The Plastic Sea. essay by Captain Paul Watson
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:45:06 -0700
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AGAINST THE CURRENT
The Plastic Sea
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 occurance.
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.
Captain Paul Watson
Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society (1977-
Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)
Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director - The Farley Mowat Institute
"Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with
me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to
go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all."
- Walt
Whitman
www.Seashepherd.org
Tel: 360-370-5650
Fax: 360-370-5651
Address: P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, Wa 98250 USA
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