Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

Mary Crowley is a former teacher who captains the Kaisei for her nonprofit Project Kaisei. Crowley’s goal is to find a way to remove the garbage comprising the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from the ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a near-million-square-mile soup of trash trapped in a gyre in the Pacific Ocean. What alarms Crowley about the garbage patch are microplastics: “Tiny pieces of plastic, a trashy confetti too small to see from the ship deck” (109). Lantern fish confuse microplastics for food and consume them. Larger fish eat lantern fish, filling their bodies with the microplastics the lantern fish consumed. Even larger fish eat the fish that ate the lantern fish, filling their bodies with the microplastics in turn, so on and so on up the food chain, until a human consumes all those microplastics, which never leave our bodies. Nearly one in ten lantern fish Crowley studies has microplastics in its system.

Some say extracting trash from the Garbage Patch is impossible, and that all we can do is commit to adding less. The technology doesn’t exist to remove that much plastic from the ocean, and even if it did, the cost, logistics, and environmental harm of the process would outweigh any potential benefit. Crowley disagrees and asserts that cleaning the Garbage Patch must be an element of any solution.

Nurdles are tiny plastic pellets that are melted and shaped into plastic products. This is how all plastic products are made. Plastic manufacturers ship billions of nurdles per year around the world, and many fall loose during transportation. Nurdles comprise 10% of plastic found on beaches. The final resting place for both nurdles and manufactured plastic products is either a landfill or the ocean. Heavy plastics sink quickly, but light plastics like nurdles, plastic bags, milk jugs, and bottle caps float. Currents carry this plastic until the Coriolis effect traps it in the spiraling currents of one of Earth’s five ocean gyres. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans two gyres—the South Pacific and the North Pacific. At 20 million square miles, the North Pacific Gyre is the largest ecosystem on Earth.

While sailing across the Gyre from Hawaii to California in 1997, Charles Moore found himself in an endless soup of trash. He says, “It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. […] no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments” (117). After that experience, Moore devoted his life and inherited family oil fortune to ending plastic ocean pollution. He financed research that found the Pacific Gyre had six times as much plastic as it did zooplankton, and in California’s coastal waters, the quantity of plastic was more than double the amount of plankton. Moore’s efforts are limited to stopping the flow of plastic to the ocean. He believes removing the plastic already in the water is impossible.

To Crowley, the issue isn’t a question of possible or impossible. Human health is tied to the ocean’s health. Crowley believes that if we don’t clean the ocean, humans won’t survive, so we must find a way to do so. Crowley brought inventor Norton Smith on a Kaisei expedition. Smith had developed four prototypes of devices to remove trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: the Lagoon, the Sweep, the Pyramid, and the Beach. Each is inexpensive to make and passively floats in the water while removing trash debris. The most successful device was the Beach, which resembles an inclined beach. Plastic floats up the ramp and into a capture net, but sea creatures do not. Still, Humes estimates that it would take 16 years and an investment of $500 million to remove the garbage with the Beach. This extensive and costly effort would be trivial if not combined with a global reduction in waste entering the ocean. 

Miriam Goldstein was a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution at the University of California, San Diego when she led a research team to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for three weeks of sampling, preserving, experimenting, and observing. Humes explains, “Goldstein’s primary interest is how the unusual critters that live in the gyre, most of them small and many of them microscopic, interact with the debris and plastic in their midst” (131). She found that small ocean life is attaching to pieces of plastic and being transported to other ocean ecosystems, upsetting the balance of nature. Goldstein believes this is a vital issue because these microscopic organisms create half the oxygen humans breathe. Goldstein also found that plastic particles collect toxic chemicals and concentrate persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The Garbage Patch transports these POPs across the ocean, where they harm marine ecosystems and endanger the safety of our food. Humes explains:

Let’s say a little fish eats ten tiny pieces of POPs […] then a bigger fish comes along and eats ten of those tiny fish. Now we have a fish that has imbibed the equivalent of one hundred contaminated pieces of plastic. Then a bigger fish eats a bunch of those, and so on up the food chain […] At some point, some of those larger creatures end up in the seafood case or the canned goods aisle at your local supermarket. (132-33)

Through biomagnification the chemicals become more concentrated at each step of the food chain.

United Nations (UN) figures estimate 7 million tons of trash enter Earth’s oceans yearly. Plastic comprises 80% of our yearly ocean trash dump. The 5 Gyres research group estimates the Earth’s five gyres contain over 157 million tons of plastic. Ocean trash is just one man-made stress on marine ecosystems. Together with overfishing, climate change, and acidification, it is destroying ocean habitats.