Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (12 page)

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DOWN TO THE SEA IN CHIPS

T
HE 151-FOOT-TALL SHIP
K
AISEI
SLUICED THROUGH
the summery waters of the North Pacific with that soft, graceful roll that always says “home” to Mary Crowley. The teacher turned sea captain turned ocean charter entrepreneur turned environmental activist learned to sail at age four, and has felt more comfortable on a ship’s deck than a city street ever since. The view from the
Kaisei
’s deck, however, was not so comforting, as the day’s catch laid out beneath the billowing sails offered her a particularly ugly sight.

The
Kaisei
—the word means “ocean planet” in Japanese, and doubles as the name of Crowley’s environmental nonprofit, Project Kaisei—had sailed more than a thousand miles off the California Coast, far north and east of Hawaii, on a research voyage through one of the loneliest, emptiest stretches of the Pacific Ocean. It’s part of a vast circular gyre of currents several times the size of the continental U.S., with more than three miles of water stretching down beneath the
Kaisei
, a place that Crowley says defines the term “middle of nowhere.” Yet it had taken hardly any time at all to haul on board a crusty collection of floating detergent bottles, milk jugs, water containers, chunks of Styrofoam, an old bucket, lawn chairs, twisted pieces of lost fishing gear and derelict nets, a well-used toothbrush and a plentiful array of jagged and cracked pieces of plastic, none from a source readily identifiable.

But finding these big pieces of ocean trash was not the main source of Crowley’s mounting despair, though she has known these waters for nearly forty years and sailed here back when they were truly blank and pristine and breathtaking. She knows this sort of trash is a huge problem, entangling and killing more than one hundred thousand marine mammals and an even larger number of seabirds—no one knows for sure how many. But what really alarmed her this day wasn’t the trash she could see. It was what she
couldn’t
see that troubled her, after the bottles, cups and other bobbing trash had been hauled out, and the mirror of water and foam appeared deep blue and clear, flashing by beneath sun and pale sky as she stared down from the railing. The spray felt and smelled as it always did, cold and salty, fresh and ancient. But the net trailing beside the
Kaisei
told her a very different story, revealing in sickly detail what could not be seen with the naked eye from the
Kaisei
’s deck.

After just fifteen minutes of being dragged through seemingly clear water, the fine mesh of the net was clogged and coated. As they hauled it in, Crowley could barely believe what she was seeing, even though this was what she and her crew of volunteers, sailors and scientists had sailed a thousand miles to locate and study.

Tiny pieces of plastic, a trashy confetti too small to see from the ship deck, had swirled through the water and into the net. The bits of plastic were all colors and shapes, jagged and smooth, flakes and pellets, making a veritable plastic noodle soup. A hundred similar trawls across twelve hundred miles pulled up plastic every time. Each one increased the sick feeling in Crowley’s stomach. The ocean, she realized, had turned to plastic chowder.

The worst part, though, the part that left her fearing for the future of pretty much everything, came during the night trawls from a sister ship on this expedition, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s
New Horizon
research vessel. That’s when the nets were set for lantern fish, those small, luminescent plankton eaters that come up from six hundred feet or even deeper waters to feed on the surface at night. These globally ubiquitous, finger-sized fish are a critical part of the food chain, with a host of variations and species that together represent an estimated 65 percent of the biomass in the ocean. Larger fish feed on the lantern fish, and bigger fish prey on them, as well as seabirds and marine mammals, and on up the food chain, right up to the fish that people eat, that civilization has harvested and relied on since there’s been something called civilization, and before that as well. That protein, that nourishment, that vast marine ecosystem—all of it depends on many trillions of healthy little lantern fish feeding on even greater numbers of tiny zooplankton.

Two Scripps scientists on the expedition team collected and dissected those fish to see what, if any, impact all that trash confetti has on them, given that some of the plastic bits are roughly the same size and shape as plankton. The researchers found more than 9 percent—nearly one in ten—of the fish had plastic in their digestive tracts. The plastic was floating right there with the plankton, and down the hatch it went.

This is bad news, but it’s unclear just how bad. It’s one thing for a percentage of fish to die from ingesting inert plastic. The problem is, the ocean receives all sorts of toxic pollutants, heavy metals and hazardous chemicals—from storm runoff, illegal dumping, sewage, ships, oil rigs and many other sources. Brittle old plastic particles can act like sponges for these toxins, becoming floating pockets of concentrated nasties. How much of this occurs, how much is absorbed into lantern fish bodies, and how much moves up the food chain toward us is a big unknown at the moment. The research is just getting started.

But this much is clear: The Scripps researchers found that the fish responsible for maintaining a significant part of the global food supply were eating potentially toxic plastic at an alarming rate—24,000 tons a year in the North Pacific alone. That’s what scares Mary Crowley about trashed oceans: a lot of little fish with a lot of plastic in their guts, headed our way.

“Welcome to Pacific Garbage Patch,” Crowley says. “We knew it was bad, but really, it’s worse than we thought. Worse than anyone thought.”

Crowley and her nonprofit are not the first to discover that the oceans have become a dumping place for plastic, nor are they the first to suggest that this threat to the marine environment might be growing worse and more dire over time. Nor has her group done the only research or even the leading research on the subject. They are doing important and sometimes breakthrough work in a field that is just beginning to draw a new generation of marine scientists, but there are other larger, more established organizations with more money and publicity at their disposal than Project Kaisei, which was founded by Crowley and two friends, a surfer and a sailor.

But Project Kaisei is unique in one regard. While other groups concentrate on studying the problem and advocating measures to stop the flow of plastic into ocean waters, Crowley’s ultimate goal is to combine garbage-patch research with the hunt for safe methods to extract the plastic waste from the seas. Many if not most experts say this is impossible—there’s too much plastic spread over too great an area to even contemplate taking on that job. The cost and the logistics would be overwhelming, even if the technology existed to remove plastic confetti from the ocean without also scooping up all manner of living things in the process, doing more harm than good. And no such technology exists.

Telling the woman who piloted a sailboat on Lake Michigan at age four that something she cares about can’t be done proved to be a good way to provoke a reaction. She is pursuing ideas for converting oil spill cleanup booms and skimmers to plastic duty, and has brought several inventors out with her on the
Kaisei
to test original prototypes for extracting plastic from ocean waters. She insists cleaning up the mess has to be part of the solution.

“That’s what finally got me involved,” Crowley says. “I kept hearing that cleaning it up was impossible, that all we could do is keep it from getting worse. I figured someone had to try. Why not me? Why not try to find a way to heal the thing I love most? I think we can find a way.”

L
ANDFILLS REMAIN
America’s go-to solution for capturing trash, but gauging their contents and their alternatives is only the beginning, not the end point, of understanding the nature of waste. What about the trash that escapes? What happens to the debris that is hurled to the side of the road, that blows off trains, that spills from loading chutes, that is swept into rivers and storm drains by wind and rain? And what about the below-the-radar waste stream that consumers never see or hear about, though it occurs on their behalf? Pre-production pellets of plastic—tiny beads called nurdles—are shipped by the billions every year all over the country and the world, so that they can be melted down and reformulated into infinite varieties of plastic and products. Each piece of this embryonic plastic is the size of a lentil, sometimes smaller, twenty-two thousand pellets to the pound (which means annual production in the U.S. exceeds a quadrillion nurdles). Their tiny size makes them easy to ship, almost like a liquid, readily poured into railroad tanker cars, their most common mode of transport. But that convenient nub of polymer is also easy to spill and next to impossible to pick up. These mini-plastics are notorious for slipping through cracks, seams and gaps during loading, shipping and unloading. Wind and rain take over, along with swooping birds that mistake them for tasty grubs or edible crumbs. Ten percent of the plastic debris found during beach cleanups is made up of these nurdles, according to Greenpeace. A survey of the forty-two-mile coastline of Orange County, California (home to Disneyland, Laguna Beach, Rick Warren and Surf City, U.S.A.), found that its renowned beaches had an estimated 100 million nurdles mixed in with the sand, shells and rocks. The pellets are such a common find at sea that their nickname has become “mermaids’ tears.”

There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest feature, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It’s the ocean.

Of course, the ocean isn’t a single destination, but many—and depending on the region, the season and the weather, trash entering the marine environment can end up in a vault, a grinder, a pond or a conveyor belt. Because of the multitude of currents that move, churn and mix ocean waters, as well as the effects of winds, tides and the rotation of the earth, plastic trash that finds its way to the sea often embarks on a complex course and a very long trip not easily charted or understood. Predicting the voyage of a single piece of trash is a far dicier proposition than plotting a journey to the moon or Mars. The latter can be calculated in seconds on the average laptop. The former, due to the vast variables and incomplete knowledge of what happens when sea meets trash, could choke a supercomputer.

First of all, not all plastic trash swept, dropped or dumped into the ocean gets very far. Some, perhaps as much as half, sinks fairly quickly, as a number of very common disposable plastics are heavier than seawater and therefore can’t float. You won’t, for instance, see in the Pacific Garbage Patch a lot of plastic cola bottles, except for the occasional ones that are intact with air inside for buoyancy. Once broken up, the polyethylene terephthalate (better known as PET), which includes most soda, water, sports drink and juice bottles, sinks to the bottom or gets washed ashore. This can pose a huge problem for coastal environments and beaches, but it’s not a factor in the deep-ocean garbage patch. On the other hand, milk jugs and plastic bags—or, rather, pieces of them—along with plastic bottle tops are a common find in the garbage patch, as the high-density polyethylene used to make them is less dense than water.

Bottom line: About half the plastic that gets into the ocean floats, which means it tends to be better traveled than the most ardent frequent flyer. Some currents have been observed to deposit plastic trash from the United States on the shores of Japan, a journey that can take up to seven years. Another current peppers remote beaches in Alaska with huge piles of trash, some of which is later sucked back out to sea and put back on a circular course around the Arctic Ocean, only to end up back at the same Alaskan beach years later (though smaller quantities migrate across the polar ice pack and find their way to the Atlantic). This phenomenon was first tracked by oceanographers who followed the courses of twenty-eight thousand plastic bath toys (ducks, beavers, frogs and turtles, bearing the “Friendly Floaties” brand) that were washed overboard from a cargo vessel during a storm in 1992. The colorful toys, eventually bleached white by the sun and sea, kept turning up for years on the same beaches, recovered by a worldwide network of volunteer beachcombers.

But there are other spiraling currents that seem to trap the plastic that enters their grasp without letting many pieces escape. These currents are called the five gyres, and they are located in the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic, the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and the North Pacific. These are vast, constantly shifting areas of deep water that together encompass about 40 percent of the global ocean surface—which means the gyres cover more of the earth than all the dry land put together. Much of their volume is composed of the marine equivalents of desert—huge, empty, their diversity well hidden beneath the surface, although there are a scattering of zones within the gyres with incredibly rich sea life, as in the area around the Hawaiian Archipelago.

The mechanics of the gyres are complex. Multiple currents enter the gyres moving in opposite directions. The Coriolis effect—the force exerted by the rotation of the earth that causes water to circle a drain clockwise above the equator and counterclockwise below—induces the currents to converge and form a spiraling gyre. These zones also tend to have steady mild winds that augment, rather than disturb, the convergence. This slow spiral carries floating debris toward the center and tends to keep it there (given that there is no drain in the ocean for it to be sucked down through). Additional, ever-shifting concentrations of plastic and other debris have been observed on the edges of some of the gyres, too, particularly in the Pacific, where atmospheric high-pressure areas create persistent, ultra-calm conditions.