Our planet’s troubled sea of waste
The sordid secret of how oceans have become a plastic graveyard has been brought in to full view. Joe Ruxton’s ‘A Plastic Ocean’ shows to what extent plastic waste is destroying marine and plant life. reports
WHEN strong winds prevented filmmaker Jo Ruxton from sending a submarine to her chosen location off the coast of Marseille she was naturally nervous.
The crew had just one chance to record evidence of the build-up of rubbish on the seabed for her award-winning film A Plastic Ocean, but were forced to divert kilometres away from where divers had reported a growing dump.
She needn’t have worried. As the submersible reached a deep trench 1.6km from the surface, the team was confronted with a junkyard of human debris.
Tyres, plastic water bottles, synthetic netting, unexploded bombs and even an old parachute emerged from the gloom.
The world’s oceans are now choked with human waste. Each year more than 300-million tons of plastic is produced globally, of which 10% will end up in the sea.
It is estimated that there is now a 1:2 ratio of plastic to plankton and, left unchecked, the total weight of plastic will outweigh the total weight of fish by 2050.
Not only is the floating haze of scum unsightly, it is swallowed by marine animals who cannot digest it. Chemicals leach into the water and even humans who eat seafood, ingest 11 000 pieces of microplastic each year.
Ruxton, who has previously worked as a producer on the BBC’s Blue Planet, said: “People watch wildlife documentaries and think the oceans are still pristine but they aren’t. I’ve known film crews spend two hours clearing up beaches before they can take shots of turtles.”
Yet there are signs that the tide may be starting to turn.
In 2010, the University of Warwick in Britain announced that it had developed a new process which can recycle 100% of plastic waste.
The technique, called pyrolysis, “cracks” plastic into basic molecules to form an oil called Plaxx, which can then be used as a fuel or to make new plastic.
The university’s spin-off company, Recycling Technologies, has just opened its first large plant in Swindon, Wiltshire, which operators say will process the plastic of the entire town.
The goal is to create similar plants across the world and even install small versions on dredgers, which can trawl the water sucking up plastic waste and turn it into fuel on board to power the ships.
Plastic is notoriously difficult to recycle and only 12% of household waste is reprocessed – the rest is either burnt or goes to landfill.
The new system aims to turn dumped plastic into a valuable commodity.
“This could really be a gamechanging technology,” said marketing director of Recycling Technologies, Adrian Haworth.
“There is a worldwide need for it. Only a small amount of plastic is recycled, most ends up in landfill or in the ocean. We need to stop this happening in the first place.
“Eventually we hope to be able to mine landfill sites for plastic, and we’ve had a discussion with a dredging company, with the idea that they would collect the plastic in ports and turn it into fuel on board.”
The US navy and even some cruise ships already operate on-sea recycling systems which take the waste of its crew and passengers and heats it up to temperatures of more than 5 000°C to turn it back into a reusable form.
The plasma torch technology is powerful enough to convert plastics, metals and glass into granules or gas.
The Canadian company behind the system, called PyroGenesis, is planning plasma plants across the world, which could process up to 100 tons at a time.
Some countries, such as Germany, have been quick to use laws to help cut down on plastic pollution.
Since 1991, companies that produce plastic have been responsible for dealing with their waste, and most supermarkets contain state-ofthe-art bottle banks which scan barcodes so packaging can be returned to manufacturers.
Four years ago, social entrepreneur David Katz founded The Plastic Bank in Lima, Peru, an organisation which pays locals in coastal communities for their plastic bottles, then recycles them into “social plastic”.
Further, banks have since been established in Haiti and are due to open globally, and the company has released the blueprints for its recycling device so others can follow suit.
Yet many experts believe that cultural change will have the biggest impact.
Since the 50s, advertisers have been persuading consumers that plastic is a throwaway product that can be abandoned without a thought.
One trillion plastic bags are produced every year, yet their average working lifespan is just 12 minutes.
“We are in a growing culture of throwaway living,” an expert on ocean plastics from Plymouth University, Prof Richard Thompson said.
“There is an urgent need to recognise that there is no such place as ‘away’. Marine debris is damaging to the economy, to wildlife to the environment. It is wasteful and unnecessary, and we all agree that it needs to stop.”
Ruxton, whose film has been described by Sir David Attenborough as “one of the most important films of our time”, said: “It’s crazy how we believe that plastic just disintegrates, and it was because we were told in 1955 that we wouldn’t have to wash up any more. But we’re at a tipping point now, and if we don’t act we won’t be able to go back.
“In the 60s we were producing eight million tons of plastic a year. Now it is 300 million, and where will we be in another 50 years? You go out now and look in the ocean and it is just so prolific.
“People need to realise that plastic is not disposable,” he said.
A recent study estimated that nine in 10 of the world’s seabirds have pieces of plastic in their guts, with the southern hemisphere around New Zealand and Australia badly affected because of major polluters such as Indonesia and Thailand.
Some albatross and shearwater have been found to have nearly 3 000 pieces of plastic – up to 8kg – in their stomachs, the equivalent of a human eating 12 pizzas. It can’t be digested, so the birds eventually die through malnutrition.
In countries such as Tuvalu (a Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean, midway between Hawaii and Australia), where plastic wastes washes up by the ton, locals have reported fertility problems.
Brunel University’s Prof Susan Jobling, discovered that most plastics contain hormone-disrupting chemicals.
Ninety-two percent of adults in Western countries have plastic and chemicals in their system and their children have twice as much.
“I hope it will make people really think about how they use plastics and make them wonder, for example, if they really need a plastic drinking straw or a single-use plastic bottle,” Jobling said.
There are worries that what is visible could be just the tip of the iceberg – 70% of all ocean debris sinks down beyond the surface, and huge rubbish dumps could be accumulating unseen at the bottom of the ocean.
Plastic becomes brittle in seawater because it’s subjected to sunlight, waves and salt.
It breaks up until it’s smaller and smaller and mixes with plankton, meaning tiny particles are consumed by marine life.
A Plastic Ocean director Craig Leeson said: “Plastic is the most durable material man has ever made, and every piece ever produced is still on the planet in some shape or form.
“People are using water bottles thinking they are doing themselves a favour, when they are actually damaging their own health.”
The film’s executive adviser David Jones added: “The irony is that the water in most of these bottles sold to people is not as good as their tap water. We need to make plastic valuable again. The plastic around a bottle is far more valuable than the water inside it. Plastic is worth £400 (R6 544) a ton, but we just throw it away”.
A Plastic Ocean can be downloaded from iTunes. — The Daily Telegraph