Microplastic particles are captured for research purposes

Article by Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle, April 12, 2021

PHOTO — A blue microplastic bead sits on a filter under a microscope, surrounded by dust, minerals and charcoal captured from a park in Idaho. At the 2 o’clock position from the bead is puffy yellow piece of pollen.

Vast watery parcels of plastic – made of soda bottle flotsam and shopping bag jetsam – appear in our oceans as large floating islands. On roadways, plastic is often tossed, broken down into smaller pieces and churned until it is microscopic, at which point it is swept into the atmosphere and travels the world.

By sea or by land, these tiny shards of plastic are more ubiquitous than science had known, according to a new study led by researchers at Cornell and Utah State University. The research was published April 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Natalie Mahowald, Cornell’s Irving Porter Church Professor in Engineering, and lead author Janice Brahney, Utah State University assistant professor of natural resources, have found that plastics cycle through the oceans and roadways and, if tiny enough, can become microplastic aerosols, which ride the jet stream across continents.

“We found a lot of legacy plastic pollution everywhere we looked; it travels in the atmosphere and it deposits all over the world,” Brahney said. “This plastic is not new from this year. It’s from what we’ve already dumped into the environment over several decades.”

Results from their study, “Constraining the Atmospheric Limb of the Plastic Cycle,” suggest that atmospheric microplastics in the western United States are primarily derived from secondary re-emission sources.

From December 2017 to January 2019, researchers collected atmospheric microplastic data from the western U.S., where 84% of microscopic shards came from road dust – cars and trucks agitating the plastic. About 11% entered the atmosphere from sea spray, and 5% was derived from agricultural soil dust.

As large clusters of refuse plastic merge into pods of plastic islands on the oceans, the oceanic action grinds them into mere micron-size particles, where the winds ferry them into the atmosphere – for as little as an hour, or as long as six days.

In the process of conducting other scientific research, Brahney had discovered bits of microplastic everywhere she went. Marje Prank, a postdoctoral fellow who worked with Mahowald, developed a microplastic transport model to determine the tiny plastics’ origins. Together, they used the model to deduce the sources of these microplastics.

“We did the modeling to find out the sources, not knowing what the sources might be,” said Mahowald, a fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. “It’s amazing that this much plastic is in the atmosphere at that level, and unfortunately accumulating in the oceans and on land and just recirculating and moving everywhere, including remote places.

“Using our best estimate of plastic sources and modeled transport pathways, most continents are net importers of microplastics from the marine environment,” she said. “This underscores the cumulative role of legacy pollution in the atmospheric burden of plastic.”

Microplastics are landing and accumulating in all sorts of places, Mahowald said. “It’s not just in the cities or the oceans,” she said. “ We’re finding microplastics in national parks.”

In addition to Mahowald, Brahney and Prank, who is now with the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland, the other authors include Gavin Cornwell, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington; Zbigniew Klimont, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria; Hitoshi Matsui, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan; and Kim Prather, University of California, San Diego.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and its National Center for Atmospheric Research Computing facilities; the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service; and Cornell Atkinson.

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See also: “PLASTICS NOW SPIRAL AROUND THE GLOBE — A trio of discoveries about microplastics is just breathtakingly grim for the planet” — April 12, 2021

MICROPLASTICS can be thought of as litter that never, ever goes away. New research into this seemingly invisible pollution shows just how durable they can be as they go from land to sea to air and back again. Every day, microplastics — often smaller than the head of a sewing needle — infiltrate our oceans, our seafood, and even our own bodies. Now, scientists say the problem is more extreme than previously realized.

Coral reefs display much of the diversity of life

From “Living on Earth” for Week of April 2, 2021

NOTE: The Ocean Panel is a group of 14 countries looking to protect 100% of their ocean areas by 2025. Pictured: a coral reef in the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.

The oceans are facing serious and growing threats, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution and more. But a group of 14 world leaders called the Ocean Panel is committing to transform the ocean from victim to solution, by sustainably managing 100% of their ocean areas by 2025. Jane Lubchenco is the Deputy Director for Climate and Environment for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as a co-chair of the Ocean Panel Expert Group that helped ground this vision in research. She joins Host Aynsley O’Neill for more about the Ocean Panel and its vision.

O’NEILL: Putting the oceans to work by catching some of the wind offshore is part of the Biden Administration’s plan to blunt climate disruption and reduce dangerous pollution. And the oceans are also getting a champion in the White House. Jane Lubchenco is the former Administrator of NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She recently co-chaired a panel of experts advising 14 world leaders on how to transform the ocean from victim to a solution, with 100% sustainable management by 2025. She is now a senior member of the climate and ecology brain trust that President Biden has assembled at the White House, serving as Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before she took her White House job she spoke with us about the vision and work of the Ocean Panel. Jane, welcome back to Living on Earth!

LUBCHENCO: Thanks, Aynsley, it’s a delight to be here.

O’NEILL: Now, when we look at how we currently manage the oceans, why does the world need this total transformation in management?

LUBCHENCO: The ocean is incredibly important to all of life on Earth. It’s important to livelihoods, it’s important to help mitigate climate change. And yet the ocean is under serious threat from a wide range of activities: climate change, pollution, overfishing, just to name a few. The current trajectory that we are on is really not good. And the question is, how can we address these underlying challenges? And part of the answer is that we need to do so more holistically than we have done in the past. We’ve treated a lot of these problems, issue by issue. And part of the message that the Ocean Panel leaders heard is the need for integrated solutions that consider the whole suite of human activities. The other major thing that I think they heard was that a smart future is not just doing more of the same. It’s actually doing things differently, being much smarter about how we fish, much smarter about how we produce energy, much smarter about how we transport goods around the world. And so much of what is in their new, exciting Ocean Action agenda is doing things smarter, more effectively, more efficiently, and also doing things more holistically.

O’NEILL: Now, Jane, what are some of the most important ways that a sustainable ocean economy connects with climate change?

LUBCHENCO: That’s a great question. In September of 2019, we had a new report that came out from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There was a special report on the ocean and the cryosphere, and it painted in very depressing detail, all of the ways that the ocean has been massively affected by climate change and ocean acidification. And it was clear from that report that the ocean is indeed a victim of climate change. It’s not just the changes in the weather patterns, and the extreme heat, and the droughts, and the megastorms that we’re seeing on land. But the impacts of climate change to the ocean have been very, very significant. But the same week, the Ocean Panel unveiled a report that it commissioned that asked the question, what is the potential for the ocean to provide solutions to help mitigate climate change. And before that report, when people thought about climate change in the ocean, they either thought about the impacts that I just referred to, or they thought about the ocean being important for adaptation. But very rarely has the international policy community focused on climate mitigation thought about the ocean. The report that the Ocean Panel commissioned, looked at a variety of ocean based activities and asked simply, what is the potential for mitigating climate change, and they found enough data at the global scale to analyze five categories of activities. And when they added up how much they could get from each of those five, they came to the astounding conclusion that it might be as much as 1/5 of what we need, by way of carbon emission reductions to achieve the 1.5 degree centigrade target of the Paris Agreement by 2050. So that’s huge. You know, a lot of those activities weren’t even on the table. And here, we find that they actually could play a very significant role in helping to turn things around in terms of climate change.

O’NEILL: So Jane, you mentioned five ocean based activities to help mitigate climate change. Could you go through those for us, please?

LUBCHENCO: So the first one was (1) increasing renewable energy from the ocean, and that’s a big one. Most of that is going to likely be wave energy, but it might also be tidal, it might be current, it might be thermal, depending on what part of the world you are in. The second category was (2) making shipping less polluting. So 90% of the goods that are traded globally travel by ocean and currently, that’s pretty polluting. It’s dirty fuels, they contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. But it is technologically possible to decarbonize shipping, and that could have a huge benefit. Number three is (3) focusing on what we call blue carbon ecosystems. So these are coastal and ocean ecosystems, such as mangroves, salt marshes, or seagrass beds, that are little carbon engines that are just sucking carbon out of the atmosphere like crazy. Those habitats; mangroves, sea grasses, salt, marsh beds, can not only remove but then sequester as much as 10 times as much carbon as an equivalent area of forest, for example. And we’ve currently lost about half of them globally. So here is an opportunity to actually protect the remaining ones, but also to restore those that have already been degraded. The fourth area for ocean based activities to mitigate climate change comes from (4) focusing on a little bit greater efficiency with aquaculture, mariculture operations, a little bit greater efficiency, with fisheries. But the big one in this category is really shifting diets globally, away from animal protein on the land, and including animal protein from the sea, instead of that animal protein from the land. And then the fifth category was (5) simply sequestering carbon on the seabed. And the panel who looked at these five categories, said that the first four, they felt completely comfortable recommending that they be pursued aggressively. Smartly, yes, but aggressively.

This fifth one, carbon storage in the seabed has a lot of questions still about technical and environmental impacts. And so they recommended further study for those. But that’s another deep dive, if you will, into the potential of the ocean, to not just be thought of as a victim of climate change, but as a solution to climate change by providing as much as 1/5 of the carbon emission reductions that are needed to get us to the 1.5 degree target by 2050.

O’NEILL: To what extent is it important to frame this vision as an opportunity, as opposed to a sacrifice for the countries involved?

LUBCHENCO: You’ve really hit the nail on the head, Aynsley. This is really the secret sauce here. There has been a lot of focus on the ocean as doom and gloom. And there are a lot of problems. There’s no sugarcoating that. There are a range of very serious challenges underway to the ocean right now. However, we also see looking around the world, some amazing solutions that have come to light, that have developed in this community, or that country, or this industry. And those solutions are bright lights. Collectively, they aren’t at the scale that’s needed. They aren’t at the pace that’s needed. But we have the benefit of a huge range of potential solutions that if they were adopted and implemented, could actually transform how we think about and how we use and how we benefit from the ocean in ways that are truly opportunities. So this is not really sacrifice. It’s being smarter about doing things. I think people are familiar with the concept of greater efficiency when we think about energy. You know, much of the focus for mitigating climate change has been focusing on how do we use energy more efficiently. And there have been tremendous advances in energy efficiency of our appliances, of our automobiles, of our transportation systems. That same concept of being more efficient, is what underlies a lot of the transformative actions that are in the ocean action agenda. So yes, this is an incredible opportunity. And it’s my belief that these 14 nations that have embarked on this journey of discovery and now journey of action will have such success with what they are proposing that others will say, oh my gosh, I want some of that too. I want to join forces because what they are doing is exactly what the world needs.

O’NEILL: Jane Lubchenco is a co-chair of the Ocean Panel expert group. Jane, thank you so much for taking the time with me today.

Links in Article: More on the Ocean Panel, National Geographic | “In Rare Show of Solidarity, 14 Key Nations Commit To Protect Oceans”, More on Jane Lubchenco

Increasing plastic pollution is at a dangerous level in our oceans

From an Article by Tiffany Duong, EcoWatch & Oceans, January 22, 2021

This month, a new era began in the fight against plastic pollution.

In 2019, 187 nations within the United Nations amended the 1989 Basel Convention, which governs trade in hazardous materials, to include plastic waste. The historic treaty created a legally binding framework to make global trade in plastic waste more transparent and better regulated, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) said in a press release.

The amendment to the Basel Convention, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 2021, will result in a cleaner ocean within five years and allow developing nations like Vietnam and Malaysia to refuse low-quality and difficult-to-recycle waste before it ever gets shipped, a UN transboundary waste chief told The Guardian.

“It is my optimistic view that, in five years, we will see results,” Rolph Payet, the executive director of the Basel Convention, told The Guardian. “People on the frontline are going to be telling us whether there is a decrease of plastic in the ocean. I don’t see that happening in the next two to three years, but on the horizon of five years. This amendment is just the beginning.”

“Pollution from plastic waste, acknowledged as a major environmental problem of global concern, has reached epidemic proportions with an estimated 100 million tons of plastic now found in the oceans, 80-90 percent of which comes from land-based sources,” the UNEP release noted, explaining a primary rationale behind the amendment’s passage.

Once in the oceans, plastic continues to cause harm. It degrades into microplastics, which end up in our seafood and ultimately us. A recent study also found that plastic pollution increases ocean acidification.

The amendment now requires “prior notice and consent” in writing from importing and transit countries before shipping plastic waste for recycling, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)explained. Exporting countries must detail whether a shipment is mixed or contaminated. If permission isn’t granted to receive the goods, they must remain in their country of origin.

The new international rule aims to level the playing field between wealthy nations that dump contaminated plastic waste and poorer ones that have traditionally received it. According to The Guardian, before the new rule, shipments containing contaminated, non-recyclable and low-quality plastics were often sold to developing nations for recycling. After China refused to continue accepting contaminated waste in 2018, the onus fell on other developing nations to accept it, a 2020 Greenpeace report found. Once received, the waste was often illegally burned or dumped in landfills and waterways because it was unusable and unrecyclable.

Heng Kiah Chun, a Greenpeace Malaysia campaigner, called the impact from illegally dumping plastic waste from more than 19 countries worldwide “an indelible mark” left throughout Southeast Asia, the report added.

According to the EPA, the Basel Convention made an exception for pre-sorted, clean, uncontaminated and recycling-bound plastic scrap: it will not be subject to informed consent requirements. The idea is to encourage exports of commercially viable plastics for recycling rather than the unrestricted dumping of plastic trash that previously occurred.

In Dec. 2020, the European Union passed additional regulationsthat are even stricter than the Basel Convention amendment, including a ban on sending unsorted plastic waste, which is harder to recycle, to poorer countries.

Despite leading the world in plastic waste, the U.S. did not agree to the amendment in 2019. However, the amendment still applies to the U.S. anytime it tries to trade plastic waste with another of the 187 participating countries, CNN reported.

Rather than framing the plastic problem as an issue between developed and developing nations, some critics would rather see commercial producers take responsibility. Others, noting that recycling models, especially in the U.S., aren’t working, are encouraging a cultural shift away from using plastics, stemming the problem of plastic pollution at the source.

Nevertheless, the convention is a “crucial first step towards stopping the use of developing countries as a dumping ground for the world’s plastic waste, especially those coming from rich nations,” Von Hernandez, Break Free From Plastic global coordinator, told CNN.

“Countries at the receiving end of mixed and unsorted plastic waste from foreign sources now have the right to refuse these problematic shipments, in turn compelling source countries to ensure exports of clean, recyclable plastics only,” Hernandez added. “Recycling will not be enough, however. Ultimately, production of plastics has to be significantly curtailed to effectively resolve the plastic pollution crisis.”

The Oceans are critical to our survival on Earth

From Pakalolo, The Daily Kos, June 8, 2018

And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came. — John F. Kennedy

in this handout photo from the University of Bergen taken on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017, plastic bags are shown inside the stomach of a two-ton whale that was beached in shallow waters off Sotra, an island west of Bergen, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) northwest of Oslo.

Norwegian zoologists have found about 30 plastic bags and other plastic waste in the stomach of a beaked whale that had beached on a southwestern Norway coast. Terje Lislevand of the Bergen University says the visibly sick, 2-ton goose-beaked whale was euthanized. Its intestine “had no food, only some remnants of a squid’s head in addition to a thin fat layer.”

In this handout photo from the University of Bergen taken on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017, plastic bags are shown inside the stomach of a two-ton whale that was beached in shallow waters off Sotra, an island west of Bergen, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) northwest of Oslo. Norwegian zoologists have found about 30 plastic bags and other plastic waste in the stomach of a beaked whale that had beached on a southwestern Norway coast. Terje Lislevand of the Bergen University says the visibly sick, 2-ton goose-beaked whale was euthanized. Its intestine “had no food, only some remnants of a squid’s head in addition to a thin fat layer.

Today is World Oceans Day! A day to celebrate the Ocean and raise awareness of the vital importance of our oceans, and the critical role that they play in sustaining a healthy and livable planet. This years theme is “Beat Plastic Pollution” a disastrous problem that UN Secretary General António Guterres warned; “Our world is swamped by harmful plastic waste; every year, more than 8 million tons end up in the oceans, microplastics in our seas now outnumber stars in our galaxy.”

Let’s be honest. Donald Trump doesn’t give one flying fuck about the Oceans. He stated on a visit to Japan in 1990 that he would not eat “fucking raw fish”, but he will wolf down a heavily processed McDonalds Filet of Fish sandwichharvested by fishing trawlers on occasion. That is, when he doesn’t have a Big Mac or fried chicken in his mouth. He clearly enjoys his waterfront properties, that you and I pay the mortgage for when he visits with his entourage. And he will pressure local governments to protect these opulent properties from sea level rise, even though he is one of the most deplorable climate change deniers on Earth.

So, it is no surprise that protecting the Ocean is not on his radar, in fact, he is just as hostile to the oceans as he is towards the climate. Margaret Cooney writes on Trump’s war on the oceans.

In just his first six months in office, President Donald Trump undertook a range of actions that gravely undermined common-sense stewardship of America’s oceans—enough for the Center for American Progress to conclude that he had launched a “War on Oceans.” His attacks included withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change; signing executive orders aimed at reckless expansion of offshore oil drilling; direct attacks on the spectacular wildlife protected within national marine sanctuaries and marine national monuments; and proposing draconian cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Altogether, these rollbacks amount to an attack on America’s coasts and oceans the size of which has not been seen in decades.

And President Trump’s war on oceans has not stopped there: Since June 2017, this onslaught has continued largely unabated. As citizens and advocates for ocean conservation convene in Washington, D.C., this week for Capitol Hill Ocean Week and the first-ever March for the Ocean, the Trump administration is accelerating its rollbacks of basic safeguards and pollution controls for the marine environment, as well as the sell-off of oceans to special interests.

National Geographic News reports on how the Oceans have protected us and that they will be unable to protect us anymore.

As global temperatures rise, scientists expect the pace of change in the oceans to accelerate, leaving many fishing communities to adapt or transition to new species.

Since 1970, global waters have been a “powerful ally” against global warming, absorbing 93 percent of the carbon dioxide released by human activities. (See “Ocean Warming Faster Now Than in 10,000 Years.”)

“Without this oceanic buffer, global temperature rises would have gone much, much speedier,” Andersen said Monday at the IUCN World Conservation Congress.

To put it bluntly, if the oceans weren’t there to protect us, our lower atmosphere would have already heated up by 36 degrees Celsius, says Dan Laffoley, principal advisor of marine science and conservation for IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Programme.

Now, as global warming continues apace, the ocean will continue to warm by between 1 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, Andersen says. “In an ecological timescale, 2100 is tomorrow.”

Oceans produce most of our oxygen, we are in for a world of hurt if we do not rein in our fossil fuel emissions immediately. Besides plastic waste, acidification, overfishing, pollution, marine heatwaves, emerging pathogens, and the Atlantification and Pacification of the Arctic ocean are all threats to every living creature on earth. Tick Tock!

Peter Ross in Vancouver, BC

A ‘smog’ of plastics may be killing our oceans

From an Article by Daphne Branham, Vancouver Sun, September 6, 2016

ABOARD THE AKADEMIK SERGEY VAVILOV — The biggest problem in the world’s oceans isn’t swirling, Texas-sized islands of discarded plastic. It’s the small stuff; the little bits you can’t see that are congregating in gyres where ocean currents converge.

If it were only big, visible chunks of floating plastic, the fix would be simple. Send some people in boats with big nets and scoops and collect it. Unfortunately, it’s way more complicated than that and it’s why Marcus Eriksen is trying to change the narrative by using a different analogy — smog in the oceans.

Eriksen is one of the authors of the peer-reviewed study that estimated there are 244,000 tonnes of plastic in the world’s oceans. Of that, 92 per cent of the pieces are five millimetres or smaller, which works out to an estimated 5.25 trillion tiny pieces. Some microplastics absorb toxins such as PCBs, DDT, other pesticides, flame-retardants and oil from vehicles. Others release toxins as they degrade.

As for microfibres, a study published this summer by researchers at Southampton Solent University found that as many as 2,000 fibres from fleece and polyester fabrics are released during a single washing cycle. Almost all of those find their way through municipal sewage systems to the sea.

A couple of years ago, the Great Lakes were described as being awash in microfibres with bits found enmeshed in the gastrointestinal tracts of some fish and fish-eating birds like cormorants.

And there’s growing evidence of microplastics in the Arctic Ocean. “Polar sea ice is becoming a major sink for microplastic contamination,” according to a 2014 study. “And, as the ice melts, these microplastics can be released into the environment.” The study was cited by the Canadian government last year when it added microbeads to its list of toxic substances in 2015.

What no one knows is the extent of microplastics in the Arctic or where they come from. It’s why Eriksen, founder of The 5 Gyres Institute, and Eric Solomon, the Vancouver Aquarium’s head of Arctic programs, were sampling water during a 12-day trip through the Northwest Passage.

Because of the focus on plastics, everyone on the expedition looked for bigger plastic pieces while we were ashore on desolate, unpopulated islands. All sorts of stuff was found — shopping bags, rope, gun shell casings, plastic-coated wire and smaller, unidentifiable pieces.

But it was the micro-bits that were the real target. Eriksen and 5 Gyres “citizen scientists” dragged a 60-centimetre wide Manta trawl behind a Zodiac at about two knots for 30 minutes.

Solomon and the aquarium’s volunteers took some sediment samples as well as numerous samples from 3.5 metres below the surface. “It’s not sexy stuff,” admitted Solomon. “It’s basically just sieving sea water.”

Several times a day, a pail full of water was poured through a metal sieve, which filtered out anything larger than 63 microns. (A micron is one one-thousandth of a millimetre.)

Both sampling methods yielded a few bits visible to the eye. One water sample viewed under a microscope had copepods (small crustaceans), translucent marine snails, phytoplankton, thin strands of fibres and a pinkish piece that looked like a granite rock.

“I’m really curious about the coloured bits,” Solomon said. “The blue pieces are the question marks for me. They have a square-ish base that comes up (under the microscope) rough, jagged with reflective flecks.” Neither Solomon nor Eriksen was making any guesses about whether any of what they found is plastic. That requires further study.

The aquarium’s samples will be handed over to Peter Ross, head of the Ocean Pollution Research Program, to do the toxicology work. The aquarium’s lab is the only one in Canada with a $300,000 Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, which will eventually not only identify plastic, but determine exactly which of 5,000 varieties of plastic it is.

But before that, the samples will be rinsed again and the bits from each sample counted and measured. Sediments will be removed using a technology Ross and his team have developed using canola oil to emulsify with the sediments, leaving the plastic floating on the top.

Other samples with phyto- or zooplanktons will be put on glass-coated polypropylene well plates, immersed in nitric acid, covered and heated until the tissues have dissolved.

Only then will the samples be put through the spectrometer where an infrared beam strikes a crystal that Ross says “excites” the electrons. Because each kind of plastic has a unique signature, the response conveyed back to the spectrometer can be identified within 20 seconds.

Why this matters is because if scientists can identify specific kinds of plastics concentrated in specific areas, they can begin to determine where they’re coming from and what can be done to stop it. 

How big is the problem?

When Ross and his team sampled the water off the B.C. coast a couple of years ago, the results were astounding. One of every 34 copepods and one of every 17 euphausiids contained microplastics or fibres.

Based on their findings, they estimate that juvenile salmon in the Strait of Georgia may ingest two to seven microplastic particles each day, while returning adult salmon take in up to 91 particles. Extrapolating from that, the researchers concluded humpback whales could scoop up more than 300,000 plastic bits daily.

Their study, published in Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology last year, was described as “the first indisputable evidence that species at the bottom of the food web are mistaking plastic for food.”

Others have studied fish and bivalves sold in markets in several different countries. As Eriksen said, “If you eat oysters, you’re likely feeding on your own fleece.”

Microplastics include everything from tire dust to fibres from dryer exhaust; from broken down bits of plastic bottles, Styrofoam containers and other packaging to microbeads intentionally added to cosmetic products. Global plastics production went from 202 million tonnes in 2002 to 299 million tonnes in 2013. By 2030, it’s forecast to reach 600 million tonnes and double that by 2050.

What is the majority of all that plastic used for? Packaging, according to the U.S. Plastics Industry Trade Association’s 2015 global trends report. That’s followed by vehicle production and medical uses. Eriksen says the plastics come from three sources. One is unavoidable catastrophic events like Japan’s 2011 tsunami that washed 16.2 million tonnes of debris into the ocean.

Another is poor product design including the proliferation of single-use products. Some of this can be blamed on our demand for convenience. Think of single-serve coffee pods; frozen foods in ‘stand-up-straight’ plastic bags that can’t be recycled; individual cleaning wipes; and over-packaged, small items from memory cards to mascara.

Finally, there’s poor waste management. It ranges from nonexistent in developing countries to inefficient and insufficient in wealthy countries where even massive landfills and incinerators don’t seem capable of dealing with what’s thrown into them.

Even with good intentions, progress is slow. Statistics Canada reports 92 per cent of Canadians have access to recycling and 98 per cent use at least one recycling program (bottles, plastics, paper, etc.). But total residential waste disposal continues to grow.

We need to start making choices about what we buy. But we also have to decide who ought to pay the lion’s share of the fundamental switch away from being a throwaway society. Will it be producers or consumers?

Microplastics are everywhere, so there’s no time to waste. Because as we nibble away at the problem, microplastics and nanofibres are being gobbled up by almost everything along the food chain. Including us.

What are microplastics and where do they come from?

Microplastics are synthetic polymer particles. While there is no agreed-upon scientific definition of their size, Canada has accepted the United Nations’ Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection’s recommended range of between five millimetres and one nanometre (one-billionth of a metre) in size.

Some microplastics are manufactured specifically for use in personal care products (toothpaste, face cleansers, anti-aging creams, shaving creams, eyeshadow, baby products, sunscreen, lipstick), industrial cleaning products, printer toners, anti-slip products and medical applications.

Peer-reviewed research indicates that the number of microbeads in personal care products varies from 137,000 to 2.8 million in a 150 ml bottle. Used on a daily basis, a single application of some products could result in as many as 94,500 microbeads released into the household waste water stream.

A voluntary survey of the Canadian Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association’s members found that they produced an annual total volume of microbeads ranging from 30 kilograms to 68,000 kilograms per year. Other microplastics are by-products of bags, bottles, and fishing line that are breaking down while microfibres slough off synthetic and fleece clothing when it is laundered.

As some microplastics break down, they release chemicals. Others are stable, but attract other toxins. They enter the food chain either because they float and are eaten by birds and other species in the open ocean (pelagic) or they sink and are eaten by bottom feeders.

Peter Ross shows a sample of microplastics and microfibers in the Vancouver Aquarium lab in British Columbia, Canada:

Ocean Day 2014

How Acidification, Overfishing and Plastics Threaten the World’s Oceans

From an Article by Dr. David Suzuki, EcoWatch.com, June 3, 2014

June 8 is World Oceans Day. It’s a fitting time to contemplate humanity’s evolving relationship with the source of all life. For much of human history, we’ve affected marine ecosystems primarily by what we’ve taken out of the seas. The challenge as we encounter warming temperatures and increasing industrial activity will be to manage what we put into them.

As a top predator, humans from the tropics to the poles have harvested all forms of marine life, from the smallest shrimp to the largest whales, from the ocean’s surface to its floor. The staggering volume of fish removed from our waters has had a ripple effect through all ocean ecosystems.

Yet the ocean continues to provide food for billions of people, and improved fishing practices in many places, including Canada, are leading to healthier marine-life populations. We’re slowly getting better at managing what we catch to keep it within the ocean’s capacity to replenish. But while we may be advancing in this battle, we’re losing the war with climate change and pollution.

In the coming years, our ties to the oceans will be defined by what we put into them: carbon dioxide, nutrients washed from the land, diseases from aquaculture and land-based animals, invasive species, plastics, contaminants, noise and ever-increasing marine traffic. We once incorrectly viewed oceans as limitless storehouses of marine bounty and places to dump our garbage; now it’s clear they can only handle so much.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report described how ingredients in the ocean’s broth are changing dramatically. Life in the seas is closely linked to factors in the immediate surroundings, such as temperature, acidity or pH, salinity, oxygen and nutrient availability. These combine at microscopic levels to create conditions that favor one form of life over another and emerge into complex ecosystems.

The oceans now absorb one-quarter of the atmosphere’s CO2. That’s bad news for organisms with calcium carbonate shells that dissolve in acidic conditions. We’re witnessing the effects of ocean acidification on shellfish along the West Coast of North America. Earlier this year, a Vancouver Island scallop farm closed after losing 10 million scallops, likely because of climate change and increasing acidity. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has also linked oyster die-offs along the Pacific coast to climate change.

While we may be getting better at figuring out how to sustainably harvest crabs, lobsters and sea urchins, we’re just starting to investigate whether they can even survive in oceans altered by climate change.

Whales also offer a glimpse into our changing relationship with oceans. From the 17th century until well into the 20th, commercial whaling in Canada left populations severely depleted. Now, our most endangered whales are threatened by industrial activity. The St. Lawrence beluga population, for example, was decimated by hunting until 1979. Today’s biggest threats include contaminants, vessel traffic and industrialization, including a proposal to develop an oil port in the heart of their critical habitat.

Although the conservation challenge is daunting, nurturing functioning ecosystems offers hope. Healthy oceans ensure we can continue to enjoy seafood—and they’re more resilient to increasing human impacts. If the global fishing industry wants to ensure its survival, it should advocate for marine ecosystem conservation.

By continuing to improve fisheries, protect habitat, carefully control industrial activities and create marine protected areas, we can maintain marine ecosystems that are better able to adapt to the pressures of climate change and other human activities. That’s happening on the Pacific North Coast, thanks to a partnership between the B.C. government and First Nations to develop marine plans to guide future ocean uses.

Although there’s much to lament about the state of the oceans, I remain inspired by the David Suzuki Foundation’s Ocean Keepers and others working to defend our precious coastal waters. With less than five per cent of the oceans explored, we have much left to discover and learn.

As the late American marine biologist, author and conservationist Rachel Carson wrote, “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.”

EARTH’S WATER COMPARISON: Ocean Water (large blue sphere), Groundwater (small blue sphere), Freshwater (nearly invisible blue dot).

Source: Howard Perlman, United States Geological Survey.  Data source: Igor Shiklomanov “Worlds Freshwater Resources” in Peter H. Gleick (editor), 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York).

Note: The arrow is missing which locates the tiny freshwater dot below the others. Clearly, legislation is needed to provide a legal framework for the protection of our limited water resources here on earth.  As more and more chemicals are released into the environment, less of our existing water resources will be useful to us.  Life support is our number one need, as drinking water, for growing our food, for food preparation, and for the continued preparation of the products that support our life functions.