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Plastic Pollution Haunts from Sea to Shining Sea

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Plastic Pollution Haunts from Sea to Shining Sea

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By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI News staff

PROVIDENCE - The amount of plastic choking the planet, most notably the world's oceans, is unfathomable. The evidence of this unrelenting assault overwhelming. The scale of this toxic pollution horrifying.

Consider:

It's estimated that there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean, from 269,000 tons afloat on the surface to some 4 billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer in the deep sea.

Plastic bags break up into smaller pieces, but their footprint never vanishes. If they do break down, it's into polymers and toxic chemicals. Some 500 billion single-use plastic bags are used annually worldwide. If you joined them end to end, these petroleum pouches would circumnavigate the globe 4,200 times. Only a minuscule fraction are recycled or reused.

Twenty-five billion Styrofoam cups are thrown out annually in the United States alone.

A single tube of facial scrub can contain more than 330,000 plastic microbeads. A single microbead can be a million times more toxic than the water around it.

Nearly 3 million plastic bottles, every hour of every day, are used in the United States. Less than 30 percent are recycled.

More than 300 million plastic straws are used every day in the United States. Straws are too small to be easily recycled, so they typically become trash. Plastic straws are one of the top beach polluters worldwide.

Eight million tons of plastic are dumped into the world's oceans every year.

About 100,000 marine creatures die every year from plastic entanglement.

About a million sea birds are killed every year by plastic. A record 276 pieces of plastic where found in one dead bird. It was 90 days old.

At least two-thirds of the world's fish stocks are suffering from plastic ingestion.

A 2016 study warns that there will be more waste plastic, by weight, in the ocean than fish by 2050, unless humans clean up their act.

"We've plasticized the entire biosphere, including our bodies," said Marcus Eriksen, research director and co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute. "The impact of plastic is widespread, and it's destroying the oceans."

Eriksen was one of four guests who spoke March 4 at Brown University during a panel discussion titled "The Plastic Ocean." The discussion also featured photographer Chris Jordan, Georgia State University professor Pam Longobardi and author Carl Safina.

In January, ecoRI News hosted a screening of A Plastic Ocean at the Cable Car Cinema. Both events highlighted a serious problem.

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Plastic Pollution Haunts From Sea to Shining Sea

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PROVIDENCE - The amount of plastic choking the planet, most notably the world's oceans, is unfathomable. The evidence of this unrelenting assault overwhelming. The scale of this toxic pollution horrifying. Consider: It's estimated that there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean, from 269,000 tons afloat on the surface to some 4 billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer in the deep sea.

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Floating in the waters of the North Pacific Ocean is one lasting human legacy we can't be proud of at all - a giant floating island of garbage.

It's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch and the Pacific Trash Vortex. But no matter what you call it, it's pretty disgusting.

The floating island of rubbish is a collection of marine litter in the central North Pacific estimated to be about the twice the size of the state of Texas. It's mainly composed of plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the current of the North Pacific Gyre.

It's huge but - so far - it's not visible from space.

Basically, the garbage patch has formed over time as a result of ocean currents moving waste to one location. Once the garbage gets to the central North Pacific location, it doesn't really move much (that's the way the ocean currents work).

Some Stats

Twice the size of the state of Texas

Covers an area between 700,000 square kilometers to more than 15,000,000 square kilometers - 0.41% of the total size of the Pacific Ocean

Contains over 100,000,000 tons of debris

80% of the garbage comes from land

20% of the garbage comes from ships at sea

It takes about 5 years for currents to carry a piece of garbage from North America to the spot

It takes about 1 year for currents to carry a piece of garbage from Asia to the spot

Impact On Environment

Even though we always talk about how plastic doesn't disintegrate in landfills, it does break down into smaller and smaller pieces when it's floating in the ocean. However, it only breaks down in size, not content - so once plastic, always plastic.

Once the plastic pieces become small enough they can be mistaken for zooplankton and actually be ingested or eaten by aquatic organisms - which means they can enter the food chain and may end up back on your dinner plate.

Whether they ingest the tiny pieces of plastic directly or by eating another animal that has previously ingested the plastic, there are several kinds of creatures that are affected: jellyfish, sea turtles, albatross, etc.

The floating debris can also absorb organic pollutants from the seawater, which makes them even more harmful to wildlife that may ingest them.

Cleanup

In 2008, Richard Owen, a building contractor and scuba dive instructor, formed the Environmental Cleanup Coalition to address the issue of the pollution of the North Pacific. The ECC plan calls for modifying a fleet of ships to clear the area of debris and form a restoration and recycling laboratory called Gyre Island.

Related Stories:

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Floating in the waters of the North Pacific Ocean is one lasting human legacy we can't be proud of at all - a giant floating island of garbage.

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Unsightly plastic bottles, bags and other trash give just a hint of the largely unseen problem of plastic pollution. Scientists have found tiny bits of it throughout the ocean. The bad news: Sea life can’t tell the difference between plastic and food.

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Drinking Water: Bottled or From the Tap? 

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Drinking Water: Bottled or From the Tap? 

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Around the world, people throw away roughly four million tons of trash every day-that's enough to fill 350,000 garbage trucks or 10 Empire State Buildings. About 12.8 percent of that waste is plastic, which causes big problems for wildlife: some animals mistake plastic for food, while others can become entangled in the trash.

Don't use face wash or toothpaste with microbeads. These tiny plastic beads go down the drain, eventually making their way to rivers, lakes, and the ocean at a rate of eight trillion a day in the United States. Because these toxic beads look a lot like fish food, it's not uncommon for bigger fish and sea turtles to munch on them-a dish that could be deadly.

Say no to straws! In 2015 a viral video showed an olive ridley sea turtle in obvious discomfort as a team of experts work to dislodge something deep within its nostril. At first, they thought it was a worm. But experts were stunned to see what it really was: a plastic drinking straw.

Instead of packing your sandwich and snacks in plastic bags, use reusable containers or cloth sacks instead. Same goes for your drink: Skip the juice boxes and opt for a refillable water bottle.

Reduce the amount of plastic bags clogging up our trash and oceans by shopping with reusable bags instead.

To eliminate some of the excess packaging piling up in landfills, encourage your family to shop for snacks, cereal, and pasta in the bulk section of your grocery store (if yours doesn't have any bulk items, check out a nearby natural food shop). Then, store it all in reusable glass jars.

Pack an apple, a banana, or an orange. Fruit fills you up in a healthy way, plus there's no need for extra packaging. (Save the core, peels, and rinds for your compost bin.)

Using these tips, keep track of the trash you toss. Every week, try to throw out less and less and see how much you can minimize your waste in a month. Some people have managed to put an entire year's worth of garbage in one jar. Can you beat that?

If your family is like many in the United States, unloading the week's groceries includes hauling a case or two of bottled water into your home. On your way to a soccer game or activity, it's easy to grab a cold one right out of the fridge, right?

But all those plastic bottles use a lot of fossil fuels and pollute the environment. In fact, Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world, adding 29 billion water bottles a year to the problem. In order to make all these bottles, manufacturers use 17 million barrels of crude oil. That's enough oil to keep a million cars going for twelve months.

Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.

So why don't more people drink water straight from the kitchen faucet? Some people drink bottled water because they think it is better for them than water out of the tap, but that's not always true. In most places in the United States, local governments make sure water from the faucet is safe. There is also growing concern that chemicals in the bottles themselves may leach into the water.

People love the convenience of bottled water. But maybe if they realized the problems it causes, they would try drinking from a glass at home or carrying water in a refillable steel container instead of plastic.

Plastic bottle recycling can help-instead of going out with the trash, plastic bottles can be turned into items like carpeting or cozy fleece clothing.

Unfortunately, for every six water bottles we use, only one makes it to the recycling bin. The rest are sent to landfills. Or, even worse, they end up as trash on the land and in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Plastic bottles take many hundreds of years to disintegrate.

Water is good for you, so keep drinking it. But think about how often you use water bottles, and see if you can make a change.

And yes, you can make a difference. Remember this: Recycling one plastic bottle can save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for six hours.

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Plastic Pollution- Why Coca-Cola need to take responsibility too 

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Plastic Pollution- Why Coca-Cola need to take responsibility too 

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One of the best things about working on Greenpeace's campaign to end ocean plastics is the chance to have lots of conversations with all sorts of people about the issue - whether on local radio stations or with pedestrians walking past the 2.5 tonne sculpture we installed outside Coca-Cola's London HQ this week.

Everyone knows that plastic pollution is a massive problem. We're all too familiar with seeing plastic bottles scattered along our beaches or washed up on riverbanks.

But when it comes to tackling a problem of this scale, knowledge of the solutions is a bit fuzzier. It's clear that to stop the flow of plastic into the ocean, we need to turn the tap off at source. This means ending the era of throwaway plastic. But that's a pretty big ask. For those of us who live for practical to-do lists, how do we do that?

We've kicked off our campaign by calling for the companies that are responsible for selling single-use plastic bottles to us to commit to drastically reducing their plastic footprint, by ditching throwaway plastic. Studies estimate that 600 billion bottles will be produced globally this year - and Coca-Cola alone is responsible for a sixth of all plastic drinks bottles sold around the world. In the UK, 16 million plastic bottles will be dumped into our environment every day.

But isn't it up to individuals not to litter, and to make sure the plastic bottles they use are recycled?

The answer is that we all have a responsibility to reduce our plastic footprint - individuals, businesses and governments. But there is such a huge amount of plastic flowing into the ocean - a rubbish truck's worth every single minute - that we need to tackle this problem at source.

Think about it like this: if your bath was overflowing, your priority would be to turn off the taps - you wouldn't first start mopping up the excess water.

So to end ocean plastic pollution, we need to prioritise reducing the staggering amount of single-use plastic packaging that is being pumped out and sold to us in the first place.

Our litter collection and recycling systems simply cannot keep up with the amount of plastic we're using. It's unacceptable that it's so hard to avoid buying food and drinks in throwaway plastic packaging on your weekly shop. In fact, the 5p plastic bag charge in supermarkets is a great illustration of how individuals, governments and business can work together to make single-use plastic a thing of the past.

Governments across the UK introduced the charge to give individuals an incentive to re-use bags, and businesses started creating more durable plastic bags to meet this demand. As a result, throwaway plastic bag use has dropped by 85% in England, and number of plastic bags washing up on British coastlines nearly halved between 2014 and 2015!

So of course individuals are part of this change - you can try out our plastic calculator to test your own plastic footprint, and find out easy ways to reduce it. But even if you're shocked by your results, I bet you're a long way off the plastic footprint of major soft drinks companies like Coca-Cola.

Whilst it's important, it's not enough that individuals simply recycle more, as the big drinks companies claim. Without drastic action from the industry itself as well, we won't succeed halting the flow of plastic into the oceans.

These companies spend millions promoting themselves as eco-conscious, but we've revealed that Coca-Cola sells over 100 billion single-use plastic bottles every year. That means if Coke do take credible action to reduce their plastic footprint and embrace refillable packaging, that can make a massive difference to our oceans.

They've done it before to tackle climate change, through reducing their carbon footprint. Coca-Cola used its influence across the soft drinks sector and its global supply chain to boost momentum for phasing out highly polluting greenhouse gases from its cooling units. Now it needs to do the same for its plastic footprint.

That's why we're encouraging people to demand change from these companies.Coca-Cola has already U-turned on its opposition to a deposit return scheme in Scotland this year after its own customer polling showed the majority supported this kind of scheme.

You can now join over 46,000 people who've written directly to Coke's European CEO to tell him that ocean plastic pollution must end - and that he can't keep washing his hands of the problem.

This problem isn't going to go away unless companies like Coca-Cola drastically reduce their use of single-use plastic bottles, embrace reusable bottles and invest in ways of dispensing drinks based on re-use.

Our oceans simply cannot stomach any more plastic - tell Coke to stop choking our oceans. Email Coca-Cola's CEO now.

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Plastic Pollution - Why Coca-Cola need to take responsibility too

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One of the best things about working on Greenpeace's campaign to end ocean plastics is the chance to have lots of conversations with all sorts of people about the issue - whether on local radio stations or with pedestrians walking past the 2.5 tonne sculpture we installed outside Coca-Cola's London HQ this week.

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This mobile game lets you 'clean up' plastic pollution from the ocean. 

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This mobile game lets you 'clean up' plastic pollution from the ocean. 

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The game stars a vaquita, a small porpoise from Mexico on the edge of extinction. Only about 30 vaquitas remain, making it the world's most rare marine mammal. After playing, users are encouraged to sign a pledge to commit to using less plastic in the real world.

"The Big Catch," empowered by Playmob and supported by the United Nations, is the first in a series of initiatives designed to change consumer behaviors.

"One of [our] goals is to show people the interconnectedness of the oceans with our everyday lives, and how the smallest lifestyle change can make a lasting impact towards protecting the future of our people and planet," Daisy Kendrick, founder and CEO of We Are The Oceans, said in a statement.

An estimated 19.4 billion pounds of plastic wind up in the ocean each year, a 2015 study found. The garbage is a choking hazard for birds and marine wildlife. It also spreads toxic chemicals up the food chain, from microscopic plankton all the way to humans.

Image: Lou Dematteis/Spectral Q via Getty Images

A separate anti-pollution project is focused on one plastic perpetrator in particular: drinking straws.

Strawless Ocean, an effort by the Lonely Whale Foundation, works with restaurants and coffee shops to help them ditch plastic straws and swap in paper substitutes. In the U.S. alone, Americans use around 500 million plastic straws every day, which, in worst-case scenarios, can end up lodged in the noses of turtles.

At Freehold, a hybrid work space-bar-venue in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, plastic straws are nowhere in sight. If patrons want something to slurp with, they can request paper straws, which are made by the startup Aardvark - and, fortunately, don't immediately turn to mush.

Brice Jones, a co-owner of Freehold, said the bar previously ran through 1.5 million plastic straws a year. Now, he expects to use about 700,000 paper straws a year, though it will cost an extra $3,000.

"We wanted to be at the forefront" of the strawless movement, he said from the bar on a recent afternoon. "We want to show other restauranteurs how to make it work."

Jones said Freehold is also looking at composting its food waste and recycling other plastic products, which Emy Kane of Lonely Whale said was the campaign's bigger goal. Going strawless is a "gateway" for reducing other types of plastics that wind up in the ocean, she said.

Such efforts can't come soon enough.

Scientists recently discovered that fragments of plastic waste are even showing up regions as remote as the Arctic Circle.

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This mobile game lets you 'clean up' plastic pollution from the ocean

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The game stars a vaquita, a small porpoise from Mexico on the edge of extinction. Only about 30 vaquitas remain, making it the world's most rare marine mammal. After playing, users are encouraged to sign a pledge to commit to using less plastic in the real world.

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How We Can Keep Plastics Out of Our Ocean

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How We Can Keep Plastics Out of Our Ocean

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How We Can Keep Plastics Out of Our Ocean | National Geographic

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Are You Eating Plastic for Dinner? | Short Film Showcase

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New Research Reveals Devastating Effect of Nano Plastics on Marine Life

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New Research Reveals Devastating Effect of Nano Plastics on Marine Life

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New Research Reveals Devastating Effect Of Nano Plastics On Marine Life

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A study into the devastating effects of nano-sized plastic particles on oceans and marine life by Lund University in Sweden found the pollutants were crossing internal biological barriers. Hear more at https://www.audioburst.com/Science

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Plastic Pollution, Our Ocean, Our Future

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Plastic Pollution, Our Ocean, Our Future

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Plastic Pollution, Our Oceans, Our Future...

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Microplastics in the Ocean are Killing Baby Fish, Study Finds

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Microplastics in the Ocean are Killing Baby Fish, Study Finds

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Microplastics in the Ocean are Killing Baby Fish, Study Finds

Could this plastic-problem climb the food chain, impacting entire populations

by Julie Fidler

Our seas are littered with plastic, and tiny bits of it are seriously threatening the environment, according to a study published in the journal Science. Researchers say microplastics - small plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter - could be hurting the survival of European perch, as well as other creatures.
Read: Will There Be More Plastic than Fish in the Ocean by 2050?
According to a 2015 study, an estimated 4.8 million to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic were dumped into the ocean in 2010 alone, and that amount is expected to rise. The issue has taken on another dimension as scientists have become aware of the issue of microplastics.

Plastics don't decompose in the water; instead, they break down over time into tinier and tinier pieces. These microplastics are especially dangerous to marine life because they are easy to digest. Tiny pieces of plastic have been discovered in the bodies of many types of animals, including clams and mussels, small fish, and birds.

Scientists are only starting to uncover how microplastics affect the animals that consume them, and how potential problems might climb the food chain and impact entire populations. [1]

For the study, European perch embryos and larvae from the Baltic Sea were placed in lab aquariums with varying levels of polystyrene microplastics, including concentrations currently observed in nature, EcoWatch reports. Polystyrene is used to make styrofoam.

The team of researchers found that larvae living in high concentrations of microplastic particles chose to eat the particles over plankton, the creatures' natural food source.

Peter Eklöv, co-author of the study, told The Guardian:

"This is the first time an animal has been found to preferentially feed on plastic particles, and is cause for concern."

Lead author Dr. Oona Lonnstedt explained to BBC News:
Read: Huge Discovery: Bacterium That "Eats" Plastic Waste

"They all had access to zooplankton and yet they decided to just eat plastic in that treatment. It seems to be a chemical or physical cue that the plastic has, that triggers a feeding response in fish.

They are basically fooled into thinking it's a high-energy resource that they need to eat a lot of. I think of it as unhealthy fast food for teenagers, and they are just stuffing themselves."

Could these microplastics threaten the perches' survival? How might this affect the other animals - and humans - that consume the perch?

The study found that young perch living in high concentrations of microplastics were smaller and less active than fish living in average concentrations of microplastic particles. They also seemed to ignore the chemical signals that would normally warn them of predators.

When researchers put the fishes' natural predators in the aquariums with them, pike consumed the perch 4 times more quickly than they consumed the perch living in normal conditions. All of the plastic-exposed perch were dead within 48 hours.

The fish that had been exposed to microplastics also had a lower hatch rate - 89% under the average concentration, and 81% under the high concentration, compared with 96% when no microplastics were present.

In other words, the chunks of styrofoam, the plastic bags, the microbeads found in cosmetic products tossed into the ocean...they are altering the behavior of fish and reversing the evolutionary changes in perch designed help them thrive in the water.

Lonnstedt said:

"If early life-history stages of other species are similarly affected by microplastics, and this translates to increased mortality rates, the effects on aquatic ecosystems could be profound."

Read: Edible Silverware Could Cut Down On Plastic Waste and Pollution
The perch had long been a fixture in the Baltic Sea, but citizens have noted in recent years that the fish seem to be declining. Scientists may now know why.

Lonnstedt said the next step is to determine whether some types of plastics are more harmful than others:

"What we're actually trying to do now is pinpoint...which plastic polymer is the worst for fish. Is it polyethylene? Is it polystyrene? Is it PVC?"

Sources:

[1] The Washington Post

The University of Rhode Island

About Julie Fidler:

Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

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Microplastics in the Ocean are Killing Baby Fish, Study Finds

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Could this plastic-problem climb the food chain, impacting entire populations by Julie Fidler Our seas are littered with plastic, and tiny bits of it are seriously threatening the environment, according to a study published in the journal Science .

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Marine Debris Growing Problem for Beaches, Wildlife

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Marine Debris Growing Problem for Beaches, Wildlife

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The problem of marine debris and beach trash is overwhelming. According to the documentary, "A Plastic Ocean," about 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean annually. Much of it is still out there just waiting to be consumed by fish, sea turtles, albatrosses and other marine creatures. The plastic that isn't consumed by wildlife eventually washes up on a beach.

July Lewis, who coordinates beach cleanups throughout the state for Save The Bay, said there are two aspects to the issue of marine debris: aesthetics and wildlife impacts.

"No one wants to come to a beach that's covered in trash," she said. "It makes a difference in how people can enjoy our beaches."

From a wildlife perspective, however, it can be a life-or-death issue. Sea turtles consume plastic bags and latex balloons that they mistake for jellyfish; whales that feed on large quantities of plankton can't separate out the microplastics from the edible microorganisms; and bits of plastic get caught in the gills of fish and the stomachs of birds.

"Even if it's not fatal, it's a burden on these animals," Lewis said. "It's hard to calculate exactly what that burden is and what the mortality may be from it, but it's increasing because we know that the amount of plastics in our ocean is increasing. Most everything that lives in the ocean has some plastic in them."

Lewis noted that monofilament fishing line is especially dangerous to marine life, because animals can easily become entangled in it.

"It's meant to be invisible and unbreakable, so it's a serious entanglement hazard to marine life," she said.

Nearly 1,500 pieces of fishing line at least a yard long were picked up on Rhode Island beaches last September as part of the International Coastal Cleanup. In addition, Lewis said the event's 2,205 volunteers removed about 46,000 cigarette butts, 7,500 plastic bottles, 4,800 glass bottles, 13,000 pieces of plastic, 10,500 food wrappers and 5,700 plastic bags from 65 miles of Ocean State shoreline.

Dave McLaughlin, executive director of Clean Ocean Access, a Middletown-based nonprofit that organizes dozens of beach cleanups on Aquidneck Island annually, said the problem of plastics in the ocean continues to increase.

"By 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish," he said. "That's a pretty scary statistic."

In the past 10 years, his group has removed nearly 95,000 pounds of debris from Aquidneck Island beaches.

"We're still finding debris left on the shoreline from the storm surge of Hurricane Bob and Hurricane Sandy, some of which has been out there for 20 years," he said.

Clean Ocean Access has adopted a unique technology used at marinas on the West Coast to help address the problem. The group has installed a trash skimmer in Newport Harbor that uses a Dumpster-sized contraption with a motorized pump to suck floating debris - as well as oil and other pollutants - into the container for proper disposal. Between August and December of last year, it collected more than 6,000 pounds of debris. McLaughlin aims to install four more at other marinas around the state next year.

"It's like watching paint dry," he said. "It looks like it's doing nothing, but when you come back eight hours later, it's collected a lot of stuff."

With Earth Day approaching, McLaughlin and Lewis encourage Rhode Islanders to join in some of the many local beach cleanups taking place this month. Save The Bay-sponsored cleanups can be found here, or join Clean Ocean Access at a cleanup of the Cliff Walk on April 22 from 10 a.m.-noon.

Clean Ocean Access is also sponsoring a screening of the film "A Plastic Ocean" at the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport on April 26 at 6:30 p.m.

"In the grand scheme of things, picking up someone else's trash on the beach isn't changing people's habits," Dennis said. "But in my little niche, it's making a difference."
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

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Marine Debris Growing Problem for Beaches, Wildlife

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The problem of marine debris and beach trash is overwhelming. According to the documentary, "A Plastic Ocean," about 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean annually. Much of it is still out there just waiting to be consumed by fish, sea turtles, albatrosses and other marine creatures.