Plastic debris is clogging the oceans

Pollution is now as dense in the northernmost ocean as it is in the Atlantic and Pacific.

From an Article by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic Monthly, April 20, 2017

The Arctic Ocean is small, shallow, and—most importantly—shrouded. Unlike the other large oceans of the world, it is closely hemmed in by Asia, Europe, and North America, with very few watery entrances in and out. Some oceanographers call it the “Arctic Mediterranean Sea,” a nod both to its between-the-terra-ness and its similarity to that smaller ocean.

Often, that remoteness has played to its ecological advantage. Very few ships pass through the area (with all their attendant pollution and environmental disruption), at least compared to nearby waterways like the Bering Sea. It also helps that much of the Arctic freezes over every winter.

But a paper released this week in Science Advances argues that its location is now harming it. The first survey of the region has found that roughly 300 billion pieces of floating plastic, most of them tiny but visible to the unaided eye, have clogged the planet’s northernmost sea. The plastic, having been carried to the pole over decades, now has very few ways out.

In other words, the Arctic Ocean has become the Northern Hemisphere’s “dead end” for floating plastic.

“Our data demonstrate that the marine plastic pollution has reached a global scale after only a few decades using plastic materials,” said Andrés Cózar Cabañas, a biologist at the University of Cádiz. It is, he said, “a clear evidence of the human capacity to change our planet. This plastic accumulation is likely to grow further.”

The survey was carried out while the research vessel Tara circumnavigated the pole in late 2013. The same Tara cruise also surveilled local plankton populations and observed the aurora.

It found a couple key differences in how plastic pollution works in the Arctic. To the south, in the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, plastic tends to accumulate in enormous subtropical “trash patches.” While these are not the dense and churning gyres of garbage that many people imagine, they can be accurately described as parts of the ocean with a lot of garbage in them. In a way, they’re like the asteroid belt, an otherwise void place in the world-ocean where plastic is much more likely to accumulate.

The Arctic does not so much have trash patches inside it; it is giant trash patch. The Arctic Ocean has about the same median density of plastic as the Atlantic and Pacific do. But unlike in the southern oceans, where plastic has unevenly congregated in certain areas, it has spread itself throughout the entirety of the Arctic.

Sometimes, though, it is quite dense: In the seas north of Iceland and western Russia, there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic per square kilometer.

Martha Buckley, an oceanographer at George Mason University, agrees with the authors that plastic is not coming from the Arctic itself. This is “intuitive,” she writes: Few people live around that ocean’s coast, there is little ship traffic there, and most of the plastic is tiny enough that it seems to have spent several years in the ocean. (The paper’s authors estimate that it takes one to three years for plastic from the North Atlantic to make it to the Arctic.)

“It is pretty clear that this plastic has been transported by ocean currents. How the plastics are entering the Arctic is not as clear,” she told me in an email. The paper, for instance, doesn’t discuss transport through the ocean’s vertical currents. Over the last few years, research has suggested that gyres in the subtropics and subpolar regions are linked by deeper currents.

Ocean currents matter because they’ll help researchers learn if the plastic is trapped in the Arctic permanently or whether it will eventually work its way out. Other scientists are still trying to come up with solutions to the world’s long-term plastic problem. In the meantime, says Cabañas, the only way to fix the problem is to mitigate its scale. Countries and coastal communities should work harder to keep plastic from winding up in the ocean.

“We should properly manage the plastic waste at its source,” he told me. “Once the plastic enters the ocean, its destination and impacts are uncontrollable.”

Lethal debris from inside sea turtle

Another Whale Dead From Ingesting a Plastic Bag

NOAA Marine Debris Program | October 30, 2015

From an Article of the NOAA Marine Debris Program, October 30, 2015

[EcoWatch Editor’s note: Yesterday EcoWatch reported that a mature sperm whale was found dead in Taiwan. Local marine biologists said plastic bags and fishing nets filling its stomach.]

Marine debris can be a dangerous problem for the animals that inhabit the marine environment. Unfortunately, we recently saw this first-hand on a Florida beach. A melon-headed whale that was recovered along Florida’s east coast died due to a large plastic bag in its digestive system. NOAA Fisheries’ stranding network staff, partnering with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute responded to the call about a stranding on Riviera Beach.

A decision was made to euthanize the whale after vets at the Palm Beach Zoo determined that the animal was in very poor condition and extremely thin. A necropsy (a non-human autopsy) was performed by a veterinarian to discover the cause of the animal’s poor health and subsequent death, during which a large plastic bag was found to be blocking the whale’s intestinal tract. The whale had suffered from starvation due to the blockage.

This is a sad reminder of the impact of marine debris. Every piece of debris matters. Animals can mistake trash for food or accidentally ingest it when consuming actual food items. However, we can help! By properly disposing of our trash, following the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle), helping to educate others, and by cleaning up our shorelines and waterways by getting involved in cleanup events, we can fight the marine debris problem and work to avoid outcomes like this in the future. To learn more about how you can help, visit our website.

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Shocking Photos of Green Sea Turtle Killed by Ingesting Plastics and Other Marine Litter

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com, November 2, 2015

A green sea turtle was found dead on a beach in Sai Kung, Hong Kong, with its stomach and intestines filled with plastic and other marine debris, underscoring the growing crisis of ocean pollution.

The greatest threat to green sea turtles, which are endangered, is the commercial harvesting of their eggs, poaching and bycatch (unintentional capture from fishing).

However, this recent incident in Hong Kong highlights the disturbing fact that human-caused trash is a growing threat to aquatic life. As the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) told the Hong Kong Free Press, this is the first time that a green sea turtle in Hong Kong has been found dead from ingesting marine litter.

According to Hong Kong newspaper Stand News, the turtle was found by a local woman named Mandy Wong, who immediately notified the Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Department upon discovery. When she returned to the site the next day, she was surprised to find that the turtle’s body had been torn apart (perhaps by a dog) with the turtle’s stomach and intestines filled with trash.

Dee Hwa Chong, senior fish researcher at the Ichthyological Society of Hong Kong, told Chinese newspaper Ming Pao that the turtle had died from ingesting plastic litter that can tear apart its digestive tract and block its intestines, preventing the turtle from taking in food.

The WWF’s Coastal Watch conducted a comprehensive survey on marine litter on coastal habitats in Hong Kong from July 2014 and May 2015, and concluded that plastic trash is a severe threat to all marine ecosystems.

“During all of the surveys, we observed various organisms entangled in debris which caused injury or death, like ‘ghost nets’ (fishing nets which have been cast adrift). We also found fish bite marks on pieces of plastic litter,” said Patrick Yeung, Coastal Watch project manager. “The pollutants absorbed by marine animals will potentially bioaccumulate along the food chain, which will eventually damage the marine ecosystem, affect fishery resources and human health. It is imperative that we tackle the marine litter problem at its source immediately.”

Green turtles are a protected species in Hong Kong and listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. According to Conserveturtles.org, the current population of nesting females is estimated to be between 85,000 and 90,000.

It’s clear that we must reduce our plastic footprint as this pollution chokes the entire marine food chain, from plankton to much larger creatures.

Roughly 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the world’s oceans every year, and according to a recent study, 60 percent of this waste comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. As these economies continue to grow and demand more plastic goods, it’s projected that plastic consumption in Asia will increase by an astonishing 80 percent to surpass 200 million tons by 2025.

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Ten Ways Ocean Pollution Makes Us Sick

By Cole Mellino, EcoWatch.com, November 7, 2015

Our oceans are very polluted and full of plastic. Roughly 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the world’s oceans every year, and according to a new study, the majority of this waste comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Regardless of its source, plastic pollution has a devastating impact on marine life.

At EcoWatch, we’ve highlighted photos of sea turtles killed by ingesting plastic and other debris. And just recently, two whales have been killed from ingesting plastic bags and fishing gear. But ocean pollution affects humans too.

Check out this infographic from DIVE.in, an online scuba diving magazine, to learn how ocean pollution hurts us, too:

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/07/ocean-pollution-makes-us-sick/

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Why We Must Ban Plastic Bags and Support a Circular Economy

From an Article by Marcus Eriksen, EcoWatch.com, November 11, 2015

“There’s your product. It’s all plastic bags,” I said to Phil Rozenski, director of sustainability and marketing for Novalex, a plastic bag manufacturer. We were on stage debating the efficacy of plastic bags at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina in early October.

The object I was referring to was a 45-pound mass of tangled plastic bags found in the stomach of a dead camel in the desert of Dubai. The intention was to point out that in a circular economy products and packaging that escape the best recovery systems on the planet and cost taxpayers unfairly to clean up the mess, must be replaced with a design that is a benefit rather than a cost once you include the inconvenient externalities.

For half an hour we went back and forth about statistics that we each use to defend our positions, pointing to the other’s faulty arguments, but I wanted to get to the bottom of it, so I said, “You know, we could go back and forth all day with our convenient statistics, knowing we’re just gonna dig in our heels on where we stand. Can we get beyond it all?”

My point was very simple. Plastic bags by design are really good at escaping our recovery systems and knowing now how dangerous plastics are to the environment, the logical next step is a design overhaul. Out with the old and in with the new. Rozenski nodded his head, then responded, “Would you be willing to support our How2Recycle program?” Two weeks later I was on a call with How2Recycle representatives.

How2Recycle was born out of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and their work to create a circular economy around plastic products and packaging in order to keep materials out of the dump or incinerator and instead keep them moving in a circular system from production and manufacturing to consumption and recovery.

See also: Plastic Bags and Fishing Nets Found in Stomach of Dead Whale