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Posts Tagged ‘floating debris’

Crew Log 244 – Fight the Bottle

Jun 7th, 2010
by Herb McCormick.
1 comment

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June 7, 2010 – At Sea, 43º 44’N, 124º 51’W
By Herb McCormick

Herb's Headshot

For many weeks now, at least since crossing the equator on our northbound run from South America back to Seattle, we’ve occasionally permitted ourselves a glance (and a wince) at the final stretch of the voyage from Northern California back to the Pacific Northwest. Let’s put it in perspective by posing the problem in a popular multiple-choice question format, so you, too, can play at home! When skipper Mark Schrader and his crew delivered Ocean Watch home from Mexico shortly after her purchase two years ago, was the hop from San Francisco to Cape Flattery at the mouth of the Straits of Juan de Fuca a) heinous, b) wretched, c) awful or d) all of the above?

Why, of course, the answer is “d!” You’ve won a case of Dramamine!

So, yes, we knew that this late, crucial trip could well be conducted in fierce headwinds and stacked seas (just like the last time) and might possibly be an exercise in pain and misery (ditto). We were ready for it, poised for it, steeled for it.

And guess what? We lucky fellows have seen none of it.

Today on Ocean Watch, sliding nicely up the coast of Oregon, the sun is shining, the ocean is a sparkling blue, and the potentially nasty Northwest waters are doing a fine imitation of tropical seas. By mid-afternoon on Monday, the crew had closed to within 150-nautical miles of the opening of the Columbia River, which we’ll enter sometime tomorrow before proceeding to our next port of call in downtown Portland.

Happily, with little drama to report, we have the time and space to write about other matters. Unhappily, we’ll use the opportunity to address an unpleasant but growing and ubiquitous problem: plastic in our seas. The bad news, naturally, is that plastic garbage is absolutely everywhere, along our coastlines, inside sea life, in spinning gyres covering uncountable miles offshore on the deep blue ocean. The good news is that people are starting to notice and care, and one of the leaders of that group is a San Francisco sailor, formerly from Spain, named Manuel Maqueda, the co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

The logo for the coalition is a fellow with a plastic bottle for a heart silhouetted inside an upside-down outline of another plastic bottle, which bears a remarkable resemblance to a clenched fist. Remember the old rallying cry of the 60s: Fight the power. The coalition’s message could well be very similar: Fight the bottle.

“The problem we have on our hands is that we’re using a material that is toxic and takes hundreds of years to disappear for single-use objects, objects that are designed to be used for seconds or minutes,” said Manuel during a visit to Ocean Watch last week. “Globally, that’s amounting to catastrophic consequences. Just in the U.S. alone, each week we discard 500 million plastic bottles, just for water. That’s enough to go around the planet five times. One week. Just in the United States. Just for water.”

Manuel formally launched the Plastic Pollution Coalition with three partners after a summit, of sorts, at the Google campus with a host of like-minded individuals and organizations. Today, the coalition is about a hundred strong. “I’d been looking at our inability as a sustainable society to deal with global problems,” said Manuel, who holds a masters degree in macroeconomics as well as a law degree, and has been working in social media and on the Internet for over five years (sailors should have a look at his clever, very useful iPhone App called Bloosee – an interactive Wikipedia-style information source for boaters).

“We’re just not able to do that. So I started to focus on emerging and future environmental issues to see if we could be quicker in identifying and solving problems.”

As we witnessed time and again in our travels, plastic is everywhere: we saw a few water bottles float past just this morning. It’s also insipid, and plastic particles are now part of the ecosystem, right down to the seafood we eat and the beaches we love. “It leaches chemicals into everything,” said Manuel. “It fragments into really tiny filaments and is encroaching everywhere, and yet it doesn’t stop being plastic. It’s still synthetic and it’s still toxic.”

Naturally, Manuel is routinely asked about the Pacific gyre, the “garbage patch” of plastic and debris that is spinning endlessly in a wide circle north of Hawaii. “It’s not an island, it’s an area of higher concentrations of plastic. But tiny fragments of plastic are circulating in every ocean; 93% are tiny, you can’t see it, but you can filter it out through nets. It’s on every beach. It’s everywhere.

“For me,” he continued, “the real garbage patch is when I go to the store. The gyre is an entry point to understanding the issue, it’s a manifestation of how bad the problem is. But it’s not the issue itself.”

No, the big problem is hidden in plain sight, in every American home. Open your fridge, urges Manuel. Look in your bathroom. “After people become more aware, they walk through their homes and are shocked. But more and more people are waking up from this plastic matrix and realizing how big the problem is.

“The solution is finding wise uses of plastic. We cannot continue to use it for disposable products. We have to move away from plastic water bottles, bags and straws. We need to cut down on single-use containers. It’s about changing habits and finding alternatives, like reusable shopping bags. The thing is, there’s a lot of satisfaction when people begin to give up on their need for plastic.”

Aboard Ocean Watch, we all have our own water bottles we’ve been refilling constantly and using for the last year (for fresh water we have a water maker that desalinates sea water), and when we provision, we have a big stack of cloth bags we lug to the grocery store. It’s a start. So what are you doing or can you do in your home? Maybe, when it comes to plastic, Mick Jagger was wrong. Maybe we can all get some satisfaction after all.

-Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

*To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct your messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.

Crew Log 207 – Snagged

Mar 18th, 2010
by Herb McCormick.
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March 18, 2010 – At Sea, 06º 59’S, 083º 51’W
By Herb McCormick and Mark Schrader

Herb's Headshot

Things were going great: until they weren’t. We’ll start with the great part. Yesterday afternoon, as the golden sun was just starting to make its serious, end-of-day descent into the Pacific west, I ambled up on the foredeck, carrying a big, blue bucket, my razor and a bottle of shampoo. The water was 81 degrees. There was a decent breeze blowing, from the quarter, and a gently rolling seaway; the deck was pleasantly warm. I was going to have a shave and a bucket bath, and afterwards, a short sprawl beneath the setting sun. All was right with the world.

Okay, here’s the “until they weren’t” part. You’ll soon see it’s the larger part of the tale.

Had I for the briefest moment put aside thoughts of my joyous, forthcoming ablutions and glanced forward – even for an instant – I would’ve seen the long line of buoys attached to the deep tangle of commercial fishing gear, and I could’ve yelled at my watchmate, Dave Logan, to disengage the autopilot and swing the wheel hard to starboard. In retrospect, it could’ve been easy. There would’ve been time. Fifty feet in the other direction – fifty, measly feet, at the most – and a rather major problem would’ve been averted.

“Yo, Dave! Net! Turn the boat, brother!”

These were the warnings I failed to issue. Logan still had the presence of mind to shift the engine into neutral, but a split second in arrears.

It’s not like we didn’t know they weren’t out there. The day before, we’d actually sailed over two long-lines – lines on which other, hooked lines are suspended – that passed safely beneath the keel. We’d even seen the fishing boat off in the distance. But these were lines that were being tended on a regular basis, well set and stationed well below the interface of water and air. Okay, yes, we’d been lucky. I’d spotted the first moments before we were over it – I said, “We’re over it…” – and looked down to see Ocean Watch clear the hazard with room to spare.

“You see one, you see more,” I said. I wasn’t on deck when we transited the second one. But we did, and kept on going.

The third long line was the problem, an untended, lost, massive tangle of hooks, buoys, polypropylene and god knows what else, all knotted and bundled, all of it lurking right beneath the surface. We hit it hard, we glanced astern, we could see we were dragging the entire godforsaken mess.

We were snagged.

Way back in Seattle, way back in May of last year, we all had jobs on our to-do list before we set out on the expedition Around the Americas. At the top of mine were two items I remember well: Satellite radio for the stereo, and scuba gear for emergencies. I’m a diver, it was my responsibility. In the interests of brevity, I’ll spare you the reasons we have fins, masks, a full tank, and all the things one requires for the safe and exciting activity of exploring undersea worlds…with the exception of a working regulator, the rather crucial item that connects the a) air in the tank with b) your lungs.

But man, we got some rockin’ tunes!

Seeing that I was already in my baggies (remember the bath?) and that, um, I’d forgotten to make that last, somewhat critical run to the dive shop, when the roster of candidates to inspect the situation was winnowed down, I was on the extremely short list.

Into the drink I went.

Let’s just say it wasn’t a pretty sight. There was enough line wrapped around the keel to build a corral. Fortunately, with a sharp blade, this was dispatched with pretty quickly and easily, and proved to be a minor hassle. The first big problem was the net wound round and round the propeller shaft. The second large issue was the fifteen or so feet of open water that had be gained to address it. The third major dilemma was the other thing attached to the shaft, namely, a 44-ton steel sailboat, which had a lovely, mellow, gentle motion when sitting atop it, but took on altogether different, quite sinister characteristics once you were beneath it.

Skipper Mark Schrader, always wanting to get in on my fun, was soon swimming alongside me. I’ll let him pick up the tale with these excerpts from his personal log:

“Our night of sailing was a welcome change from the light air motor-boat ride we’ve been on since Callao.  But, the reason for unrolling the jib and trimming the main had nothing to do with anything pleasant.  About an hour before sunset, with engine and propeller moving OW nicely through the water, we drove over an unmarked and probably abandoned long-line – a fishing trot line that is usually set on the surface between two marked/flagged buoys with a series of hooked lines dangling down from the surface line.

In this case, the marker buoys had been broken and were invisibly floating, along with the line, stretched across our path and moving with the current.

“The on-watch group saw the line and shifted into neutral (stopping the prop) just a second too late.  In no time at all several hundred feet of line, floats, hooks and assorted gear wrapped itself around our shaft, prop and keel.  A few of us, remembering the exact same unpleasant experience during the delivery of OW from Mexico to Seattle a year ago, let out a collective groan.  Thanks to that experience we mounted a so-called line-cutter on the shaft just forward of the prop, and hoped for the best.

“Herb was first in the water with mask and fins to do a recon of the situation.  One look and it was obvious to him that the ball of line immediately overwhelmed the line cutter and then just pretended it wasn’t there.  It was also clear we weren’t going to be motoring anywhere until the mess was cut away.  Did I mention it was getting dark and the choppy sea was lifting OW’s stern out of the water every now and then?

“Somewhere in the vast storage areas of OW is an air tank we’ve been carrying for 22,000 miles for just this occasion, and a regulator, mouthpiece and hose setup so the short-straw guy could descend and hack away this kind of a mess at his leisure.  Trying to dive under a bouncing boat with a knife in one hand, a guiding rope in the other while holding your breath long enough to avoid getting tangled up in the lines and then having some time to cut something, isn’t easy.  That much we knew, hence the air tank and gear.  What we had forgotten, however, was that our regulator was missing some important pieces making it useless for our purposes.

“On went the booties and masks and soon McCormick, Logan, Thoreson and Schrader were all in the water, with knives and saws in hand, taking turns under the boat. The sharp line-cutter proved very effective at cutting Thoreson’s hand when he was trying to find something to hang on to as the boat bounced up and down above his head.  Blood in the water isn’t a good thing, neither is a deep cut in the hand.  DT removed himself to the first-aid station.

“Before darkness prematurely ended our efforts we had made some gains and were optimistic that another attempt at first light would be successful.  A nice evening breeze filled in and with all safely aboard, we hoisted the main, unrolled the jib and enjoyed a night of quiet sailing.  New crewmember Billy Gammon served up a wonderful chicken curry on rice; we tended to DT’s hand and then relaxed for awhile.

“The morning assault on the problem started at 0930 when Herb and I hit the water with tools of the trade, a serrated dive knife and a very nice fine-toothed cabinet saw, compliments of Dave.  The prop and shaft were shedding pieces of line pretty quickly for an hour or so, and then we were down to the last bit of tightly wound line on top of the line-cutter.  Another hour of trading dives, tools and people and it looked like we had it all.  Herb made one final look and gave us a thumb’s up.  I don’t know about the others, but I had just enough strength left to haul myself out of the water one last time.

“David’s cut appears to be okay but we’ll watch it carefully and call Dr. Jarris, our emergency medical contact at Swedish Hospital in Ballard, if we see any signs of infection.  OW is motoring along, making good time toward the Galapagos, 557 nautical miles to the north.  Our ETA looks like mid-day on the 21st, if we manage to avoid a repeat of this experience. We may be a little tired, salty and bruised, but I’m happy to report all are well aboard Ocean Watch.”

One postscript: In the Silver Lining Department, the night proved to be a memorable one. A huge flock of swallow-tailed gulls, drawn by Ocean Watch’s running lights, spent most of the evening circling the boat in orchestrated precision, swooping down to catch the thousands of flying fish that presumably had also been attracted by the green, starboard bulb. It was so quiet under sail that we could hear the flapping of their wings, their warbles and purrs, the satisfied noises from their all-you-can-eat banquet. In the glow of the navigation lights, they fluttered atop the water and spun high into the air, just a few feet frome the boat, and then did it all over again, for hour after hour.

It was such an amazing sight – so singular and unforgettable – one might be tempted to think I left that regulator ashore on purpose. Those birds in flight were just so cool. And would we have even seen them if we’d just motored on, if we hadn’t, you know, gotten snagged?

-Herb McCormick and Mark Schrader with photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

*To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct your messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.

Crew Log 206 – The “P” Words

Mar 17th, 2010
by Herb McCormick.
1 comment

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March 17, 2010 – At Sea, 08º 32’S, 081º 52’W
By Herb McCormick

Herb's Headshot

Everyone remembers the famous scene in the movie The Graduate when the character played by a young Dustin Hoffman tries to come to grips with his future. Without a clue as to what the world ahead has in store for him – or how he could possibly engage it in any meaningful way – he encounters an older, “wiser” man who sums up all the possibilities of the coming decades – in terms of livelihood, security and prosperity – in one single, tantalizing word.

“Plastics,” he says, quietly, conspiratorially.

Hoffman, unsure, considers this a moment, but he got the message. “Plastics,” he replies.

The Graduate was obviously an iconic movie, one for the ages, but that one-word line of dialog – though meant to be humorous and ironic – may have been its most prescient moment. For when it came to the very basics of civilization, the needs and wants of your societies and their interwoven, interwined economies, from the 1960s to this very day, the guy was absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent correct.

Plastics.

Of course, these days, plastics – and its neighbor in the “p” section of your dictionary, not to mention in the fabric of our shared existence: petroleum and petroleum-based products – are simply everywhere. But do you really want to see plastics, to understand their reach and span and remarkable, mind-bending durability?

Well, do as we have. Go to sea.

Today on Ocean Watch, our tiny spot on the Pacific Ocean is framed in beauty and wonder. Just before noon, about a mile ahead, the waters began to boil as if we were approaching a shallow reef. Considering we were about two hundred miles off the coast of South America, over a deep expanse of waterborne canyons known as the Peru Trench – where depths range from 14,000 to over 20,000 feet – this was unlikely. But it had to be something.

Suddenly, a black form broke the surface, then another, then a half dozen more. Porpoises! Hundreds of porpoises! It was a stampede of sea life, at least a half-mile long and several hundred yards wide, crossing our bow and sprinting, soaring and leaping westward into the Pacific. This captivating show by the acrobats of the ocean was riveting enough, but just when you couldn’t imagine it getting any better, there was the sight of an unmistakable geyser spurting skyward from a massive, sounding whale that was riding shotgun to the herd. Coupled with last evening’s stunning, clear, moonless night, with all the heaven’s blinking above, the first days of our light-air voyage to the Galápagos Islands has been nothing less than a visual cavalcade.

Happily, there hasn’t been a scrap of plastic in sight.

That wasn’t the case during the time when we were moored off the Peruvian seaside town of Callao, where an endless stream of plastic garbage bags streamed past Ocean Watch, and we crossed our fingers every time we started our generator to charge our batteries that the raw-water intake valve wouldn’t be fouled by the refuse of a mini-market. Miraculously, it never was.

And that most certainly was not the case just a few short miles north of our anchorage. The day before we departed, our David Thoreson met a professional delivery skipper from Florida who, on the night before arriving in Callao with a sailboat he was delivering from Ft. Lauderdale, sailed through a literal river of plastic and garbage. The sailor, Captain J. Miranda, left early the next morning, so we never had a chance to view his photos, but he did send an email message on what he’d seen.

“I talked to you yesterday about the garbage we found off the coast of Peru about thirty miles north of your location and about twenty nautical miles off the coast,” he wrote. “As I told you, at times there was so much of it around us that we had to go off the autopilot to dodge it. The garbage seems to be partly processed (through a grinder) but the size of the chunks of it and just the sheer volume of it raises some eyebrows.”

That’s right: this stuff isn’t the current-borne flotsam wafting off the coast from the massive metropolis of Lima. Commercial vessels are deliberately dumping it.

“The crews of the boats do it to avoid dumping charges at the ports they visit,” Captain Miranda continues. “Raising awareness of this to the crews of the ships doing the dumping is not going to resolve it. The solution will be found in the partnership between the ports and the recycling companies. If you can eliminate the dumping fees (pay them through avenues other than the ship companies) and reward the crew’s recycling efforts (through cash incentives), then you are moving in the right direction.

“Where to get the money for it?” wonders Captain Miranda. He suggests, “marketing campaigns of worldwide awareness. (For instance) if all the people driving Japanese cars would realize that their purchases are (indirectly) financing the killing of whales for the satisfaction of the Japanese whale-eating market, things (might) be quite different.”

We were delayed in leaving Peru, and though we tried to locate the seaborne garbage dump in question, we passed the location in darkness and failed to do so. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t encounter plenty of plastic trash on the beaches near Callao. Just as he did in Miami, in ports all through South America, and outside Lima, during our stay in Peru David T continued to record the sad truth about the cleanliness of the coastlines – or distinct lack thereof – in a series of heartbreaking images, some of which accompany this report.

David’s pictures bring to mind the work of another environmental photographer, the Seattle-based photojournalist Chris Jordan, whose images of dead albatrosses in the vast Pacific – their skeletal remains cast in the framework of the plastic junk they ingested, which put an end to their lives – tells the story about what’s happening with greater frequency not only out at sea, but everywhere birds take flight, in sad, telling detail. (Jordan’s subject matter extends beyond wildlife, but is all topical, important and related, and though often disturbing, is well worth seeking out.)

And, of course, the infamous Pacific Gyre – a swirling, gargantuan whirlpool of rubbish borne endlessly along the currents of the wide Pacific Ocean – is something we may yet encounter before our voyage is through.

So, yes, despite the glorious scenery, the good company and the fine weather, like “The Graduate,” today we’ve been thinking about plastics. They sure do add a lot to a complete, consumerist life!

Unless, of course, they’re killing you.

-Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

*To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct your messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Mar 3rd, 2010
by ATA.
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One of the primary concerns motivating the mission of Around the Americas is to raise awareness of issues of marine health and ocean stewardship.  A critical issue endangering the health of the oceans is the ubiquity of plastics in the ocean, and the corresponding impacts on marine life.  Susan Casey presents a thought-provoking and compelling account of some of the challenges arising from the presence of plastics in the oceans, that is deeply resonant with the mission of Around the Americas.

*The following article has been reprinted with generous permission from Conservation Magazine, a publication of the Society for Conservation Biology

—

Garbage In, Garbage Out

When a single swath of ocean contains more plastic than plankton, the simple act of taking out the trash becomes a grueling scientific challenge

garbage-page-spread

By Susan Casey
Conservation Magazine, January-March 2010 (Vol. 11 No. 1)

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 1300 kilometers north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered the course of the Alguita, his 15-meter catamaran. Veering slightly north, he had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 13-billion-hectare oval known as the north Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean—“the doldrums,” sailors called it—a place most boats purposely avoided. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in California with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours on the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand, things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As the Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “eastern garbage patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the twenty-first-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

“Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a two-meter-long magenta-and-yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home.

Since his first encounter with the garbage patch 12 years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more-abstract battle. After enlisting scientists to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed the Alguita back to the garbage patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic had grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things such as bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. 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.

01_breakdown

Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: by weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables are scary.

To take just one example, we deploy annually about 450 million kilograms of chemical compounds called “phthalates”—despite the fact that California recently listed them as chemicals known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce nearly 3 billion kilograms of BPA each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States.

Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows appearing on products doesn’t always signify endless re-use; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.

“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says. He points 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 vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material.

What’s more, “Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: even when plastic breaks down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.

Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And yet nurdles, lentil-sized pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.

The U.S. banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.

The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution 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 harbors, 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. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.

02_nurdle-soup

One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, 3,380 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand.

In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”

Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. If that polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, it will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: 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 of these gyres has its own version of the garbage patch as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”

Our oceans are turning into plastic—are we? Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but also 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. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering.

03_plastic-sausage-machine-2

Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, awareness of just how hard we’ve slapped the planet is skyrocketing. None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that wisdom will eventually trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has investigated using satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot.

The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which is birthed in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it floats, a sturdy, two-and-a-half meter two-seater. Moore stands on the Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.

Watching the kayak bobbing disconsolately, it is hard not to wonder what will become of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than battleship gray. The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 25 kilograms of nurdles extruded into an object that nobody wants but which will be around for centuries longer than we will.

And as Moore stands on deck looking into the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the same thing 1200 kilomters west, in the gyre. You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on earth. And then, below, you can see the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and discarded things. As Moore looks over the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives low and then boomerangs over the horizon. Gone.

Susan Casey is editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. The original article can be found at:
http://www.conservationmagazine.org/articles/v11n1/garbage-in-garbage-out/

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