Inspiring social change through print, spoken word, and creative
action.
The Plastic Sea
By Paul Watson
July 2006
AGAINST THE CURRENT
The Plastic SeaBy Captain Paul WatsonOn 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
Paul Watson is the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and the co-founder
of the Greenpeace Foundation. He is an author, writer and lecturer and a resident
of Friday Harbor, Washington. Paulwatson@earthlink.net
Back to wordsasweapons home page