An Ocean of Plastic
Welcome to the future,” says Capt. Charles Moore, the commander of a 25-ton research vessel called Alguita. He’s standing in Kewalo Basin Harbor on the south shore of Oahu, holding up a jug filled with murky yellow liquid. Tiny bits of debris swirl in the jug, a cloudy mass of trash. Most of it is plastic.
“This is what our oceans look like now,” Moore continues in a mariner’s drawl. “This sample was taken in the Pacific about 1,000 miles west-southwest of Los Angeles. But I need to emphasize that this is not just one place—this is the whole ocean.” The liquid in the jug resembles a gutter puddle in Manhattan more than the placid blue of the Pacific.
It was Moore who, in 1997, made a discovery about the ocean that raised alarms around the world. Returning home to California after a sailing race to Hawaii, he plotted a course through the North Pacific Gyre, an area known to sailors as the “doldrums.” Encompassing some 10 million square miles, the gyre is home to trade winds and circular currents that tend to keep whatever meanders into it without self-propulsion for months, years, even decades at a time. There, near the center of the slow, deep, clockwise currents that form this oceanic eddy, Moore came across a vast mass of floating debris that has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The first thing you need to know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is that its name, which conjures up images of an animated Charlie Brown special, is disgustingly inappropriate. In reality, the “patch” is a swirling vortex of plastic soup, an immense, fetid swamp of debris where tiny bits of decaying plastic outweigh surface zooplankton—one of the most prolific and abundant organisms on the planet—by a ratio of six-to-one. Nobotly knows its exact size or if it has any boundaries at all: Its location and shape vary depending on factors such as water temperature, season and major weather events like El Niño. Scientists estimate it is twice the size of Texas—maybe even larger—and contains some 10 million tons of waste.
“At first you see blue water stretching to the horizon,” says Mary Crowley, director of the Ocean Voyages Institute. “That makes it seem like everything is quite all right. But then, when you really look into the water, you see this never-ending plas- tic confetti. We usually gather individual pieces of plastic at a rate of 200 to 300 every 30 minutes—and that’s just in our immediate vicinity.” Since the study started, researchers have not found a single sample in the gyre devoid of plastic.
Because most of the debris consists of “microplastics”—larger chunks of waste that have been reduced to tiny bits of polymer by the combined effect of waves, wind and sun—it poses an especially dire threat to wildlife. Particulated plastic is more likely to be eaten by birds and fish—and can contain concentrations of toxic chemicals, including DDT and PCBs, as much as a million times greater than the surrounding seawater. On Midway Atoll, albatross chicks are dying from starvation, their bellies full of plastic. Sea turtles mistake buoyant plastic bags for jellyfish, one of their main sources of prey, and choke to death. In a recent sample of 670 myctophids, a major source of food for larger fish, the crew of Alguita found 1,298 pieces of plastic. “It’s becoming the new diet,” says Moore. “We’re putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.”
It’s hard to believe plastic has only been around for a century. In 1909, a Belgian-born chemist named Leo Hendrik Baekeland introduced the first completely synthetic plastic, a phenol-formaldehyde compound he called Bakelite, to the world at a conference of chemists in New York. Bakelite, first synthesized in Baekeland’s barn in Yonkers, New York, was made by mixing carbolic acid and formaldehyde. It had the near-mystical property of being malleable when heated under pressure, while becoming rigid and insoluble when cooled. Highly moldable, more durable than ceramics, lighter than metal and made entirely in the lab, the new composite was also electrically nonconductive and heat-resistant, quickly earning it the title “material of a thousand uses.”
First it was nylon, which hit the market in 1940, later causing riots at department stores as women stampeded over one another for a pair of stockings. Mass production of other plastics came after World War II with the advent of polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene, which serve as key ingredients in products like Saran Wrap, disposable milk jugs, Hula-Hoops and Styrofoam. By the 1960s, plastics were a ubiquitous part of American life and the very picture of modernity. By 1979, the annual volume of plastic produced in the U.S. overtook that of steel.
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