Toxic Waters: How Ocean Ecosystems are Drowning in Plastic
The massive amount of plastic pollution in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch not only threatens marine wildlife, but humans as well
There’s a country three times the size of France in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It didn’t used to be there, but it keeps growing year after year. You can visit it, but never set foot on it. We didn’t build it, but humanity’s fingerprints are all over it. And while no human can live there, it’s home to millions of residents.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is no riddle. It’s a rapidly growing environmental blight — a floating “garbage island” that’s swelled 1.6 million square kilometers in size. That’s up to 16 times larger than previous estimates, making it twice the size of Texas and indeed three times the size of France. But in truth, it’s hard to know exactly how far this pollution has spread since it’s not just comprised of floating refuse. A considerable amount has made a home along the ocean floor, and the portion that does ride the waves is constantly moving.
This garbage, nicknamed the Pacific trash vortex, is kept in motion by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a vast system of circular ocean currents that transport the trash clockwise around 20 million square kilometers. Much of it then gets drawn to the center of this spiral, where it accumulates as massive islands. One such island, the Western Garbage Patch, floats off the coast of Japan, while the Eastern Garbage Patch resides between Hawaii and California.
It’s been given many names, and there are more still. The sprawling filth has also been dubbed the Trash Isles by satirical activists. In a clever 2017 publicity stunt, the Plastic Oceans Foundation petitioned the United Nations to recognize the Trash Isles as their own sovereign nation to raise awareness of the problem. Former Vice President and current environmentalist Al Gore even became the first citizen of the Trash Isles, with over 200,000 others following suit. They even went as far as to design their own currency.
Despite being characterized as islands, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass. There are an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the patch; that amount translates to 250 pieces of plastic per human being in the world. About 94% of it is microplastics — bits of plastic bags, bottles, straws, wrappers, and assorted man-made waste. This rubbish becomes more dangerous as heat from the sun and motion from ocean currents slowly break the plastic down into tiny pieces, usually smaller than 5 millimeters. That degree of deterioration makes microplastics extremely difficult to effectively remove, and they are easily mistaken as food by fish and other aquatic wildlife. Since microplastics elude the efforts of cleanup crews and poison ocean animals, they pose the greatest ecological threat.
Yet even though the vast majority of this garbage is composed of microplastics, they only account for 8% of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic floating out there. 75% of the total weight is from megaplastics and macroplastics, the larger bits of plastic that better resemble whole pieces of trash. Roughly 20% of that was a direct result of the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan, which washed a lot of debris out into the ocean, but even that disaster didn’t produce the heaviest of the garbage. Almost half of all that tonnage is from ghost nets, abandoned fishing nets that now haunt the Pacific and endanger the lives of countless marine animals.
Ghost nets are the greater immediate threat. At 46% of the total mass of garbage, they claim the lives of roughly 100,000 marine animals each year. Whales, turtles, seals, and fish are regularly strangled or trapped by these nets, which are either accidentally lost during fishing or purposefully cast adrift after being damaged. Animals are also entangled in other discarded fishing gear found in the patch, such as ropes, traps, and baskets. These hazards put the inhabitants of many ocean ecosystems in great peril, one perhaps more than others.
Midway Atoll, a U.S. territory north of Hawaii, is one of the most polluted sites in the Pacific. Its beaches are covered in plastic and have become a killing field for birds like the albatross, which migrate in the millions to Midway Atoll each year. With nearly no human population and no major predators, the primary cause of death for these birds is plastic consumption. If you were to cut open any of the many albatross corpses found on the island, it would look as if you had just torn open a garbage bag. Chunks of plastic, bottle caps, golf balls, cigarette lighters, even shotgun shells have been found resting between their bones. The longevity of plastic means it outlasts natural decomposition, so island researchers know that if they see a distinctive pile of plastic bits on the beach, that was the spot where an albatross met its end.
Every single albatross on Midway Atoll has dined on plastic, from the adults to the fledglings that they feed. They mistake much of the trash floating in the ocean as their regular prey. When an albatross comes across a plastic bag, it sees it as a jellyfish or a squid and gulps it down. Microplastics also resemble fish eggs to these birds, which just accumulate inside their stomachs without being properly digested. Since they bring back the garbage to their nests (where it remains after the bird has perished), in addition to it continuously washing ashore due to currents, the island has become both a graveyard and a dump heap. Plastic shards live in the soil beneath the grass, nets cover the coastline like webs, and the smell of decaying birds pervades among the five tons of trash they carry to the island every year. So many microplastics have ended up on Midway Atoll that they are near-inseparable from the natural sand.
The remains of the albatross may foreshadow humanity’s own if this pollution continues unchecked. Toxic substances that leak out of the plastics over time are absorbed by animals once ingested. This process is called bioaccumulation. Humans harvested approximately 167 million tons of fish in 2014 alone, which accounted for 17% of global animal protein nutrition. Researchers have concluded that at least 84% of the plastic found floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains Persistent Bioaccumulative Toxic (PBT) chemicals, which often contain carcinogens. Since fish are swallowing untold amounts of microplastics, and humans continue to eat fish in greater quantities every year, we are decisively poisoning ourselves as well as ocean creatures. Sea turtles in the Pacific can have up to 74% of their diet consist of plastics, and as of 2015 at least 8 trillion microbeads, the tiny plastic particles found in many cosmetic soaps, were being dumped into oceans and consumed by fish.
Eating plastic has become so common that some animals have even adapted to it. Last year, it was discovered that wax worms are able to naturally digest plastic since its chemical composition is similar to the polymer-based wax that they normally eat. As promising as this evolution is, there aren’t enough worms in the world to eat the colossal amounts of plastic waste that we produce, not in time to save the environment. Scientists estimate that by 2050 the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans will outnumber all fish. This is because plastic production has increased 20-fold in the last 50 years, and may double again in another 20 years. It doesn’t help that 91% of plastic is not recycled and thus finds its way into landfills and oceans.
So we’re spoiling our own food supply, creating more and more plastic over time, and failing to dispose of it properly. How did this happen? Plastic is malleable and cheap to produce, making it convenient and attractive for consumer and industrial manufacturing. But the durability of plastic is a double-edged sword, as it can take up to 400 years for plastic to degrade on its own. Plastic produced back in 1977 has been found still floating in the Pacific as recently as 2015, and the damage that plastic waste causes to marine ecosystems has an annual cleanup cost of $13 billion. And that’s a conservative estimate.
The pernicious influence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has taken decades to grasp, and in all of that time it has spread at a devilish pace. This sadly means that it’s not going to stop growing anytime soon. Much like fossil fuels, the societies of the world are unwilling or unable to abandon heavy plastic reliance cold turkey, so how do we stop this staggering pollution from getting worse? It’s easy to feel powerless when confronted by the sheer scale of this issue. But just as people created this problem, we have it within ourselves to begin reducing it.
Start with your daily decisions, specifically those made with your wallet. Disposable coffee lids often end up at sea, so invest in a portable coffee container that you can reuse. Bring your own canvas bags to the grocery store so you don’t need to use their plastic ones. Support beverage brands that foster innovations like biodegradable 6-pack rings made from wheat, which easily disintegrate in water and are safe for animals to eat. Plastic straws can become lodged in the nostrils of sea turtles, so stop using them. You may not be able to prevent a restaurant from stocking straws, but you can make a point of declining them when you order a drink. Similarly, say no to styrofoam to-go containers. Many around the world have even begun using plastic bottles to build new homes. Switching to glass bottles instead of plastic is also a good idea, since glass is easier to recycle and doesn’t pose the same risk to the environment.
These may seem like small, inconvenient measures for your day-to-day life, but they send a strong message to businesses if the majority of consumers start to change their ways. If less plastic straws, containers, and bags are being used, they’ll stop producing as many. Because make no mistake, these changes won’t make a dent in plastic pollution unless we all commit to them. Convenience is a powerful drug, and the side effects of abusing it are no less harmful than any other. In this case, we’re harming both wildlife and ourselves.
The cost of plastic has simply become too high. We have misused our ingenuity and created a material that not only persists beyond all natural reckoning but also contaminates ecosystems throughout the world due to our own negligence. More garbage patches have also formed in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, so no corner of the globe is untouched by this threat. The impact we’re leaving on our oceans will soon become irreversible if we don’t alter how we package our products and deal with our waste. Until we do so, marine animals will continue to suffer the most from our transgressions.