PCBs. This makes these small particles more dangerous when consumed by animals throughout the food chain, fish, turtles, marine birds, seals, sea lions, dolphins and whales.
The increasing awareness and concern with the plastic in the Pacific, however, encouraged several different groups to develop processes or approaches for cleaning up this giant patch of plastic, whether as big as Texas, or three times the size of France as one story reported. The most ambitious was announced in San Francisco in September 2018, the Ocean Cleanup Project. This effort developed in The Netherlands, consists of a 2,000-foot-long floating barrier with a skirt that hangs down 10 feet into the water. When deployed, the barrier is intended to curve into a U-shape as it is pushed by the wind and waves. The concept was that the slow-moving system would gather the plastic floating at the surface, while fish and other marine life would swim underneath it.
After five years of research, engineering and testing, a large ship towing the barrier departed San Francisco on Sept. 9, 2018. By mid-October they had reached a location about 300 miles offshore for a two-week trial to make sure it operated as planned in the typically rough waters of the North Pacific before heading 1,100 miles further to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The plan was for smaller boats to come out and scoop up the plastic and take it back to shore where it could be recycled.
There are some very significant challenges involved with any effort to try to clean up the plastic in the ocean, however. Perhaps the largest is that there isn’t a huge raft the size of Texas consisting of plastic bottles at the ocean surface. The plastic particles are mostly very small and not all concentrated at the surface. Any net or device used to collect all of these small particles will also be catching floating or swimming animals. This newest Dutch effort is only designed to collect plastic from the upper ten feet of ocean, which seems to be a small fraction of the total out there.
There is also the issue of the fuel and its combustion required for any vessels attempting to undertake such a massive effort, which will have their own emissions impacts and costs. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) did a cost calculation several years ago of a hypothetical cleanup of the Pacific Garbage Patch. They used an area of 385,000 square miles, which is a little larger than the combined areas of California, Oregon and Washington, which is a very large area to sweep clean.
NOAA’s estimates were that it would take 67 large ships, working 10 hours a day, covering swaths 650 feet wide, one year to accomplish, with ship time alone costing between $122 million to $489 million. They also expressed concerns with collecting marine life along with the plastic and that all the plastic isn’t at the sea surface. There are also plastic concentrations in all of the other oceanic gyres.
Despite the best intentions, cleaning up plastic from the middle of the ocean is extremely unlikely to ever be successful. We need to focus on other approaches – cutting plastic off at the source, reducing our use of plastic of all types and recycling all that we use. And this will take a global commitment, but we can set an example for the world in California like we do for so many other things.
