Threat to oceans may be the greatest
Glad to see that Jim Vibert’s recent column on plastic waste, (“Province needs to do more...”, Jan. 9) also mentioned our looming ocean threat. It may prove our gravest.
Why? Of the millions of plastic items discarded inland every day, most eventually end up in lakes and rivers which ferry them to sea. Add to that the half-million-plus plastic items shamelessly dumped overboard each year by the world’s merchant marine alone, and we have the makings of a gargantuan maritime mess. They say plastic now threatens to outweigh fish in the North Sea.
It’s become so bad that the Great Pacific Gyre, that vast oceanic whorl between North America and Japan, is now dubbed The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Roughly the size of Africa, it dwarfs five other floating garbage dumps circling other seas. And now we’re letting summer cruise ships into the Arctic Ocean!
Last summer I did an informal survey of one small East Coast beach. Inside my sample area of less than 100 square metres, I found lots of the usual suspects: pop and detergent bottles, toys, lobster buoys, broken nets, poly rope, shotgun shells, beach signs, tampon applicators – and, of course, plastic bags.
As Mr. Vibert rightly notes, petroleum-based plastics – the cheapest to produce – are virtually indestructible. Sure, they go brittle when exposed to sun and air. But in cold ocean water this takes decades, if not centuries – some say millennia.
Remember, plastics have only been around for 50 years or so. No one really knows. As a test, a U.K. researcher tied plastic grocery bags to undersea wharf pilings. A year later the bags were still intact and usable.
Moreover, oil-based plastic seldom sinks. It either floats on top or hovers in the water column. Either way, it’s very mobile. So plastic bags get eaten by sea turtles, who mistake them for jellyfish and choke to death.
As the flotsam breaks down further, cod and herring mistake it for fish eggs or larvae and die of constipation. Finally, at micro and molecular levels, the particles become near-invisible threads called nurdles. Cute name, deadly menace. For at that level they absorb ocean toxins, creating poison pills for microscopic zooplankton.
The threat is obvious. Plankton support the entire marine food chain. They also produce about half our atmospheric oxygen. If enough plankton die, entire oceanic ecosystems can collapse. Seas might even become anoxic — no oxygen, acidic — a condition suspected of causing massive die-offs on land and sea in geologic time.
What to do? Apart from lobbying governments to ban plastic bags and magazine wraps, we can take to heart those three Rs from the 1960s: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle! And we must stop discarding the stuff.
Finally, as shoppers, we can get serious about bringing reusable tote bags to the checkout counter — not leave them, as I often do), in the car.
With luck, we won’t end up drinking nurdle soup after all.