Capitulo 14

After reading about the problems and possible solutions to the issue of microplastics in the
ocean, what questions do you still have about the problem and the proposals? Focus the content
of your questions on the people from the readings. Write two questions for each person. Use at
least one word from Review or Expand in each question. 1. Erica Cirino (author and voyager,
R1) a. b.
2. Boyan Slat (founder of Ocean Cleanup, R2) a. b.
3. Marcus Eriksen (founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, R2)

Sea Unworthy: A Personal Journey Into the Pacific Garbage Patch Erica Cirino
The Patch Close Up It’s about four o’clock in the afternoon on a clear day last November
onboard the S/Y Christianshavn, a 54-foot Danish steel sailboat, which is bound for Honolulu
from Los Angeles, across the most famous plastic-clogged place on Earth: the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch. As on most days during the 23-day journey, I spend my free time in the cockpit
on the lookout for trash. Every once in a while, I see disturbingly familiar plastic items float by
—a pink dustpan, a punctured green condiment bottle, a barnacle-covered Tupperware lid, a
white Styrofoam packing wedge. Then I notice a cloudy white blob floating on the water’s
surface—hundreds of white plastic pieces, some tiny confetti-like bits and some robust, rugged
chunks that look like peeled paint chips. I stick my head over the ship’s railing for a closer look.
Near the floating mass of white plastic there is something else in the water—something small,
finned. Something alive. I watch as a quarter-size blue-green larval fish swims to the surface,
opens its mouth and swallows a bit of plastic the size of a pencil eraser. Within moments, the
fish and plastic have floated away. “You just got a firsthand look at how plastic gets into the
food chain,” Kristian Syberg tells me a few minutes later. Syberg is an associate professor of
environmental risk at Roskilde University in Denmark and one of two resident scientists
onboard the vessel, which has set out to measure the smallest, most toxic pieces of plastic in the
ocean, called “microplastic.” Prior to this voyage scientists have never before searched for
plastic deep in the Pacific Ocean water column. “It’s the smallest fish that eat the most plastic
and become toxic. Then the middle-sized fish eat those smallest fish and become a little more
toxic. Then the larger fish eat those middle-sized fish and become even more toxic. And then we
eat the largest fish,” he notes. Suddenly, I think twice about consuming the mahi-mahi we’ve
caught for dinner that night. A Growing Problem Plastic can be detected in the bodies of more
than 50 percent of the world’s sea turtles. Scientists estimate 90 percent of all seabirds have
ingested plastic at some time in their lives. Fish, too, contain plastic and appear to consume it in
large quantities when it is available. Although there is a huge amount of plastic trash that has
accumulated on land, much of the world’s plastic resides in the oceans, where it is deposited
after being whisked there by the wind from land, being dumped at sea or on the shore, or being
carried there in runoff from rivers and streams. Scientists predict that by 2050 there will be
more plastic in the oceans than fish. Current estimates put the oceans’ total plastic load at 165
million tons. But that is just based on plastic samples collected from surface trawling 1 . More
microplastic found at greater depths in the oceans means scientists might be greatly
underestimating the total amount of plastic in the ocean—and its total effect. Syberg’s
expedition entails collecting water samples and trawling this famous stretch of ocean for
evidence of microplastic. His group's previous research in the Atlantic Ocean revealed that
microplastic exists at a greater depth than previously believed. What is more, a 2016 study
found that seafloor animals like lobsters, sea cucumbers, and hermit crabs, which can live at
depths of up to 6,000 feet (1,800 meters), have consumed the stuff. Pervasive Plastics Plastic is
so pervasive in the natural environment that if you took a look inside the body of any animal—
on land or at sea—you would likely find at least a trace of plastic, Syberg says. That includes
inside us humans. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “to date no systematic studies can confirm plastic is
present in people on a wide scale. Not enough money or attention has been allotted to address
this issue.” Although the garbage patch is typically portrayed as “a floating island of plastic
trash the size of Texas,” in actuality it only contains the occasional large piece of trash or fishing
gear and is mostly a large soup of microscopic plastic bits, many of which are too small to see
with the naked eye. That is because plastic breaks up over time, but never fully breaks down.
When plastic is exposed to UV radiation from the sun and mechanical movement of waves, it
breaks into little pieces. As I saw firsthand, fish tend to eat small pieces of plastic, mistaking it
for plankton, their preferred food source. Research reveals consuming plastics can increase fish
mortality by causing behavioral and physical abnormalities, such as slowed reaction time and
reduced size. Scientists hypothesize these problems are caused by the man-made chemicals that
plastic absorbs from seawater. The worry now is that these tiny toxic pieces of plastic may
affect more than just fish—possibly causing cancer in humans, altering our plastic 1 trawling:
method of fishing in which a large net is dragged through the water from the back of a
boathormones, and maybe even killing us. “In a little more than sixty years, we know we’ve
littered more than 150 million tons of plastic into the oceans,” says Henrik Beha Pedersen,
founder and president of the Danish nonprofit Plastic Change. “Where does it all end up? Is it in
the fish? Is it in the birds? Is it on the beaches? Is it on the deep-sea floor? Where has all the
plastic gone? Is it in us, us humans?” Research and Change Over the course of the expedition,
Syberg and Malene Møhl, an advisor on chemicals to The Danish Ecological Council and
Plastic Change volunteer, trawl for plastic, and additionally gather water at 200 meters (650
feet) down in the water column, flesh samples from fish, and bits of seaweed. Back in Denmark
it will be Syberg’s responsibility to process the samples, estimating how much microplastic is in
the Pacific. He will also test for chemicals in the plastic, fish, and seaweed, which will help him
determine to what degree plastic acts as a “vector,” soaking up and delivering toxic chemicals in
the bodies of living things. It is research that is most helpful in combating our plastic problem,
according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agent Mark Manuel, regional
coordinator of NOAA’s Pacific Islands Marine Debris Program, whom I meet up with in
Honolulu a few weeks after Christianshavn's journey ended in Kewalo Basin Harbor. He says
with government environmental agencies—including his own—strapped for cash and staff, it is
largely up to nonprofits like Plastic Change to gather data that, when analyzed and published,
can push plastic-curbing policies like plastic bag, microbead, and Styrofoam bans, which he
says appear effective in curbing plastic use and reducing pollution. For example, San Jose,
Calif. officials found a 2012 ban on plastic bags in their city helped reduce plastic litter in
streets by 59 percent, storm drains by 89 percent, and creeks by 60 percent, as well as increased
consumer use of reusable shopping bags. In the future, Syberg hopes he and other researchers
will be able to get the funding they need to pursue studies on the effects plastic has on human
health—the last big question remaining after the total amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is
properly quantified. As of now, a substantial portion of the research effort comes from the
nonprofit sphere— organizations currently collaborating with scientists to study plastic include
5 Gyres Institute, Mission Blue, and Greenpeace. NOAA currently provides grants to nonprofits
for plastic education, clean-up, pollution prevention and research projects—such as trash
surveys—in the Pacific and in coastal regions across the United States. Manuel says he has
found one of the biggest challenges to getting more data on marine debris and microplastic is
garnering enough volunteer help. “Changing behaviors can be hard, but we’ve seen how
nonprofits’ research can help get policies passed,” says Manuel, a Big Island native and father of
two young sons. “It can be hard to incentivize spending hours counting and cleaning up trash on
a beach, for free. Yet the more people that get involved, that help to get the science done, the
closer we get to cleaning up this mess.”
By now, most everyone knows this dirty truth about our oceans: Tons and tons of plastic waste
in the form of bottles, bags, fishing nets, Styrofoam, and a myriad of other containers are
routinely discarded into the sea. Marine scientists estimate that over 5 trillion pieces of plastic
currently litter the oceans. So is there any way to clean up that mess, and how feasible is it? “In
the past, people have proposed to clean up these areas using boats and nets, but of course these
areas are very large, many times the size of Texas, so if you were to do that it would take many
thousands of years and billions of dollars to clean up just one of those areas,” says Boyan Slat,
the young man behind an ambitious strategy called The Ocean Cleanup. Slat was a teenager in
the Netherlands in 2013 when he first proposed a technological solution to the problem of
plastic pollution. It’s focused particularly in the region located between Hawaii and California
known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s considered the largest of five ocean garbage
patches where ocean currents act like a gyre 1 to concentrate the floating plastic debris. “But
then I thought this plastic is actually moving around, it doesn't stay in one spot. So, why would
you go after the plastic when the plastic can come to you?” says Slat. “So, we came up with this
passive system that uses very long floating screens floating around to concentrate the plastic like
an artificial coastline.” Despite much hype, Slat’s solution is still in the prototype stage. But the
plan is that, within a year, the first Ocean Cleanup system will be towed out into the Pacific and
will get to work 2 . Basically, a floating U-shaped screen is weighed down and moves more
slowly in the current than the floating plastic, so the trash gets snagged by the screen. Once
gathered, the waste can be collected and stored more easily before it’s shipped to land for
recycling. Many questions have been raised about the viability of the Ocean Cleanup. Some
critics call the elaborate environmental scheme a boondoggle 3 . For example, can the
technology withstand fierce ocean storms? Slat and his team did test out floating screen
technology in harsh North Sea conditions, and it seemed to pass with flying colors, according to
Slat. Also, what about the huge amounts of plastic litter entrapped by the floating screens? How
does Slat propose to efficiently collect and retrieve vast amounts of plastic waste? “Basically I
have a fleet of clean-up systems floating around, up to fifty that we plan on deploying. Once a
month, a vessel comes and basically goes from clean-up system to clean-up system, like a
garbage truck of the ocean. With this we basically calculated that we should be able to clean up
about 50 percent of this Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just five years’ time,” he says. But the
bottom line is this: Ocean Cleanup hasn’t yet been actually deployed. It’s still in development
and could come online sometime in the coming year. So, stay tuned. In the meantime, other
marine scientists, including Marcus Eriksen, founder of the 5 Gyres Institute in California, are
working on an entirely different and global approach to ridding the world’s oceans of plastic
litter. Eriksen believes that a prevention model and changing the systems that create the
problems in the first place are the best way forward. “That’s where a lot of the hard work is
happening,” says Eriksen. “It’s far upstream trying to stop this flow of trash to sea. If you pick
up what’s out there, you’re not stopping the problem continuing far into the future. You’ve got
to stop the source.” Eriksen points to what he calls a “rising tide of activism 4 to fight plastic
pollution.” Many cities around the world, for example, are installing booms in their rivers and
estuaries to capture plastic trash before it washes to sea. Plastic recovery centers are starting to
appear in Southeast Asia, which Eriksen says are “getting really good at sourcing where plastic
trash is coming from and separating what can be recycled and composted. Any plastic trash left
over, they’re working with local companies to deal with it and to redesign excessive plastic
packaging.” That’s the kind of hard work that is required, Eriksen says, to stop the flow of
plastic into the ocean. He insists, “That’s where it’s happening.” As for Slat’s big floating
screens to be installed in the Pacific Ocean to be serviced by "ocean garbage trucks"? Eriksen
responds: "I’m sorry to say, but I think these downstream mitigations 5 out in the middle of the
ocean are a distraction from the work that almost all environmental organizations are focused
on.”