Do you ever wonder what happens to the litter that washes down into storm drains?
Maybe it's the cigarette butt somebody drops to the curb and leaves there, or the plastic bags that fly away in the slightest breeze. When the rain runs courses down the streets, all these bits of debris float down through metal grates and into the sewers. And then what? Peter Hill of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative says, the water gushes through the sewers and “often runs straight into waterways, untreated.”
It's just one of the ways that trash gets into the world’s rivers and oceans, a global problem on a huge scale. In a single day in 2008, volunteers in 104 countries picked up nearly 7 million pounds of debris from beaches and waterways, including more than three million cigarettes, more than a million plastic bags, and nearly a million each of food wrappers and bottle caps.
“The thing to remember is that every single piece of trash has a face behind it,” says Seba Sheavly, an independent consultant who has worked on the problem of marine debris for more than 15 years. “I often try to get people to realize that a six-pack ring does not take itself off of a six-pack of beer, open the kitchen door, jump out into the yard, and find its way into a river.”
Just like many other pollution problems, Sheavly says people are behind marine debris. But she says, this one can be solved on a person-by-person scale—by making people aware of the consequences of their behavior, showing them how to do better, and making waste management tools readily available.
More than just an eyesore
Anyone who has shaken a slimy plastic bag off their leg during an ocean swim can tell you how they're affected by ocean litter.
But the problem has much larger consequences for aquatic wildlife, for marine navigation, and even for people, says David Osborn, who works with United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) marine and coastal ecosystem's branch.
For one thing, a huge amount of the debris littering the oceans and coasts comes from plastic. Plastics are a particular problem, Osborn says, because they don't biodegrade. Plastic just sits there, or else it breaks down into tinier and tinier pieces—eventually microscopic pieces—of plastic. These pieces create a number of problems, largely when they are ingested by wildlife or when wildlife become entangled in them. Plastic can carry invasive species, spreading another insidious environmental problem.
Osborn says plastics in the ocean have the potential to cause damage further up the food chain. “Plastics are pollutants,” he says. “They carry chemicals that can get caught in the tissue of the fish. We eat them, and we're ingesting those pollutants in their system.” Commercial fishing nets—big, bulky, and incredibly durable—are another big headache. Sometimes they get lost overboard, and sometimes there is no good way to dispose of them when they're no longer usable. When they're left in the water, all kinds of wildlife can get trapped and killed. Plus the nets can get tangled in delicate coral reefs or in the machinery of boats.
Beyond the individual impact of specific debris, the health of oceans affects everyone, says Tom McCann, who works for Ocean Conservancy. “When we're trashing our oceans,” he says, “we're really harming not only our economic well-being and our social well being, but ultimately the health of humans both here in America and abroad as well.”
Cleaning up the mess
McCann's organization is one of the major players working to clean up the debris. Theirs is often a fairly low tech approach: mobilize squads of volunteers and hit the beach with trash bags. But although Ocean Conservancy expends a lot of energy on cleaning up, most experts, including McCann, say the problem cannot be solved that way.
Cleanup, it turns out, can be pretty complicated. The low-tech solution is inefficient and ineffective—and doesn't really even begin to address the problem of debris that is circling far away from land in the open ocean. UNEP's Osborn says even finding the debris in deep water can be challenging. The litter doesn't show up on satellite imagery or radar, and it moves around.
Even in the case of the “North Pacific Gyre”—aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region of ocean northeast of Hawaii where currents converge to concentrate marine litter—it's not so easy to clean up. Osborn says depending on the season, the location of the patch moves. Sometimes the litter cycles down far beneath the surface, and often the debris is spread out over a large enough area that litter density becomes minimal and attempting a cleanup becomes a monumental task.
Moreover, Osborn says, the cleanup itself can have an ecological toll. Anything that catches litter runs the risk of catching marine life as well, and he notes that the by-catch of a clean up can be as damaging as the litter was to begin with.
That doesn't mean some people aren't trying to tackle the problem. George Orbelian, a lifelong surfer and oceans enthusiast, helped found Project Kaisei, an organization dedicated to studying deep sea debris and trying to clean it up. Right now, Project Kaisei is in the research phase, in partnership with, among others, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. But Project Kaisei has also partnered with large-scale recycling companies, which think all that debris out in the water has the potential to bring in some profit.
Orbelian says there are a number of recycling possibilities. “We're actually looking at four or five different technologies that turn waste plastic into fuel and other things that can be used,” he says. “So we'll see which technology is most appropriate.” In terms of collecting the plastic, he says one new possibility would be “to create a material that acts as a magnet that attracts the plastic or something that ends up connecting to the plastic bits.”
Going to the source
Osborn remains skeptical that an efficient solution can be found for collecting plastic. While he welcomes the effort—as well as the publicity and research—Project Kaisei is putting into the problem, he says finding a better solution for recapturing the waste “is extremely difficult and the primary reason why a market has not already appeared.” That's why he, like many other experts, says the real solution is prevention.
“[One step] many cities invest in is gross pollutant traps,” says Osborn. “Waste that goes into storm-water channels gets caught in effectively a big net, which stops it from going into the marine environment.”
Another technological advance that could help is to improve the composition of plastic so that it biodegrades in the marine environment. “There are a number of different variations of plastic bags,” Osborn says, such as “bags made out of corn starch or bags that biodegrade when they get wet.”
These may not be ideal from a consumer standpoint, Osborn points out—imagine walking home with your groceries in the rain—but could lead to a long-term solution that minimizes the number of bags floating around.
A less technologically advanced solution might be to use fewer plastic bags to start with. Osborn says “the UN has been calling for some time for governments to phase out those flimsy film bags, and move towards recyclable, reusable materials,” like cloth. But given that we can't eliminate plastic 100%, some marine litter programs aim to make better use of plastic waste so it won't get discarded in the first place—for example, what to do with those bulky, durable fishing nets.
In many port areas, marine litter expert Sheavly says, there is no good mechanism in place to help fishermen dispose of the nets that don't work anymore, “so sometimes fishermen have no recourse other than to let it go.” Instead, some places have turned the nets into a resource. Hawaii has developed a program where derelict nets are collected, brought back to Honolulu, processed, and, in a special waste-to-energy plant, turned into electricity.
“Putting a fishing net into landfills is kind of worthless,” Sheavly says. “Being able to convert those nets into electricity, they now have a monetary worth to them, so that it makes it worthwhile to collect the nets and then process them.” And it provides an opportunity to convert the energy that was used to make that net into something else.
What you can do
Keith Criddle, a fisheries and marine conservation professor at the University of Alaska and the lead author on a congressionally mandated study on marine debris, points out, “All of the man-made debris in the oceans and on the coasts was put there by people, willfully or by accident.”
“It is important,” he says, “to acknowledge that the marine debris problem and its solution can be boiled down to simple individual and social choices about the disposal of waste materials.”
Sheavly says better education can play a big role in helping individuals make better choices. For instance, “most people have been told the caps on a soda bottle aren't recyclable,” she says, and so they toss them. But recycling technology is now capable of sorting the bottles, which are made from one kind of plastic, and the caps, which are made from another, and capturing and reusing both.
Any real solution, she says, will attack the problem from a number of different angles, but the personal angle should always be included.
“In some pollution issues people don't see how they could affect it.” Sheavly says. “This is one where you can.”
Maybe it's the cigarette butt somebody drops to the curb and leaves there, or the plastic bags that fly away in the slightest breeze. When the rain runs courses down the streets, all these bits of debris float down through metal grates and into the sewers. And then what? Peter Hill of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative says, the water gushes through the sewers and “often runs straight into waterways, untreated.”
It's just one of the ways that trash gets into the world’s rivers and oceans, a global problem on a huge scale. In a single day in 2008, volunteers in 104 countries picked up nearly 7 million pounds of debris from beaches and waterways, including more than three million cigarettes, more than a million plastic bags, and nearly a million each of food wrappers and bottle caps.
“The thing to remember is that every single piece of trash has a face behind it,” says Seba Sheavly, an independent consultant who has worked on the problem of marine debris for more than 15 years. “I often try to get people to realize that a six-pack ring does not take itself off of a six-pack of beer, open the kitchen door, jump out into the yard, and find its way into a river.”
Just like many other pollution problems, Sheavly says people are behind marine debris. But she says, this one can be solved on a person-by-person scale—by making people aware of the consequences of their behavior, showing them how to do better, and making waste management tools readily available.
More than just an eyesore
Anyone who has shaken a slimy plastic bag off their leg during an ocean swim can tell you how they're affected by ocean litter.
But the problem has much larger consequences for aquatic wildlife, for marine navigation, and even for people, says David Osborn, who works with United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) marine and coastal ecosystem's branch.
For one thing, a huge amount of the debris littering the oceans and coasts comes from plastic. Plastics are a particular problem, Osborn says, because they don't biodegrade. Plastic just sits there, or else it breaks down into tinier and tinier pieces—eventually microscopic pieces—of plastic. These pieces create a number of problems, largely when they are ingested by wildlife or when wildlife become entangled in them. Plastic can carry invasive species, spreading another insidious environmental problem.
Osborn says plastics in the ocean have the potential to cause damage further up the food chain. “Plastics are pollutants,” he says. “They carry chemicals that can get caught in the tissue of the fish. We eat them, and we're ingesting those pollutants in their system.” Commercial fishing nets—big, bulky, and incredibly durable—are another big headache. Sometimes they get lost overboard, and sometimes there is no good way to dispose of them when they're no longer usable. When they're left in the water, all kinds of wildlife can get trapped and killed. Plus the nets can get tangled in delicate coral reefs or in the machinery of boats.
Beyond the individual impact of specific debris, the health of oceans affects everyone, says Tom McCann, who works for Ocean Conservancy. “When we're trashing our oceans,” he says, “we're really harming not only our economic well-being and our social well being, but ultimately the health of humans both here in America and abroad as well.”
Cleaning up the mess
McCann's organization is one of the major players working to clean up the debris. Theirs is often a fairly low tech approach: mobilize squads of volunteers and hit the beach with trash bags. But although Ocean Conservancy expends a lot of energy on cleaning up, most experts, including McCann, say the problem cannot be solved that way.
Cleanup, it turns out, can be pretty complicated. The low-tech solution is inefficient and ineffective—and doesn't really even begin to address the problem of debris that is circling far away from land in the open ocean. UNEP's Osborn says even finding the debris in deep water can be challenging. The litter doesn't show up on satellite imagery or radar, and it moves around.
Even in the case of the “North Pacific Gyre”—aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region of ocean northeast of Hawaii where currents converge to concentrate marine litter—it's not so easy to clean up. Osborn says depending on the season, the location of the patch moves. Sometimes the litter cycles down far beneath the surface, and often the debris is spread out over a large enough area that litter density becomes minimal and attempting a cleanup becomes a monumental task.
Moreover, Osborn says, the cleanup itself can have an ecological toll. Anything that catches litter runs the risk of catching marine life as well, and he notes that the by-catch of a clean up can be as damaging as the litter was to begin with.
That doesn't mean some people aren't trying to tackle the problem. George Orbelian, a lifelong surfer and oceans enthusiast, helped found Project Kaisei, an organization dedicated to studying deep sea debris and trying to clean it up. Right now, Project Kaisei is in the research phase, in partnership with, among others, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. But Project Kaisei has also partnered with large-scale recycling companies, which think all that debris out in the water has the potential to bring in some profit.
Orbelian says there are a number of recycling possibilities. “We're actually looking at four or five different technologies that turn waste plastic into fuel and other things that can be used,” he says. “So we'll see which technology is most appropriate.” In terms of collecting the plastic, he says one new possibility would be “to create a material that acts as a magnet that attracts the plastic or something that ends up connecting to the plastic bits.”
Going to the source
Osborn remains skeptical that an efficient solution can be found for collecting plastic. While he welcomes the effort—as well as the publicity and research—Project Kaisei is putting into the problem, he says finding a better solution for recapturing the waste “is extremely difficult and the primary reason why a market has not already appeared.” That's why he, like many other experts, says the real solution is prevention.
“[One step] many cities invest in is gross pollutant traps,” says Osborn. “Waste that goes into storm-water channels gets caught in effectively a big net, which stops it from going into the marine environment.”
Another technological advance that could help is to improve the composition of plastic so that it biodegrades in the marine environment. “There are a number of different variations of plastic bags,” Osborn says, such as “bags made out of corn starch or bags that biodegrade when they get wet.”
These may not be ideal from a consumer standpoint, Osborn points out—imagine walking home with your groceries in the rain—but could lead to a long-term solution that minimizes the number of bags floating around.
A less technologically advanced solution might be to use fewer plastic bags to start with. Osborn says “the UN has been calling for some time for governments to phase out those flimsy film bags, and move towards recyclable, reusable materials,” like cloth. But given that we can't eliminate plastic 100%, some marine litter programs aim to make better use of plastic waste so it won't get discarded in the first place—for example, what to do with those bulky, durable fishing nets.
In many port areas, marine litter expert Sheavly says, there is no good mechanism in place to help fishermen dispose of the nets that don't work anymore, “so sometimes fishermen have no recourse other than to let it go.” Instead, some places have turned the nets into a resource. Hawaii has developed a program where derelict nets are collected, brought back to Honolulu, processed, and, in a special waste-to-energy plant, turned into electricity.
“Putting a fishing net into landfills is kind of worthless,” Sheavly says. “Being able to convert those nets into electricity, they now have a monetary worth to them, so that it makes it worthwhile to collect the nets and then process them.” And it provides an opportunity to convert the energy that was used to make that net into something else.
What you can do
Keith Criddle, a fisheries and marine conservation professor at the University of Alaska and the lead author on a congressionally mandated study on marine debris, points out, “All of the man-made debris in the oceans and on the coasts was put there by people, willfully or by accident.”
“It is important,” he says, “to acknowledge that the marine debris problem and its solution can be boiled down to simple individual and social choices about the disposal of waste materials.”
Sheavly says better education can play a big role in helping individuals make better choices. For instance, “most people have been told the caps on a soda bottle aren't recyclable,” she says, and so they toss them. But recycling technology is now capable of sorting the bottles, which are made from one kind of plastic, and the caps, which are made from another, and capturing and reusing both.
Any real solution, she says, will attack the problem from a number of different angles, but the personal angle should always be included.
“In some pollution issues people don't see how they could affect it.” Sheavly says. “This is one where you can.”
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