The amount of plastic debris in the sea is predicted to increase from 50 million metric tons in 2015 to 150 million metric tons by 2025.28
Grappling with the plastic in your life means getting your head around the flow of this material into and around the natural environment. Look at the everyday items around you: a sandwich wrapper or a takeaway carton made from blown polystyrene; a tub of chewing gum; a pair of sports socks; or even the common-or-garden teabag. All depend on plastic for their manufacture. Each time you make a cup of tea, or chew gum, or throw away a chocolate wrapper, you probably don’t automatically think it may lead to ocean gyres, or the death of a whale, or enter the bellies of zooplankton – but read on. Plastic’s odyssey is like no other.
I spend a lot of time going up and down this beautiful island, travelling to far-flung locations. The Victorian pier and beach at Clevedon on the outskirts of Bristol is a popular place for filming. It is secluded and genteel, and not too busy out of season. On the drive from Portishead, beautiful postcard villages are reached along roads edged by generous grass verges. But you can’t help noticing the litter: plastic bottles and cans scattered among the wildflowers, hedges decorated with crisp packets – the usual problem items in problem places. I immediately had vengeful thoughts about the litter-louts who’d left it there, but something didn’t quite fit: the upper canopy of the trees was garlanded with plastic supermarket bags. These were in a raggedy state; given that the bag tax has caused a huge drop-off in usage, they’d probably been there for a while.
Committed litterers, local fly tipper, or something else? I rounded the corner and there it was: the sign to a waste transfer site where rubbish was trucked in several times a day. Inevitably, given the volume and pace of the waste traffic, windblown escapee rubbish is the most likely culprit. It was a reminder that this can’t and shouldn’t always be blamed on rogue litterers.
Raised on a rubbish diet of Keep Britain Tidy and a commendable sense that putting your junk in the bin is a civic duty, the UK has a particular obsession with the ‘litter-lout’. As the subject of plastic pollution comes up more and more, it takes approximately forty seconds in my experience for someone to mention litter-louts and how much they hate them. I’d like this to be taken as a given. Can we just agree that yes, they are awful? I mean, who in their right mind would applaud someone who chucked fast-food wrappers out of their car window? Case closed.
What I’d love to consider instead is whether the litter-lout, the bogeyman of the plastic pandemic, isn’t actually a wildly overblown construct, a convenient semi-truth that’s let the real culprits in the waste pandemic off the hook. Controversial, I know.
Of course, I’ve seen the odd person drop litter, and don’t get me started on fly-tipping. We bemoan declining standards of behaviour, and we even have a suspect in our sights: men drop three times as much litter as women,29 and the young, aged between sixteen and twenty-four, drop twice as much as everyone else. It’s easy to blame the litter-lout, and who doesn’t love a handy scapegoat?
In England, we’re heavily invested in flushing out the litter-lout. There’s a £500,000 Litter Innovation Fund, for example. The focus is traditional: change the behaviour of litter louts and galvanise all of us, including the hardcore recycling refuseniks, into packs of litter-picking volunteers. One report from the Keep Britain Tidy Centre for Social Innovation caught my eye.30 ‘We’re Watching You’ is essentially a guide to how to stake out the bins at Beaconsfield Motorway Services! A graphic illustrating a pair of beady eyes in a rear-view mirror accompanies handy tips on observing behaviours and intercepting litterers. If we are to believe the Keep Britain Tidy literature, eradicating litter is merely a question of education and surveillance. Hmm, I’m not so sure.
Dr Sherilyn MacGregor from Manchester University has studied the government’s litter strategy.31 Her research centres on Moss Side, an area of Manchester with ‘a large population of students studying at universities with award-winning sustainability education programmes’, and one also full of alleys strewn with rubbish dumped by students. Education, MacGregor concludes, does not seem to be the issue here; rather local government funding cuts that have purged the street cleaners and sweepers and left litter to proliferate, this along with a policy that allows the manufacturers of single-use packaging to get off scot-free. Meanwhile, responsibility for cleaning up is dumped on un-incentivised volunteer communities. We can surely do better than this?
Again I return to Keep Britain Tidy to take a look at the businesses that generously sponsor their activities. Among the corporate partners in 2018 for their annual Great British Spring Clean are Coca-Cola, Costa, McDonald’s, Lidl and DS Smith, the leading packaging company in the UK which last year posted profits of £4.7 billion. The fact is that the growth in litter – up 500 per cent since the 1960s – mirrors almost exactly the growth of the packaging industry, particularly of the single-use container. Yet up until now the brand and packaging giants take little, if any, of the flack.
I have a proposal: that we spend less time on surveillance and scanning for litter-louts, and channel our time and energy into reducing plastic at source, before it turns fugitive.
Once fugitive plastic is on the move, it’s difficult to stop. An enormous 8 to 12.2 million tonnes (depending on which data sets you look at) of plastic waste ends up in the marine environment each year.32 Rivers are a major source of plastic pollution, delivering bottles, stirrers and coffee cups with incredible regularity. In fact, they are thought to deposit between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic in the sea.33
Meanwhile, some stuff seems supranaturally clever at hurling itself into the water – 10 per cent of the litter in the River Thames, for example, is made up of plastic bottles.
Consider the weight of an empty plastic bottle and how easily it rolls and moves, and you get a clearer sense of how an estimated 80 per cent of marine litter comes from the land itself.34 When you live on a wet and windy island like we do, any plastic waste that isn’t properly disposed of, bagged and tied down will be whipped up by the wind and rain and will travel in a seaward direction. This litter is a sign of a system that cannot cope. An overflowing bin in a beach car park is a warning sign. Once it’s in the water it’s difficult to collect, despite the heroic efforts of beach cleaners, and then it gets swept out to sea.
GYRES AND GARBAGE PATCHES
If overflowing bins and waste trucks don’t capture the imagination, what happens to some of the trash that finds its way into the world’s oceans is mind-boggling – but for all the wrong reasons. Once it enters into the marine environment, the movement of the swirling vortex of plastic is more dynamic, more damaging and more peculiar than anything we could imagine.
‘You must be able to lift one-third of your body weight,’ reads an intriguing advert that appeared in a number of US West Coast news organisations in 2011. Part environmental message, part enticement to pay up and take a new form of eco-cruise, it represents an early example of ‘garbage patch’ tourism. As well as strong and physically fit, you also needed to be pretty wealthy: $10,000 would buy participants a chance to spot swirling plastic detritus and see the promised scenery such as cigarette lighters, bottle caps and toys churning in a vast plastic whirlpool, or gyre, that has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). Gyres occur when airflows moving from the tropics to the polar regions create a clockwise rotating air mass, which then drives oceanic surface currents in the same direction. This is what we have discovered about the movement and behaviour of plastic trash out at sea – once the detritus enters the ocean currents, the buoyant plastic is inclined to settle in islands of trash that float just above the surface. It is here, where winds are light, that the plastic debris of our throwaway lives is dramatically visible.
To see the particularly spectacular gyre on the 2011 expedition, you also needed a sizeable chunk of annual leave. The cruise, aboard a 72-foot racing sloop, would take 20 days sailing 4,490 km across the Pacific from Honolulu, Hawaii to Vancouver, British Columbia.
This ‘science’ cruise was actually a fundraiser for Algalita, a non-profit organisation set up by yachtsman and oceanographer Captain Charles Moore, who coined the name the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for the rubbish-infested North Pacific gyre. He stumbled across the GPGP while he was captaining a racing yacht in 1997. I can’t imagine how he must have felt to find himself in a vast sea of floating debris as far as the eye could see. While his eyes might have had trouble adjusting to this new reality, it provided the rest of the world with evidence: there was a price to pay for bingeing on plastics, and it was being paid principally by the world’s oceans.
Talking about the way human waste congregates in these gruesome gyres, my friend Liz suddenly remembered her grandfather, a distinguished colonel, telling her about seeing floating trash. Now ninety years old, we gave him a call on her mobile. Colonel John Weston confirmed that he was stationed at the Hawaiian island of Oahu in 1976, and that when out at sea he spotted an extraordinary amount of plastic. I like to think he saw the GPGP two decades before it was given a name. Certainly the colonel’s recollections demonstrate that the plastic plague was already forming in the 1970s, within twenty years of plastic materials coming into everyday use. It was an extraordinarily rapid rise, with an equally rapid impact. Forty years on, Oahu has a serious problem with plastic waste, the island acting as a net for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which periodically spills its contents on the shore.
The GPGP has grown at a shocking rate. The most recent team that went in search of it was made up of scientists from seven countries brought together by the Ocean Cleanup Foundation. In the tradition of ocean plastic science, the team used the tested technique of towing fine-mesh nets behind the boats 35 to pick up surface samples. This study was supersized and supercharged. It sent thirty towing vessels crossing the GPGP to collect samples. Meanwhile the project’s mother ship RV Ocean Starr trawled two six-metre-wide devices to pick up the medium-to large-sized objects excluded from conventional net tows. Flying above on the tail of the trawler vessels, a C-130 Hercules aircraft fitted with advanced sensors recorded and collected multispectral imagery and 3D scans of the samples as they were found.36
The team of researchers found that the GPGP is sixteen times bigger than we thought from previous estimates. Stretching across 600,000 square miles of ocean, it dwarfs France, is bigger than Texas, weighs in at 79,000 tonnes and contains an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of rubbish, 99.9 per cent of which is plastic. One item pulled from the patch was found to be forty years old. It could have been bobbing around when Colonel Weston made his trip.
A GIANT SMALL PROBLEM . . .
The ocean gyres, particularly the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, have taken on quasi-mythical status. Any young adventurer worth their salt is desperate to get out there and start vlogging for National Geographic. But while everyone was freaking out about the size of these gyres and the amount of plastic in them, back at the University of Plymouth, Professor Richard Thompson was asking a different question altogether. He looked at the rapid rise in plastic usage, the huge amount ‘stored’ in gyres and he wanted to know where the rest of the plastic was.
To answer this question, day after day Thompson began to collect his own data. Rather than getting a speedboat out to some gorgeous reef in Mauritius or to the Baa Atoll in the Maldives, Thompson and his team pulled on their waders and trudged out into the estuary of the English Channel near to their laboratory in Plymouth, and there they literally sieved sediment. This is no mean feat. What Thompson and his colleagues found were tiny bits of plastic, each under 5 mm. He called them ‘microplastics’, a term that we’re beginning to get increasingly used to hearing.
In the fight against plastics, we’ve become obsessed with microplastics, and with good reason. Remember that 80 per cent of plastic in the ocean originally comes from the land, and likewise most of these tiny microplastic fragments began as recognisable objects, rubbish that we didn’t quite dispose of properly or that escaped the refuse system and ended up in the sea. Once washed into the tides, these plastic objects – a bottle or crisp bag, for example are tossed and churned by the waves as if in a never-ending laundry cycle. The macro plastics are constantly tumbled and thrown up against the shingle and other abrasive objects on the shore, and are broken down by UV rays until the objects get smaller and smaller, becoming minuscule microplastics. And these pollutant fragments constitute a real risk to marine life.
They can also be easily mistaken for food. In the main, microplastics form a toxic soup, suspended below the surface of the seawater creating an effect described by divers as ocean smog.
I visited the laboratory at Exeter University where scientist Dr Matt Cole invited me to view copepods under the microscope. Copepods are a group of small crustaceans found in both the sea and in freshwater habitats and are one of the primary ingredients of zooplankton, the collective term for microscopic organisms that drift with water currents and on which almost all oceanic organisms are dependent as a food source. Dr Cole’s research is on the biological and ecological impacts of microplastics in the marine environment. Here he was studying the effect of microbeads, a manufactured microplastic that, until a ban was introduced via legislation, was a regular ingredient in cosmetics and personal care products, especially in skin exfoliators. In Matt Cole’s laboratory the microbead is given a neon marker so that he can track it under the microscope as the copepods ingest it.
When living organisms ingest microbeads and other microplastics, mistaking the plastic particles for food, their energy levels are depleted as plastic offers no sustenance. As a result these organisms may die before they reproduce, interrupting the life cycle of the species. Some studies show that the reproduction of oysters and crabs living in microplastic-saturated water is halved, for instance.37 And, because zooplankton (which may have ingested micro-plastic) is a food source for a multitude of ocean creatures, including whales, this is one of the most insidious ways in which the plastic we throw away enters the food chain. And enter the food chain they have.
As if this wasn’t concern enough, a new, additional plastic peril has recently been identified. Australia-based scientist Mark Browne has fought long and hard to get us to recognise a new environmental danger emanating from our growing addiction to plastic-based textiles – microfibres. Over the previous decades our wardrobes have shifted from natural fibres such as cotton, wool and silk to synthetic man-made fibres – today many of us live in techno-fibre sports apparel as if at any minute we might be called upon to run a triathlon. His research, beginning some ten years ago, discovered that the majority of shoreline microplastics were actually microfibres from textiles.
Meanwhile, our old friends the marine team at Plymouth University have found that during the wash cycle in a normal washing machine, an acrylic garment can shed upwards of 700,000 microfibres as the fibres escape through the rinse and drain cycle to become another source of microplastics.38 And although acrylic fibres that include fake fur shed five times more than polyester-cotton blend fabric, and 1.5 times as many fibres as polyester, the research shows that all synthetic fibres are a source of more microplastics. Flushed into our drains through millions of washing machines during millions of daily wash cycles, these plastic microfibres eventually find their way into our rivers and then into our seas and oceans.
At the moment, only 30 per cent of the world’s population have access to washing machines. The other 70 per cent, however, would probably like them. As developing economies emerge, a consumer class will undoubtedly want to forgo the hand-washing of clothes. We’d better pray they don’t also want to wear synthetic fibres. This is the laundry plastic pandemic that we are yet to square up to.
PLASTIC SPILLS
There’s another ready-made microplastic pouring into waterways that comes directly from the plastic industry. I went to South Devon to meet Marion, an experienced beach cleaner. As we began our clean-up down on the shore, Marion beckoned me over and funnelled some little pellets from her hand to mine. Evidently she is much sharper-eyed than me – I hadn’t noticed these tiny plastic granules of differing shapes, about the size of a peppercorn or a lentil, as I’d been scouring the sandy ground. Known as ‘nurdles’, the pellets in the palm of my hand weighed next to nothing: some white, others multicoloured, some opaque, others translucent as a dewdrop.
To surfers and beach cleaners, these are known by the poetic name of ‘mermaid’s tears’. Once you’re alert to the nurdles and schooled in zeroing in along the shoreline, it’s quite satisfying to pick them out from the bladderwrack (another rather poetic word) seaweed strewn across the shoreline. The origins of nurdles are more prosaic: they are the raw material and minute building blocks of almost every bit of plastic we consume from PVC to cling film.
Marion is what I would affectionately call a ‘nurdle-chaser’. She honed her skills in spotting and picking them up along the banks of the river Clyde where they’re particularly numerous, transported by currents from Strathclyde’s plastic manufacturing plants nearby. Any time you’re transporting tiny bits of plastic, there’s a risk of creating plastic waste and occasionally millions of the pellets will spill from an overturned container. Marion shows me a nurdle app on her phone and then she adds the date and information on the location of the nurdles she has just collected. The app data feeds into a database which tracks sightings of nurdles across the UK and can be used to map their trajectory to discover how they end up on UK beaches.39 Beachcombers and nurdle-chasers like Marion are not just cleaning up beach litter, but performing so-called citizen science. Ultimately, their quest is to pinpoint the likely source of the nurdles they find. They are collecting evidence. Escapee nurdles are a direct link between production of the material and the plastic pandemic. While the plastic industry has taken steps to prevent spillages, it can’t contain all of these tiny bits of plastic. The fact of the matter is that the more plastic production, the more nurdles escape. If the industry didn’t generate so much new plastic, then fewer nurdles would end up being created and transported.
Like the microbeads used in beauty and cleansing products, these small but deadly pollutants don’t have to degrade to pose a threat: they are a ready-made microplastic. And again, like microbeads and microplastics, unsurprisingly nurdles are not good news for us, or for the environment and wildlife. While they are obviously small, microplastics have a huge relative surface area to which toxic chemical substances can attach themselves, meaning that wherever the microplastics travel, Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) travel with them. These are a particularly worrisome class of chemicals and include DDT, an organochloride chemical originally used as an insecticide. POPs are toxic to both humans and wildlife, and on land humans have taken big steps to clean up and phase them out altogether. To many researchers, the fact that microplastics can concentrate them and have the potential to carry them far and wide into the food chain represents a nightmare scenario.
Increasingly microplastics are entering our bodies too. The average European seafood eater is thought to ingest 11,000 pieces of microplastic a year. Given that plastic and microplastics have accelerated in the last ten years, and allowing time off for early childhood when – aside from fish fingers – I was not a great seafood consumer, at the ripe old age of forty-three I probably have at least thirty years of serious fish and seafood eating under my belt. That means I could have ingested 330,000 fragments of microplastic in my diet. And that’s only the microplastic in the seafood or fish I may have eaten – on average, 83 per cent of drinking water samples are contaminated with them, and they have been found in salt, beer and honey.
GRIM DISCOVERIES
The impact of plastic on our health is still being determined. I don’t mean to be flippant, but in a way, we’re the lucky ones. Whatever you think of my table manners, I do not suck in my prey, nor do I have four stomachs (on a good day).
The sperm whale is not so fortunate. It is particularly vulnerable to plastic pollution, as we saw from Blue Planet II. We know that it takes in the region of 29 kg of plastic to kill a sperm whale because in February 2018 a six-ton, 33-foot-long juvenile male sperm whale beached near a lighthouse in Cabo de Palos, in Murcia, Spain. In April the results of the necropsy were released, revealing the gruesome 29 kg statistic: plastic bags, pieces of net and a plastic jerrycan were pulled from the animal’s four stomachs, tagged and weighed.
Necropsies, the animal equivalent of an autopsy, are becoming regular occurrences as more vulnerable sea creatures succumb to death by trash. A disturbing photograph from back in 2011 shows Dr Alexandros Frantzis, Scientific Director at the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute in Greece crouched next to a hundred plastic bags and other pieces of plastic debris that he had recently pulled from the stomachs of another deceased sperm whale found off the Greek island of Mykonos. To put it bluntly, it looks like a murder scene. When the blood was cleaned from one of the plastic bags, it displayed the phone number of a restaurant in Thessaloniki. This image helped to focus attention on the need for a tax or ban on plastic carrier bags.40 But it would take another seven years until a four euro cent charge on carrier bags was introduced in Greece in January 2018, causing usage to drop by 80 per cent in the first month.
More recently, the grim findings from the necropsies of thirteen of the twenty-nine whales that beached in the German province of Schleswig-Holstein were made public. Amid the plastic debris found within the cadavers’ intestines were a 13 m fishing net, a 70 cm piece of plastic from a car engine cover and a plastic bucket. At a sombre press conference, the German environment minister suggested that the animals may have thought the items were food, mistaking plastic for squid. The animals starve, thinking they have full stomachs.
There are fewer and fewer good news stories about whales and other aquatic wildlife hitting the headlines. Meanwhile experts warn that we shouldn’t just be worried about large plastic objects such as the jerrycan or entire fishing nets blocking the gut, but the small bits of microplastic, the nurdles and the microfibres, too, which have the potential to harm all species of cetacean – dolphins, whales and porpoises – not only those that suction-feed.
Over 280 species of wildlife including puffins and fulmars have now been found to ingest microplastics. In March 2018 a study reported in the Frontiers in Marine Science journal revealed that three-quarters of deep-sea fish have plastic in their stomachs.
It’s hard to express adequately how catastrophic this is. It is difficult to process the fact that whales, sentient creatures with the largest brains of any animal that’s ever inhabited the earth, are being killed due to our discarded plastic debris, the fallout from our mindless ‘throwaway’ acts of consumption.