Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain's Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans

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Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain's Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans

by Charles Moore (Goodreads Author), Cassandra Phillips

3.93 of 5 stars 3.93  ·   rating details  ·  127 ratings  ·  30 reviews

A prominent seafaring environmentalist and researcher shares his shocking discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean, and inspires a fundamental rethinking of the Plastic Age and a growing global health crisis. 

In the summer of 1997, Charles Moore set sail from Honolulu with the sole intention of returning home after competing in a trans-Pacific race. To get to California, he and his crew took a shortcut through the seldom-traversed North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a vast "oceanic desert" where winds are slack and sailing ships languish. There, Moore realized his catamaran was surrounded by a "plastic soup." He had stumbled upon the largest garbage dump on the planet-a spiral nebula where plastic outweighed zooplankton, the ocean's food base, by a factor of six to one.

In Plastic Ocean, Moore recounts his ominous findings and unveils the secret life and hidden properties of plastics. From milk jugs to polymer molecules small enough to penetrate human skin or be unknowingly inhaled, plastic is now suspected of contributing to a host of ailments including infertility, autism, thyroid dysfunction, and some cancers. A call to action as urgent as Rachel Carson's seminal Silent Spring, Moore's sobering revelations will be embraced by activists, concerned parents, and seafaring enthusiasts concerned about the deadly impact and implications of this man made blight.(less)

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published October 27th 2011 by Avery (first published September 29th 2011)

11/10/2011

Trashing The Planet — Plastic Oceans

When sea captain Charles Moore was diverted by heavy weather during a sailing race in 1997, he made a surprising discovery which changed his life.

In 1997, Moore, skipper of ORV alguita, a 50-foot Tasmania-built catamaran, first comes upon some of the plastic on his way back from a trans-Pacific sailing race, when the strongest El Nino on record forces a detour through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre -- in sailor lingo, the doldrums. There, he and his travel companions find themselves slowly traversing what he describes as a “plastic soup,” asweeping mid-oceanic tract speckled with scraps of plastic. He is incredulous, yet galvanized.

Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans(Avery, October 27, 2011, $26, Hardcover) by Capt. Charles Moore with Cassandra Phillips tells how Moore returns to this area, soon to be redubbed The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and culls scientific samples with a game but mostly neophyte crew.

The results are shocking: plastic caught in his nets outweigh zooplankton, the oceans’ food base, by a factor of six to one. His research prompts a massive global reassessment of plastics’ invasiveness andraises profound questions about the implications of this man-made, floating landfill.

Moore's conversion from carefree sail boat racer to disgusted environmental activist has led to the publishing of his new book (with Cassandra Phillips) Plastic Ocean. Moore is on a mission from God. And rather than describe the Gospel of Trash, let's have him tell it in this informative Ted Talk.

1. Charles Moore: Seas of plastic | Talk Video | TED - TED.com

   ► 7:23► 7:23

   www.ted.com/.../capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of...

   Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage ...

Amount of plastic being recycled? diddley - point - squat

How much of our plastic waste ends up in the oceans? Lots. According to Moore (2nd video below), humankind produces between 250 and 300 million tons of plastic every year.

To get that into terms you can understand, every two years we make enough plastic to be the equivalent of the weight of the seven billion people on Earth.

Nearly 3% of that plastic winds up in the ocean, Moore says.

What is happening to most of this plastic? And how is it fucking up marine ecosystems? Aside from the obvious macro effects on sea birds and marine mammals, the answers are still largely a mystery. Consider this Science Dailystory Widespread Floating Plastic Debris Found in the Western North Atlantic Ocean (August, 2010).

Despite growing awareness of the problem of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, little solid scientific information existed to illustrate the nature and scope of the issue. Now, a team of researchers from Sea Education Association (SEA), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the University of Hawaii (UH) published a study of plastic marine debris based on data collected over 22 years by undergraduate students in the latest issue of the journal Science.

A previously undefined expanse of the western North Atlantic has been found to contain high concentrations of plastic debris, comparable to those observed in the region of the Pacific commonly referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

More than 64,000 individual plastic pieces were collected at 6100 locations that were sampled yearly over the course of the study... Numerical model simulations by Nikolai Maximenko (UH) explain why surface currents cause the plastic to accumulate in this region...

One surprising finding is that the concentration of floating plastic debris has not increased during the 22-year period of the study, despite the fact that the plastic disposal has increased substantially.

The whereabouts of the "missing plastic" is unknown...

And then there was this scolding rebuke from Oregon State researcher Angel White (Science Daily, January, 2011).

There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims that the "Great Garbage Patch" between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University scientist.

Further claims that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the patch has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s are equally misleading, pointed out Angelicque "Angel" White, an assistant professor of oceanography at Oregon State.

"There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world's oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists," White said. "We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don't need the hyperbole. Given the observed concentration of plastic in the North Pacific, it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic."

Oh, my! That's certainly a relief! There's a shitload of plastic in the oceans, but not nearly as much as rumor has it (we think). And the very last thing we would want to do is undermine the credibility of scientists. Any scientist!

"Are we doing a better job of preventing plastics from getting into the ocean?" White said. "Is more plastic sinking out of the surface waters? Or is it being more efficiently broken down? We just don't know.

But the data on hand simply do not suggest that 'plastic patches' have increased in size.

[My note: See the North Atlantic story cited just above, which mentions the "missing" plastic.]

This is certainly an unexpected conclusion, but it may in part reflect the high spatial and temporal variability of plastic concentrations in the ocean and the limited number of samples that have been collected."

Here are some take home points—

Among other findings, which White believes should be part of the public dialogue on ocean trash:

• Calculations show that the amount of energy it would take to remove plastics from the ocean is roughly 250 times the mass of the plastic itself... [other bullet points]


• There are areas of the ocean largely unpolluted by plastic. A recent trawl White conducted in a remote section of water between Easter Island and Chile pulled in no plastic at all.

"If there is a takeaway message, it's that we should consider it good news that the 'garbage patch' doesn't seem to be as bad as advertised," White said, "but since it would be prohibitively costly to remove the plastic, we need to focus our efforts on preventing more trash from fouling our oceans in the first place."

It certainly is Good News that there is no plastic at all in remote sections of the ocean between Easter Island and Chile. And there's not a snowball's chance in Hell we're going to be able to remove this plastic from the oceans—the energy cost would be prohibitive—so perhaps we should concentrate on preventing this plastic from getting into the oceans in the first place. Wise words from a scientist! A scientist whose credibility should never be challenged!

I eagerly await the day when Homo sapiens will wake up and realize that most of its wounds are self-inflicted. Unfortunately, and just like hoovering up all that plastic, there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that awakening is going to happen.

1. Captain Charles Moore on the seas of plastic - YouTube

   ► 7:21► 7:21

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7K-nq0xkWY‎

   2009. 2. 25. - 업로더: TED

   Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ...

Bonus Video — A recent Voice Of America report on plastic in the oceans

Posted at 09:11 AM | Permalink

http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2011/11/trashing-the-planet-plastic-oceans.html

Plastic Plague

Ian Angus

   more on Environment/Science

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Ian Angus is editor of the online journal Climate & Capitalism. He is coauthor ofToo Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis(Haymarket, 2011), and editor of The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010).

Charles Moore with Cassandra Phillips, Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans (New York: Penguin Group, 2011), 358 pages, $16, paperback.

Four decades ago, when most greens were blaming pollution on population growth and personal consumption, socialist-environmentalist Barry Commoner showed that neither could account for the radical increase in pollutants since the end of the Second World War. In The Closing Circle, he argued that “the chief reason for the environmental crisis…is the sweeping transformation of productive technology since World War II.”1 In particular, he pointed to dramatic increases in the production and use of materials not found in nature, such as synthetics that do not degrade and therefore become permanent blights on the earth.

Commoner described natural processes as essentially circular: “In the ecosphere every effect is also a cause: an animal’s waste becomes food for soil bacteria; what bacteria excrete nourishes plants; animals eat the plants.”2 But modern industrial systems are characterized by linear processes: “machine A always yields product B, and product B, once used, is cast away, having no further meaning for the machine, the product, or the user.” As a result, “We have broken out of the circle of life, converting its endless cycles into man-made, linear events….[M]an-made breaks in the ecosphere’s cycles spew out toxic chemicals, sewage, heaps of rubbish—testimony to our power to tear the ecological fabric that has, for millions of years, sustained the planet’s life.”3

The petrochemical industry in particular has generated a huge range of materials that nature cannot recycle and reuse. In the first decade after the Second World War, plastics were promoted for and used primarily to make durable products: furniture, tires, automobile and airplane components, and the like. But while plastics are still widely used for long-lasting products, the industry has found its biggest success with throwaways, products specifically designed to be used once and discarded. Commoner described the trend toward disposables in 1971, but he could not have known then how bad it would get when the plastic industry really got going. When The Closing Circle was published, there were no plastic soft-drink bottles, and no one imagined that giant corporations would one day brand and bottle tap water. Today, 72 billion plastic bottles are produced every year. Similarly, Commoner wrote before the introduction of plastic grocery bags, which were not adopted by major supermarket chains until the early 1980s. Today over 500 billion bags are made every year.

Bottles and bags—together with blister packs, polystyrene tubs, foam peanuts, bubble wrap, styrofoam trays, candy wrappers, and a multitude of other forms of packaging—now account for a third of the plastic produced each year worldwide. It is a bizarre and extremely irrational process: producing products that are designed to be thrown away but are made from materials that never die. The second of Barry Commoner’s famous Four Laws of Ecology is: everything must go somewhere. As he wrote, that is a critically important issue for materials that degrade extremely slowly, if at all. Some plastic has been burned, some has been recycled, but most—billions and billions of tons of it—remains on earth, and will do so indefinitely.

In his remarkable book Plastic Ocean, Charles Moore (with Cassandra Phillips) reports on the part of the “unstoppable avalanche of nonessentials” (39) that ends up in the oceans, where it chokes and poisons fish, mammals, and birds, and endangers human life. By turns a memoir, environmental expose, and call to action, Plastic Ocean is a dramatic account of what Moore has learned in fifteen years of collecting plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, studying its effects on marine wildlife, tracing its origins, and campaigning to stop it.

Moore is a rare creature, an activist researcher with the means and determination to work independently of academic and corporate restrictions. Using a family inheritance—ironically, his grandfather was president of Hancock Oil—he founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994, hoping “to shorten the distance between research and restoration of the marine environment.” He writes, “The ‘spill, study, and stall’ crowd—advocating the hundred-year-old petroleum industry’s strategy—demands a science of valueless facts to provide a ‘complete’ mechanistic understanding of a problem before embarking on any solution. Endless, purposeful delay pending perfect ‘sound science’ enforces a form of intellectual sadomasochism driven by the need to preserve profits, not benefit society” (329).

In 1997, while sailing his research boat between Hawaii and California, Moore was initially bemused and then shocked by the amount of plastic litter that floated by, a thousand miles from the nearest land. He later learned that the material he saw was concentrated in the North Pacific Gyre, an area where intersecting currents, prevailing winds, and the earth’s rotation combine to produce a slow moving whirlpool more than twice the size of Texas. There are huge gyres in each of the world’s oceans. Any plastic light enough to float that enters the sea—either directly by spills and dumping, or carried from land by wind or rivers—is likely to be swept into a gyre, where it will circulate indefinitely, broken by waves and wind into ever-smaller particles. Moore explains: “Anthropogenic debris—man-made trash, 80–90 percent of it plastic—has broken the reverie of pristine perfection that is the ocean’s essence. It’s become her most common surface feature…. Trash has superseded the natural ocean sights, stamping a permanent plastic footprint on the ocean’s surface” (70). Bear in mind that although people have been dumping garbage in oceans for millennia, we have only been throwing plastic away for fifty years. The accumulation of millions of tons of plastic in ocean gyres is powerful confirmation that the nature of garbage changed qualitatively in the last half of the twentieth century.

On the Internet, it is easy to find articles that describe the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” as a floating island of plastic debris, sixty to ninety feet thick. Moore dissociates himself from such fantasies. He describes it as a thin plastic soup—untold millions of plastic particles, interspersed with disposable lighters, pieces of fish net, broken buoys, and other objects that have not broken up yet. If anything, that makes it much more dangerous to the birds, mammals, and fish to whom small colored particles suspended in water look like food.

Concern about the plastic ocean is not simply about aesthetics—the ocean equivalent of roadside trash. It is not just unsightly; it has made the ocean deadly for its inhabitants. Cases of large animals killed by plastic have been widely publicized—thousands of birds, turtles, seals, and even whales die every year, their throats and guts clogged with indigestible debris. Plastic affects the entire animal food chain. As Moore’s research has proven, even tiny lanternfish ingest plastic particles—and since they are the main food of tuna, cod, salmon, and shark, many of those particles become part of human diets. In addition to causing direct physical damage to digestive systems, plastic particles are now known to be an efficient delivery system for toxic chemicals, some from their manufacturing processes, others absorbed as they float by polluted shorelines. Many of these chemicals are endocrine disrupters, which interfere with biological processes, including fetal development. In addition to causing premature death for countless animals, these chemicals ultimately concentrate in the fish that humans eat, contributing to a host of diseases.

These consequences are all well-known to science, but there has been little action to stop plastic pollution. The industry has successfully diverted attention away from the production of throwaway plastics to individual consumer behavior—the “solutions” they promote involve cleaning up or recycling products that never should have been made in the first place. Moore discovered this personally in 2000, when a conference on marine debris rejected his request for discussion of the plastics industry. For the organizers, he realized, “plastics pose a ‘handling’ problem—that is, a ‘people problem,’ not a material problem. It’s all our fault, in other words” (162). At a similar conference in 2011, government and industry representatives worked with the organizers to draft what was to be “a plan to lead the way to a debris-free ocean”—but the draft did not even mention plastic until Moore and other activist-scientists loudly objected. As Moore told a reporter at the time, trying to clean up the oceans while doing nothing to stop production of disposable plastic is like “trying to bail out a bathtub with the tap still running” (165).

Ultimately, Moore concludes, the problem is a system that puts corporate interests ahead of the environment, even ahead of human survival. “Because change is hard and powerful people and organizations benefit from the status quo. Plastics are a high-stakes game, and those who run it can ill afford to lose control of the playing field. But ridding the oceans of plastic means stopping all plastic inputs—now” (292). That will only happen if governments “confront industry and put responsibility where it belongs—on plastics producers—not volunteer cleanup crews, taxpayer-supported government agencies, and NGOs” (164).

Unfortunately, despite his indictment of the plastics industry, his rejection of solutions that blame consumers, and his critique of green organizations that ignore “the core issue: the ever-growing volume of plastic products and packaging across the world,” Moore stops short of suggesting a strategy for stopping the plastic plague (300). No one could expect him to provide a detailed roadmap, but his concluding chapter does not offer much more than a vague hope that people will demand change. He argues that “the science and technology that will liberate us from pollution and meaningless labor are available” (332) and predicts that a future generation will “unplug itself from the economy of constant input and output of junk” (334); but he does not address the critical question: How do we get there from here? Which battles can be won in the short term and which ones will require radical social change? What kinds of economic and social changes are needed? Above all, how can we build movements that are strong enough to overcome the power of the giant corporations whose profits depend on pollution? Moore’s failure to address such questions is not really surprising: many books on environmental problems are published, but few authors go beyond expose to explain why, in Commoner’s words, “the present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is suicidal.”4 Even fewer authors take the giant step of proposing practical steps towards the ecological revolution that is clearly needed.

It is only a disappointment that Plastic Ocean does not take that step because most of the book seems to be leading towards a call for system change. Perhaps this is one more proof that in these times it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Whatever the reason, and despite that weakness, Plastic Ocean deserves a wide audience. It is a fine example of what used to be called “peoples’ science”—it is as dramatic as many novels, it is accessible to readers with no background in science, and it is an important contribution to broad awareness of the ever-growing conflict between our systems of production and the circle of life.

Notes

1. ↩Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1971), 177.
2. ↩Ibid, 39.
3. ↩Ibid, 11-12.
4. ↩Ibid, 295.

http://monthlyreview.org/2014/03/01/plastic-plague