In the middle of the North Pacific, a vortex of trash swirls in the ocean, a repository for plastic bottles, bags and wrappers human beings thousands of miles away let drift into the ocean.
It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Capt. Charles Moore, the Long Beach man who more than a decade ago discovered the garbage patch, will set out on another voyage this summer to study what, exactly, is floating in the ocean and how toxic it really is. He says the phrase “garbage patch” doesn’t accurately describe what is happening.
If you look at the mouth of the Los Angeles River or the San Gabriel River after a storm, you’ll see trash piled up, almost enough to walk on, it seems. That’s not what’s floating in the ocean.
“It’s more dispersed,” said Moore, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Institute in 1994. “The garbage patch itself is about a handful of chips in the surface area the size of a football field.”
The ocean is so vast and so deep that the plastic bits – which break into smaller and smaller bits from UV sunlight and the churning ocean – spread far and wide. Any efforts to clean it would prove futile, Moore said. Another solution is needed.
“We need a cradle-to-cradle philosophy for plastic products. If it can’t be recycled, you don’t make it. It needs to be benign by design, which means it doesn’t have harmful chemicals that leach out, and it has an end game,” Moore said. “You want to shut off the tap before you start bailing out the bathtub.”
Capt. Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Institute, sat down at his Bay Shore home to discuss his upcoming voyage this summer to study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Q.Tell me the story of how you originally discovered the garbage patch. You were sailing back to Long Beach from Hawaii for a race. What happened next?
A.It was 1997, the largest El Niño on record. When you have this huge warm calm system, this high, even a little bottle cap or a shard of plastic is going to bob to the surface of the ocean. It took me five minutes to come up on deck and see a shard of plastic. It wasn’t this ah-ha moment where I found this island of trash.
Q.So you hadn’t seen much plastic debris on your previous trips across the ocean?
A.No, just a piece there and piece here, but not continuous like this day after day. We went back out there and measured and found that there was six times more plastic than plankton. That was explosive.
Q.Wait, six times more plastic than plankton? So the plankton can’t be very dense either.
A.It’s extremely dispersed. There’s an oceanic desert there. Other places you can trawl a line and get a mahi-mahi, but you don’t get that out there. What really goes there to grow up is the baby sea turtles, who are consuming plastic where formerly all there was was jellyfish they could fatten up on. So we’ve got another potential crash of a species, sea turtles.
Q.Other than turtles, how does the plastic impact marine life?
A.It increases the exotic corals, the oysters, the muscles, the sea squirts. You’re getting a new balance, or imbalance, in creatures that live out there. The potential for the plastic to throw the system out of balance, to make it toxic, is what we’ll be looking at on this trip, because these plastics absorb contaminants.
Q.So pollutants also leach from the water into the plastic?
A.It’s a two-way street: sponge and source. Sponge is the stuff that leaks from the water to the plastic and source is the stuff put into the plastic that is released into the water.
Q.Is there a problem when organisms at the bottom of the food chain eat the plastic, then organisms higher up eat those organisms, so the amount of plastic and contaminants concentrates in organisms toward the top?
A.That’s the mechanism of bioaccumulation. That happens because the diet of each organism on the trophic scale is comprised of many of the smaller creatures on the scale. One shrimp eats many phytoplankton. One squid eats lots of shrimp. One fish eats lots of squid. And one top predator – whale, dolphin, seal – eats lots of fish. There are problems in reproduction in the top predators.
Q.And that’s because of plastic bioaccumulation?
A.The plastic pollutants are collecting in the killer whales’ food chain, and they’re having reproductive problems. You need fat stores to migrate and reproduce successfully, and the plastic is non-nutritive. Are you going to fatten up on plastic? That won’t get you the calories you need.
Q.What sort of knowledge or new discovery are you hoping to come away with?
A.The main thing people want to know about this is how much is out there. We’ll also be studying the fate of broken-down plastics. That doesn’t stop once a plastic has broken into bits. One polyethylene molecule is really long compared to other molecules, and nothing can eat that as a single molecule. We’re guessing that if you take a water sample you’ll find broken poly-mer chains you can’t see with a microscope. So to what extent have we actually turned the water into plastic?
Q.So if the plastic breaks down into this polymer, and the polymer eventually breaks into various bits, is there ever a point when it ever breaks down into something more or less benign?
A.Biodegradation does occur over a really long time. The problem with plastics isn’t there’s no such thing as biodegradation; it just happens over a very, very long time. And there’s no organism there to gobble it up when it breaks down. Most everything will turn into a natural compound; the question is how long it will take.
Q. Since you discovered the plastic in the ocean in 1997, what has been the biggest change in your understanding of the problem?
A.The futility of the solution, the vastness of the problem and the real enormity of the change that would be required to solve the problem. This is not a denial problem. People know that if we don’t deal with this, it’s a problem, but they think it’s more or less being dealt with OK. But the oceans tell a different story.
Q.Is there anything an individual can do?
A.As an absorber of commodities, the individual does have certain power. The market will switch in response to consumers. Bring your own cup, bowl, plate and don’t shop at places where they use Styrofoam carryout and Styrofoam food containers. The personal choice, when it becomes a movement, can then drive policy and political change.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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