What the hell is a ‘subtropical gyre’ and what does it have
to do with plastic pollution?
Two questions I couldn’t answer before reading eco-activist,
ex-Navy SEAL and plastics pollution researcher Marcus Eriksen’s book, Junk Raft.
Well, it turns out that a gyre (soft ‘g’, rhymes with tyre)
is a swirling vortex of water. A ‘subtropical gyre’ is a wind-driven system of
currents on the ocean surface centred on a stable high-pressure weather system.
There are eleven gyres in the world’s oceans: five around the
poles (Arctic Circle and Antarctica), a circumpolar gyre and another five
subtropical gyres in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans above and below
the equator. The world’s gyre system
looks something like this:
And the reason that the subtropical gyres are important to
plastic pollution is that these are the forces that cause floating rubbish to coalesce
and accumulate.
You may have heard of the “Texas-sized” garbage patch, the
unwanted remnant of modern consumerism, which is apparently floating in the
middle of the North Pacific Ocean.
Marcus Eriksen had heard of it too and Junk Raft is an account of his voyage, on a vessel built solely of
single-use plastic, powered only by the wind blowing into his sail, to find the
garbage patch and to raise awareness about this man-made catastrophe.
This 2,600 mile ocean journey, from Long Beach, California to
Waikiki, Hawaii, on what amounts to not much more than a plastic dinghy took Eriksen
88 days to complete in the summer of 2008.
Spoiler alert: the journey is excruciatingly slow (it
averages almost 1 mph) and consists of long periods of boredom interspersed
with frequent moments of panic. Eriksen
concludes the journey safely to find a bit of applause and a few lessons learnt. However, the story itself is a vehicle for
Eriksen to explore the fascinating story of the plastics manufacturing industry
and our collective failure to regulate its activity or react to its waste.
In doing so, Eriksen debunks some of the myths about what
plastic pollution actually looks like in the ocean, the effectiveness of
recycling and what can be done as we look to the future.
Discovery
Plastic marine pollution was first discovered in 1972 in the
North Atlantic Ocean.
Before plastic became the near-ubiquitous product that it is
today, nearly all waste was either biodegradable, capable of rusting away or
was an inert material like glass or ceramics.
Metal, wood and glass are the material culture of practically all archaeological
sites predating the last half century. Today, plastic dominates our material landscape (or should I say, seascape).
The majority of plastics produced today are polymers such as polyethylene
terephthalate (PET - water bottles, toys), polyvinyl chloride (PVC – pipes,
siding, cable insulation) polystyrene (food containers, CDs, windows),
polycarbonate (impact-resistant glass, eye protection); as well as thermoset
plastics such as fiberglass, resins and epoxies. It’s hard to break polymers down, though not
impossible.
One of the first discoveries about the plastics that are decaying
in the ocean is that different polymers degrade at different rates. Plastic bags, Styrofoam and other low-quality
plastic products fragment quickly; they are rarely seen in original form out on
the ocean. Only thick products, such as
toothbrushes or lawn chairs, tend to survive the long drift out to the gyres
intact.
Another important early discovery was that plastics both
absorb (taking in) and adsorb (stick to) other persistent hydrocarbons drifting
about in the water. Consequently,
plastics out at sea tend to band together and form larger masses.
By 1997, eco-activist and future mentor to Eriksen, Charlie
Moore, had discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” that would come to be
referred to by the media as the “Texas-sized” garbage patch. It was the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre
that had brought the waste together.
How much are we
dumping and where does it come from?
It is widely estimated that, of the plastic pollution found
in the world’s oceans and seas, 80 per cent comes from the land and 20 per cent
comes from maritime activity.
Eriksen relies on a University of Georgia study when
estimating that plastic discarded from the land to the sea is approximately 4
to 12 million tons annually. It is an
estimate with an alarmingly large degree of uncertainty; but even at the lower
end of the estimate, there is cause for concern. Many commentators have tried to put this
number into context. The best example
that I have found is from phys.org
who have stated, “Eight million metric
tons is the equivalent to finding five grocery bags full of plastic on every
foot of coastline in the 192 countries we examined.”
While there’s no legal obligation to report lost containers during
maritime activity, the World Shipping Council surveyed the majority of shipping
fleets between 2008 and 2013 and found on average a total of 1,679 containers
had been lost at sea each year.
Whatever the numbers, the monitoring and cataloguing of ocean
plastics is practically non-existent at present. The plastics don’t sit still waiting to be
counted and the oceans can be unforgiving places to conduct the exercise.
As a result, we need to work backwards to understand the
scale of the problem. To do that, we
need to consider how much plastic is produced annually and how good are we at
recycling the plastic we produce. The
history of the plastics industry tells that story.
Plastics Industry
The plastics industry got its start after WWII. It took 25 years from WWII for annual plastic
production to rise from zero to nearly 40 million tons in 1972. Thereafter, annual production more than
doubled to 99 million tons in 1989 and doubled again to over 200 million tons
in 1997.
With rising success, global plastic production showed no sign
of slowing down and reached 311 million tons annually by 2013. At the four per cent anticipated growth rate
over the next few decades, the industry is anticipated to surpass 1 billion annual
tons of new plastic production by 2050.
Two giants of the plastics industry are overwhelmingly
responsible for this manufacturing revolution: DuPont and Dow.
The DuPont chemical company, which began a quarter century
after the American Revolution producing gunpowder, pioneered the synthetic
revolution with materials such as Teflon, neoprene, Kevlar, Mylar, Lycra and
nylon.
The other giant, Dow, is the predominant producer of
polyethylene and polypropylene, two plastic polymers that comprise the majority
of single-use throwaway products and packaging.
In 2016, Dow and DuPont merged into the so-called ‘Double D’
creating a $120 billion chemical and agricultural giant. The merger has tightened the company’s grip
on the industry and allowed it to dominate emerging markets and strangle other
production options, like bioplastic.
Bioplastic is by no means a new invention. In the early 1940s, Henry Ford demonstrated
the resilience of a “Soybean car” that used bioplastic fenders and door panels
made from soy-based phenolic resin. But DuPont
and Dow have always preferred petroleum-based plastics, given that petroleum
has historically been cheaper and more readily available for industrial (compared
to soy which has typically been used as a food source first and foremost). As a
result, the price of new plastic is always coupled with the price of oil, so
when oil prices drop, virgin plastic becomes cheaper than recycled plastic.
Consequently, by 1992, the US made more plastic than
steel. The industry’s success was
largely down to the tremendous rise in consumer preference for convenience and independence
that came to define the post-war era and the opulence of the late 20th
century. As with many a new cultural
phenomena, however, its success blinded so many to the negative consequences.
Generally, the companies that manufacture plastic have very
successfully deflected claims that they share any responsibility for the
endgame of their material, leaving the clean-up and reuse of such material to
individual states and its citizenry to work out.
Lobbying
Eriksen makes little attempt to hide his scorn for the two
largest petrochemical trade organisation lobbies: (1) the American Chemistry
Council (the ACC) (primarily funded by Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Shell, Coca-Cola
and PepsiCo) and (2) Plastics Europe.
Eriksen paints a villainous picture of the ACC and Plastics
Europe as they have combatted producer-responsibility laws for decades using a
strategy that is straight out of the textbook written by tobacco, acid rain,
DDT and climate doubt groups.
Focusing on the front lines of litigation, politics and
public opinion, the petrochemical lobbies have sought to deny, delay, and
distract any force that seeks to impose lifecycle responsibility (or even those
who speak critically of plastic’s sustainability or the damage it may cause to
the environment).
As a result, it was not until 1988 that The International
Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) was amended to
ban maritime discharge of plastic in the ocean.
Similarly, in the early 2000s, in a move that has been
replicated across the world, the ACC succeeded in inserting language into
California school textbooks asserting that recycling and anti-littering were the
primary solutions to plastic pollution.
The move is part of concerted effort to silence solutions that focus on
smarter design or the use of fewer products which would ultimately curtail
profits for plastics manufacturers. It
is hypocritical of industry to argue that consumers are responsible for litter
and taxpayers are responsible for waste management, while product and packaging
design go unregulated.
Consequently, regulation has come very slowly if at all in
most jurisdictions. The inner workings
of the regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA)
and the Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) have been routinely criticised
for their impotence and vulnerability to industry manipulation. Perhaps most egregiously, in the US the EPA lacks
the basic competence to regulate most of the chemicals it is tasked with
overseeing, thanks to the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976, which
grandfathered in 62,000 chemicals to a safe haven beyond regulation.
Whilst the ACC reportedly spent over $50 million on lobbying
activities between 2011 and 2015, the petrochemical industry continues to
succeed with its agenda of shifting all costs of the negative externalities of
plastic use to the public.
The Failure of Recycling
Notwithstanding whether it is appropriate for the public to
clean up the plastic industry’s mess, pollution would not be such a problem if we,
the public, had actually done a decent job of recycling plastic. But, the truth is that we have not (the vast
majority ends up in landfill) and we are unlikely to be able to in the near
future.
The New Plastics Economy, a study published by the Ellen
MacArthur Foundation in 2016, confirms that the global recycling of plastic is
a failure. The foundation calculates
that of the 78 million tons of plastic used for packaging in 2013, only 14 per
cent was recovered for recycling. Four
per cent of that was lost in processing and 8 per cent is downcycled into
inferior products, leaving 2 per cent, or 1.5 million tons of the original
volume, brought back into the loop. The
other 86 per cent not captured for recycling is burned, buried or washed out to
sea.
As noted above, the plastics industry has succeeded in
perpetuating the myth of recycling’s effectiveness. Whilst recycling is publicly believed to be
the solution to plastic pollution, industry is increasingly heavily investing
in optimising greater virgin production each year. Industry wants you to feel good about
recycling more than they want you to actually recycle.
The reason most plastics are so hard to recycle is primarily
because there is no obligation to design products to ensure that they are
recyclable. The great majority of
consumer products are designed with a variety of different materials using an
even greater variety of fittings and adhesives.
This all leads to a product that is exceedingly difficult to break down
into reusable component parts or materials.
When there are no such design obligations, plastic production
lacks the appropriate legal or economic incentives to change behaviour. Additionally, it is not well-publicised that:
- in the US and Europe, we export unrecyclable plastic to developing countries where environmental standards and worker health regulations are much less strict;
- China has recently amended its “Green Fence” policy to require a higher standard of recyclable material. As a result, the world’s largest user/importer of recycled materials has just deemed billions of tons of recycled material unusable; and
- according to Thomas Kinnaman, an economist from Bucknell University, the energy, infrastructure and labour costs needed to recycle waste is roughly double what it costs to bury it.
These problems all point to a system of production that is wholly
void of efficiency, responsibility or ethics.
Such a problem is worthy in its self of being cleaned up, but the
problem is exacerbated when we understand what plastic pollution is doing to
the health of the planet and its inhabitants.
Health Effects
Although the media often depicts charismatic megafauna like
whales, birds and turtles, as the victims of plastic pollution, the reality is
that the impacts are pervasive at the bottom of the food chain and come back to
us in what we harvest from the sea to feed the world.
All marine wildlife is unwittingly engaging with plastic
through entanglement and ingestion. Fish
are ingesting non-nutritive plastic that gives a false sense of satiation and
creates potential for intestinal blockages.
This has led to 557 species of marine life being documented as having eaten
or become entangled in our rubbish.
However, the damage is compounded when you consider how the
chemicals in plastic are then absorbed by those animals. Not only do they often suffer
life-threatening poisoning, but their meat is then regularly served up for human
consumption. As a result, the quality of
fish meat is rapidly deteriorating and research is beginning to show the
effects are being passed up the food chain. It is now widely accepted that human
exposure to endocrine disruptors (which are commonly found in the meat of fish
who have ingested plastic debris) is linked to increased rates of obesity,
autism and learning disabilities.
As a result, when it comes to plastic in our oceans, out of
sight does not equal out of mind.
The Truth about the Garbage
Patch
So many NGOs fighting plastic pollution have referenced the
mythical Texas-sized garbage patch as fact.
It invokes a powerful image of something solid and tangible. In my mind, I pictured something akin to a
rotten island, with a host of unlucky seagulls and turtles circulating its
shores. This was particularly reinforced
by the Plastic Ocean Foundation’s attempt to have the “Trash
Isles” registered by the UN as its own country back in 2017.
In truth, Eriksen describes something much less dense or
immediately palpable.
According to Eriksen, if we could stand on the ocean floor
and look up we would not see one dense island of plastic. Instead, because of the way plastic breaks
down into smaller and smaller particles (becoming what is known as micro or
nanoplastic), what you would actually see is several massive clouds of
microplastic sinking to the bottom of the subtropical gyres. Dark clouds of
larger plastic pieces coming from the world’s largest rivers and most densely
populated coastlines would still inhabit the worst areas such as the Bay of
Bengal, the Mediterranean Sea and the South China Sea, but the oceans are
primarily just becoming denser with near invisible microplastic.
As a result, we need a new metaphor to describe plastic
pollution in the ocean. The idea of the
“garbage patch” doesn’t capture the distribution, toxicity or widespread harm
to marine life. A mist of dust-like
microplastic slowly settling on the seafloor should, according to Eriksen, be
more accurately referred to as a “plastic smog”.
In the plastic smog metaphor, the pipes and streams that
drain city streets are horizontal smokestacks that feed the smog of the sea. Armed with this new metaphor, Eriksen looks
to see what can be done to slow down the flow of pollution emanating from these
land-based smokestacks.
Solutions
The plastics industry has for too long gone unregulated and
sought to push responsibility for clean-up onto others. It is a story that has become all too
familiar across the ‘industry versus the environment’ narrative.
As a result, it is important to move beyond the cataloguing
and explaining of the problem and to explore possible solutions. Fortunately, Eriksen has strong opinions on
what will and won’t work.
Most scientists and policy-makers are moving upstream
(production and design) because downstream (the ocean) is too late. The most compelling ideas focus on the
following key themes:
- Most plastic packaging simply doesn’t survive the long journey to the gyres intact, so if you’re hell-bent on cleaning up the gyres, the science of current movements suggests the best place to be effective is very close to shore or at river mouths.
- Decoupling recycled plastics from the commodities market is essential, so that the market for recycled materials doesn’t fluctuate as wildly as the market for fossil fuels. If we can stimulate investment and innovation in bioplastic, we will significantly decrease the amount of pollution we cause in the future.
- We must strive to move from a linear economy to a circular economy. In the circular economy, materials come back to the manufacturer through economic incentives or policy initiatives. Putting product designers, systems engineers and recyclers in the same room to design in tandem is how we begin to close the loop.
- On the legislative front, the circular economy will be greatly supported by Extended Producer Responsibility (“EPR”) laws. When a company is responsible for the full life cycle of its product and its packaging, innovation for recovery catches on like wildfire. In Germany, where EPR laws have been in effect since 1991, they have seen efficiencies in everything from waste-collection vending machines to a Green Dot system that rewards product brands with an EPR plan, resulting in a 1.1 million ton reduction in the volume of packaging produced between 1992 and 1998.
- Lastly, design for longevity and flexibility, leasing over ownership, reuse before recycling and make things easy to dismantle.
Eriksen himself is playing an important role in starting to
deliver on these proposed solutions. He
and his colleagues are running an NGO called The 5 Gyres Institute which aims
to (1) answer the question, “How much plastic is out there?” and publish the
results, (2) create a platform, in the form of sea expeditions, to engage and empower
the public, and (3) work on collaborative, solutions-oriented campaigns. You can find out more about their efforts here.
The story at the heart of Junk
Raft is somewhat mundane in tracking Eriksen’s slow progress across the
Atlantic Ocean. But, perhaps that is
reminiscent of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. Little by little, day by day, the problem
gets worse without much by way of compelling characters or climactic events. The metaphor of the frog in boiling water who
fails to realise he is being boiled alive is overused. Yet, I am reminded of that metaphor when
reading about Eriksen’s passion for eco-activism and societal reform to combat
plastic pollution. Perhaps, Junk Raft is the valiant effort we need
to make us realise just how hot the water has become.
