For weeks now we’ve seen hundreds, thousands of haz-matted workers bending over along beaches or hanging out of small boats attempting to clean up the mess that has begun to invade Louisiana’s beaches and wetlands.
On the beaches you could see the piles of plastic bags mounting, filled with oil and oil-marred sand. The boats were piled with more white plastic bags filled with absorbent, diaper-like cloths workers are using to try and soak oil from the surface and nobly clean it off the grasses, stalk by stalk. Out to sea, bigger fishing boats were similarly filling even more white plastic bags, booms and absorbent paper full of oil skimmed off the surface of the Gulf.
My question from the beginning has been, Where is all that trash headed?
My experience around the world suggests that it probably won’t go too far from the sea. We often we see landfills built within easy blowing and leaching distance from the water. If that’s the case in Louisiana, unless all that garbage is carefully disposed of, the oil that’s been collected to-date will pretty quickly be flowing right back into the system, leaking into aquifers or dirt, on its inevitable return to … the ocean.
(One day off the island of Vis, far off the Croatian border, we kayaked into a pretty, V-shaped bay and headed in. Only to find when we arrived that winds and currents had turned what had looked from a distance to be a pristine beach into a dump. Plastic was piled knee-deep, blown in from all over the Adriatic Sea. An old woman was standing at one end of the beach doing what, to her, was the natural thing: Throwing the plastic back into the sea. When I asked her why, her response was simple: Because that’s where it belongs! Sadly, that’s an attitude still held by too many around the world.)
The 14 million gallons of oil and water that has been sucked up already are apparently destined for what are known as Class 1 nonhazardous injection wells, essentially pipes that extend far below the earth’s surface and deliver the gunk into “porous layers of sand 7,000 feet below.” (NPR did a great story on waste yesterday, including a description of why the oil we’re seeing is so red; it turns that color once it becomes 60 percent water.)
In Louisiana the promise is that all those white plastic bags – which now must number in the tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands – plus all the contaminated gear the workers are wearing are headed for lined landfills, approved by the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. Both private companies and government workers are hoping to get big BP paychecks for the all the overtime they’re putting in making sure all of this waste is properly disposed. Apparently, thanks to the state’s long relationship with hurricanes, there is still plenty of available landfill space.
And what’s to happen to all the oil now being sucked from the spewing well and sent a mile up to a waiting ship? I had imagined a fleet of smaller tankers running back and forth in order to download the ship as it topped off, but that apparently is too cost-and-time-inefficient. Instead, all that oil and gas coming from the bottom will soon be burned.
The ship sitting on the surface can only process 756,000 gallons of oil a day; the report is that they are bringing up 420,000 a day. All that oil needs to be gotten rid of so from the ship’s storage tanks it will be “sent down a boom, turned into a mist and ignited using a burner to burn the oil.” Keep in mind, this has yet to be tested. That’s to happen this weekend.
Two more ships are on the way, to stand by.
Estimates – even official BP estimates – now have the well spewing somewhere from 600,000 to 1.8 million gallons a day. Take the high number and you’ve got an Exxon Valdez equivalent happening every six days. Quite a bit lower than BP’s initial estimate of no-harm to 1,000 barrels a day.
I’ve written about the garbage patch swirling around the North Pacific a dozen times. It’s big (the size of Texas?) and growing; now it’s clear that it is not alone, that there are other gyres, in other parts of the ocean. Anna Cummins is leading a project called 5 Gyres and an interview with her at SmartPlanet.com details where they are and how they’re growing.
What are the 5 gyres and why do we need to know about them?
An oceanic gyre is a slow rotating system of currents — massive marine eddies created by wind patterns and the Earth’s rotational forces. Oceanic gyres have come to the public attention due to their ability to transport and accumulate marine debris. In the last decade, Captain [Charles] Moore and the Algalita Marine Research Foundation have documented an alarming amount of plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre, between California and Hawaii. Plastic trash that washes from land in the Pacific Rim countries gets swept up in the gyre’s currents, breaking down into smaller pieces through photodegradation. Plastic debris can harm marine wildlife through entanglement or ingestion. Current research focuses on the potential human health impacts of this plastic trash, as plastic particles laden with toxic chemicals are eaten by fish, and enter the food chain.
Many have now heard of plastic trash in the North Pacific, due to more media about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
Few realize that there are five subtropical gyres in the world — the North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean . Little is known about plastic pollution in the four other gyres. To address this, our project is conducting research on these lesser known gyres, bringing the issue of plastic pollution to a global audience.
What research does your team do?
We research the accumulation of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. This year, we completed two research expeditions across the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean gyres, collecting samples of the ocean’s surface. Our research partner analyzes our samples in a lab, measuring the weight and the type of plastic collected, as well as dissecting small fish to study potential plastic ingestion. We have eight expeditions planned for 2010 and 2011, to the South Atlantic and South Pacific gyres. We will collect surface samples to study plastic accumulation, and fish to study potential biochemical impacts. The question being asked by the public now: are fish that eat plastic particles also absorbing chemicals from this plastic into their tissue? If so, are these chemicals working their way up the food chain? We hope to explore this question further.
Who works on the project?
Our team is made up of scientists, journalists, educators and filmmakers. We offer space to interested crew representing many different public sectors. It is important to have both scientists and non-scientists involved to ensure that our message gets out to a wide audience.
Why is this work important?
We have now crossed three oceans — the North Pacific, North Atlantic and Indian Ocean — and we’ve seen plastic pollution in all three. Plastics have been around for less than 100 years, yet we now find them covering shorelines and ocean surfaces around the world. Far from being simply an aesthetic issue, this plastic pollution poses threats to marine wildlife that ingest or become entangled in plastic. And we’re now finding plastic in fish that humans eat. We must begin addressing this issue on land, by changing the way we use and dispose of plastics.
What’s the goal of the project?
Our goal is to reach a much wider audience with our research, bringing the issue of plastic pollution to international attention and continuing to explore the unknown questions about plastic debris: what is the ultimate fate of plastic debris? What is the density of plastic pollution in the other gyres? And are pollutants from plastic entering the food chain through foraging fish? With our research, we also hope to encourage changes in the way we produce, manufacture, consume and recycle our plastics. Once we collect our data, we will conduct a cycling and speaking tour across the East Coast and Europe.
What challenges do you face?
Research expeditions are expensive, and finding funding for research can be difficult. Another challenge is coming up with realistic, immediate solutions to the plastic pollution issue. Changing policies that govern the way we make and use plastics will take time and public involvement. We also need to work on improving waste infrastructures of many less developed countries. Many countries are not yet equipped to deal with plastics effectively — so plastic trash is often burned or tossed. Finally, a big picture challenge in developed countries is shifting from our throwaway, consumer culture. In addition to changing the material, and recyclability of plastic, we need to consume less “stuff” altogether.
No ocean story has gotten more attention in the past couple years than the big (size of Texas!) garbage patch swirling around the North Pacific. Discovered just over ten years ago by my friend Captain Charles Moore, as he innocently steered his way back home from Hawaii after a sailing race, the patch’s press has prompted all sorts of inquiries about where it came from and how it might be cleaned up. The most interesting queries I get – often from people in the outdoor industry who already use plastic in their products, ranging from flip-flops to fleece – is how the patch might be scooped up and recycled. The best explanation I’ve read was this, from the Washington Post’s Green Lantern, written by Nina Shen Rastogi:
“(We) always thought the Garbage Patch was a huge, waterborne landfill — sort of like a massive hair clog in a big drain. In reality, it’s not so much an island of trash as a thin, soupy area of litter, mostly in the form of tiny flecks of plastic, studded here and there with old fishing gear and children’s toys. Even if you were to sail right through the Patch, the water probably wouldn’t look too remarkable, unless you scooped some up and looked at it closely. So cleaning this part of the ocean isn’t as simple as you might imagine.
“Because the trash is so dispersed, it’s not like we can just steer a big ship out to sea and pick up the Garbage Patch. Collecting all those small fragments of plastic would be extremely expensive. Plus, thanks to a variety of factors — from winter storms to El Niño — the Garbage Patch moves, making it hard to target effectively. Finally, in gathering up those little scraps, you also run the risk of catching — and killing — any marine animals living amid the debris, many of which are the same size as the plastic bits.
“For all these reasons, most organizations stress that the best way to keep oceans clean is to prevent garbage from getting there in the first place. (We) know of one group that’s actively testing methods for removing trash from the open seas: the San Francisco- and Hong Kong-based Project Kaisei. In the expeditions it is planning for 2010, Project Kaisei will focus on picking out big, derelict fishing nets, which can snare marine life in a process known as “ghostfishing.” It’s also planning to use modified purse seines — large nets used by commercial fishing operations — to collect the medium-sized pieces of garbage floating near the surface of the water. Finally, the project will continue to experiment with methods of gathering the smaller bits of debris.
“Kaisei — which receives some of its funding from a recycling trade organization — is also looking for ways to squeeze value from the trash it collects. Currently, the group is focusing on methods that use pyrolysis — in which heat is used to break down materials in the absence of oxygen — to transform the collected waste into fuel. Some experts, however, are skeptical that this particular solution will make economic sense.
“Meanwhile, we ought to know a lot more about the Garbage Patch before making a decision as to whether large-scale cleanup operations are viable or even warranted. There are still a lot of basic questions that remain unanswered. For example, no one has accurately estimated how much garbage enters the ocean each year. And despite the oft-repeated claim that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is “twice the size of Texas,” we don’t really know the exact size of the Patch or how much garbage it contains.
“Nor do we fully understand the precise impact of ocean trash. It’s possible that, when all is said and done, we’ll decide it’s better to leave the Patch alone, rather than bringing all those bits and pieces back on land and dealing with a brand-new disposal headache. (Particularly when you consider all the emissions associated with fueling collection vessels.) Scientists do know that the marine debris can entangle or otherwise harm sea life: For example, animals may eat the garbage, which can not only lacerate their throats and stomachs but can also make them feel so full that they stop eating actual food. But it’s hard to say with certainty exactly how many animals are killed this way. Some of the garbage patches in the Pacific have more teeming ecosystems than others , whereas the larger Garbage Patch itself (the area between California and Hawaii) is a relative dead zone, biologically. However, no matter where debris resides, it can pose a threat to wide-foraging seabirds such as the albatross. And, because garbage patches move, they can also sweep trash onto land, endangering shore animals such as seals.
“There are even more questions about the risks posed by those tiny bits of plastic. It’s well-established that plastic can absorb certain toxic pollutants such as PCBs and DDT, and that those pollutants — if absorbed into an animal’s fat tissues — can work their way up the food chain. But according to Miriam Goldstein, who served as principal investigator on a recent expedition to the Garbage Patch, we can’t yet draw any firm conclusions about the plastic’s effects on human health. For example, while we do know that some fish species are eating these specks of plastic, we don’t know whether they’re doing so in numbers. We also don’t know whether ingesting bits of polluted plastic is enough to transfer those toxins from the plastic into the fish’s fatty tissues. (For that matter, there’s already plenty of PCBs and DDT in the water itself, so even if we could remove all the plastic from the ocean, we wouldn’t necessarily be fixing the toxic fish problem.)
“None of this is to say that plastic in the oceans shouldn’t be an area of concern. But unless the flow of garbage is stanched at the source, cleanup can only ever be a temporary solution.”
I spent a recent afternoon at the marina in Sausalito aboard David de Rothschild’s just-launched Plastiki, the 60-foot catamaran he plans on sailing from San Francisco to Sydney … very, very soon. A sailboat made nearly completely from plastic? The idea came to him four years ago – How to use adventure to draw attention to the world’s rapacious consumption and waste of plastic? – and it’s taken that long to figure out the design, construction and sail-ability of a completely novel craft. Sixty-seven percent of its buoyancy comes from empty plastic water bottles; its strength comes from a brand new plastic – SR-PET – which unlike most other plastics is 100 percent recyclable. The idea is to use the sailing adventure to draw attention to the plastic accumulating in the ocean, and on land as well, and then tear the sucker apart and turn the whole thing into new plastic products once it arrives in Sydney.
The Plastiki’s role model? Thor Heyerdahl’s Kontiki, the balsa raft the Danish explorer sailed from Peru to French Polynesia in 1947, to draw attention to his notion that that part of the world was first explored from South America. Though his theory was debunked, Heyerdahl’s adventure was a huge success; at its height, his book about the expedition outsold the Bible. David’s media reach has proved impressive; now he just needs to get the boat onto the water, test it as thoroughly as he can within the reach of the San Francisco Bay, and then he and a crew of a half-dozen are off, hopefully around the end of February.
“We began by looking at bamboo, which stayed within the theme of the Kontiki expedition, but decided an all-plastic vessel was more fitting for our needs. A bout with recycled plastic lumber proved it wholly inappropriate due to its density and lack of stiffness. Over time the troubles we faced during our search for the right material pushed us toward the path of least resistance. It was a path that was going to see us melting down all the bottles and losing the imagination grabbing iconic image that we were trying so hard to preserve.
“With outright stubbornness and determination we stayed true to the vision of our dream. But to do it we had to engineer a new product dubbed self-reinforcing polyethylene terephthalate (SR-PET), which is a proprietary plastic evolved from plain old PET plastic. Had we taken the easy route we would have of lost the biggest breakthrough for the Plastiki project and more importantly a possible real world solution for our plastic problem. Simply put the structural skeleton of the Plastiki as well as the majority of the boat is made entirely out of the same plastic used in soda and water bottles, the same material that ends up in our oceans! The two could co-exist within the same waste cycle and feed into each other’s production. Just as long as the plastic flows back into factories, not our backyards and coastal waters, it would be a model referred to as ‘closed loop.’ ”
No matter how the sail goes, David already feels like the Plastiki’s message has already been heard. He and the boat have gotten great press, from the New Yorker to the Wall Street Journal. “If all that comes from these past four years is that people think more about where that water bottle they buy each morning comes from – and where it’s going – then we’ve succeeded,” he says.
Standing on the deck of the plastic ship, it’s small cabin like some kind of hexagonal dome grown slightly wild, I try and imagine what it will be like to sail it in a big Pacific Ocean storm.
“I’ve gone back and forth about our route,” its captain explains (not a sailor himself, David’s hired a good one, Jo Royle, to command the ship), “initially I thought we would take our time and make lots of stops. Now I’m thinking we just go straight through, really test the boat and ourselves.”
In my travels along the world’s coastlines I’ve seen thousands of miles of beaches nearly buried beneath plastic waste – bottles, beer crates, flip-flops, fishing cord, etc. – washed up from … well, that’s always an interesting question. Where exactly does all that plastic originate? A lot of it comes from boats (fishing, commercial, cruise, sport), some from landfills built too close the sea and some simply from lazy citizens who still toss garbage of all kind onto the beach or directly into the ocean.The Times has a great piece today about a novel program, being monitored by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, which has put tracking devices on three thousand pieces of garbage collected from individuals and businesses from Seattle to New York. The results of their trackings will be displayed in real time online and in exhibitions at the Architectural League on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.
Trash-to-be-tracked, Photo by Kevin P. Casey
What caught my eye was the comment by the lab’s director Carlo Ratti on how the project might impact people to pick up after themselves. “If you see where a plastic bottle ends up, a few miles down the road in a dump, you may want to get tap water or some other container for the water,” Mr. Ratti told the Times.
I’m going to call M.I.T. and encourage them to expand the program, to attach tracking devices specifically to a wide-range of plastic used near a coastline or on an international container ship and see just how much of it ends up in the ocean … and then what path it takes once there. I wonder if those tracking devices are waterproof?
Two weeks ago my friend Captain Charles Moore – discoverer of the now-famed North Pacific Garbage Patch – pushed off from the docks in Long Beach aboard the ORV Alguita for a four-month-long exploration of the sizable floating plastic trash pile he initially brought to light a decade ago.
The 2009 exploration, divided into two segments, will first take Moore and his team to Hawaii and then to the heart of the swirling gyre, where he first measured six times as much plastic afloat near the surface as plankton.
The first leg, June 10- July 25, is underway and should take the crew around the North West Hawaiian islands, north of Midway and Kure.
Their pre-cruise expectation: The quantity of plastic pollution in the ocean is increasing rapidly, paralleling the rapid rise in global plastic production. Each time the ORV Alguita crew collects samples from the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), we find that the abundance of plastic has increased since our previous visit. In previous research voyages we have found a very high abundance of plastic in the area of the gyre that has come to be known as “The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch”, but we suspect that the contamination is much more widespread. This summer we will have the opportunity to test this hypothesis during the first voyage of our four month research expedition. During this voyage the ORV Alguita research crew will be at sea for over six weeks as they sail west from California past the Northern Hawaiian Islands as far as the International Date Line (180 degrees longitude) to sample areas of the Pacific Ocean previously un-sampled for plastic marine debris. We will be collecting samples of plastic debris, plankton and fish to analyze back in our laboratory to better understand not only the quantity of plastic debris pollution in remote areas of the ocean, but also the impacts the plastic is having as it is consumed by marine animals. Below is a map that shows the area where ORV Alguita has sampled for plastic pollution over the past 10 years. The first voyage of the summer expedition hopes to extend the study area all the way to the International Date Line at 180 degrees longitude.
The second leg of the expedition, expected to begin early in August, will take the boat on a giant loop one thousand miles north of Hawaii, into the NPSG. Moore is convinced the percentage of plastic in the gyre will have increased during the past decade, but this exploration will bring back hard evidence. While lots of people have talked about visiting the site it is tricky to reach – halfway across the Pacific Ocean, between Russia and California – so very few scientific efforts have actually taken place.
Moore and crew are posting daily logs, so … tune in.
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