About midway through Yann Martell’s Man Booker Prize winning novel “The Life of Pi”, the protagonist finds himself washed up on an island populated solely by meerkats. After a time on the island he begins to suspect that all is not as it seems – the meerkats take to the trees every night and one day Pi takes a bite of a fruit growing from one of the island’s trees and finds human teeth inside. It begins to dawn on him that the island is carnivorous, each night digesting anything that has the misfortune to remain on the ground.

For some reason, Pi’s carnivorous island was the first thing that popped into my head when I heard a news story on the NewsHours with Jim Lehrer podcast recently about what was described as our rapidly growing eight continent. There are no meerkats and it is not strictly carnivorous and it’s not really an island, but the Great Pacific Garbage Dump is as disturbing and potentially dangerous as Martell’s fantasy island.

My initial reaction to the NewsHour report is that it was a typical case of what tends to be a melodramatic and lacking in understanding response of the mainstream news media to a juicy science story. Surely there isn’t a continent of garbage out in the Pacific Ocean. The good news is that the media has overreacted, “continent” is not the right word. The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is not visible from the air (because most of it lies slightly below the surface of the water) nor does it have a particular nautical position (due to the shifting wind directions and currents). The bad news is that there are two massive accumulations of plastic waste swirling around in the doldrums of the northern Pacific Ocean. Charles Moore, the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the man who had the misfortune of discovering the dump, estimates that the plastic garbage in the Pacific covers approximately five million square miles (about 1.5 times the land mass of the United States) and contains over 3.5 million tons of largely consumer waste.

By most accounts the trash finds its way to its home in the North Pacific through a long and circuitous route. Trash is dumped into rivers, in both North and South America and Asia, that empty into the Pacific. Ocean currents carry the trash, picking up more debris as it travels, around the Pacific before depositing it in the doldrums of the North Pacific Gyre. 80% of the trash in the ocean originates on land and a majority of that is from consumer products. Thus, it is a hard truth that we – you and I – are the problem. Here is how it works: say that you inadvertantly drop some innocuous bit of plastic – a clear plastic wrapper from a box of candy. The next time it rains, that wrapper gets washed into a storm drain which will flow into your nearest watershed and ultimately into the ocean. That little wrapper floats its way around the Pacific currents until it comes to rest in the Gyre where it will join the rest of the trash. This plastic waste will be around longer than you and I, longer than our children, longer than our grandchildren, longer than our great-grandchildren. Nobody really knows how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade because it basically doesn’t. Conservative estimates are around 450 – 500 years. We are creating a problem that will outlive us by centuries.

It isn’t just an aesthetic problem. In short, it’s devastating to marine ecosystems. Forty percent of albatross chicks are killed each year by consuming plastic accidentally fed to them by their parents. More than a million birds and marine animals die each year from consuming or becoming caught in plastic and other debris. But there is a less obvious and more frightening consequence to our trashing of the oceans. Moore’s group does a lot of research into the ecological effects of plastic debris on marine ecosystems. Recently they have been looking at plastic particulate levels in and around the Garbage Patch. The small bits of plastic that are a byproduct of the slow degradation of the plastic debris have been found to accumulate a lot of nasty chemicals – polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chlorinated and legacy pesticides and hormonally active additives. This latter class are particularly nasty beasties, some of which have been implicated in an increased risk of breast cancer. Moore and his colleagues found that the ratio of plastic particles to plankton in the Gyre was between 1.4:1 and 6.9:1. In other words, there is more plastic particulate matter in this part of the ocean than there is plankton. You don’t have to be a biologist or have an in depth knowledge of food chains to recognize what this means: small fish eat plankton (or plastic particles), big fish eat small fish, humans eat big fish. We are eating our own toxic garbage.

I don’t wish to sound melodramatic or preachy but this is a problem that is getting worse on a daily basis and one that we cannot repair. We can, however, do something to slow the accumulation of rubbish in the oceans. 80% of the trash out there comes from us directly, so it is up to us to do something to make it better.

Here are ten things we can do about it:

1. Don’t use so much plastic. Make a concerted effort to reduce the amount of plastic that you purchase. It’s not easy. I’ve been making a concerted effort since I heard this story and it’s absolutely stunning how much excess plastic you get when you purchase anything. Note how much plastic crap you come home with on your next trip to the supermarket. Preferentially purchase items packaged in glass or paper. Virtually any material is better than plastic.
2. I’m a beach bum. Roughly 10% of the trash out in the Pacific comes from trash left on beaches. So, don’t leave trash on beaches and maybe pick some of it up when you’re out there.
3. Recycle. Plastic recycling is very low efficiency – only about 3.5% of plastic is recycled in any way. This is due in part to contamination of plastics with non-plastics, food waste and non-recyclable plastics. Clean up your plastic before recycling and make sure that you only include recyclable plastics. If your community does not recycle plastic then demand that they do.
4. Along the same lines, buy recycled products or products containing recycled materials.
5. This is kind of a no-brainer. But do not litter. Most of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is thought to be a result of litter working its way into the river system.
6. Consider volunteering or donating to the Algalita Marine Research Foundation or other environmental organizations.
7. Think about the watershed when cleaning up around your hose. Sweep your sidewalks rather than hosing them. Wash your car on the grass so that the water sinks into the ground rather than storm drains.
8. When you go shopping do not take a plastic bag. Use a cloth or other reusable bag.
9. Buy in bulk. Most of the plastic that you bring home with you from the shop is packaging, the higher the product to packaging ratio, the less trash generated.
10. For god’s sake, don’t use so much plastic.

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Image credits:

Plastic trash