Cleanup Time

This month in our Offshore Issue, we highlight three of the best reasons we know to head for blue water: dolphin, tuna and billfish.

It’s a topic we’ve been especially excited about. First of all, there’s the lure of the glamour species in and of themselves. But then, once we’ve sent this issue to the printer, the staff will be packing up for our own annual offshore expedition.

A big part of that venture consists of sitting for hours over a couple of days of meetings as we forge the coming year of Web and print content into a semblance of order and value. Our first responsibility is to make sure you get something interesting, authentic, informative and inspirational in the mail and online every month.

But then we get to fish — as part of our jobs, of course — and the very species we featured this month will be in our sights for a couple of days.

Who knows if we’ll find them or not. Since we’ll be fishing off the Pacific side of Costa Rica, I know one thing with certainty: We’ll find plenty of plastic trash in the ocean, riding north on the current, a continent’s worth of refuse en route to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Google it!).

There’s no need to repeat all the

background stats. Plastic pollution in the oceans is documented, and public awareness is high through varied outlets, from surfer blogs to The New York Times.

Some 8 million metric tons of plastic go into the world’s oceans — about a garbage trunkful every minute — and every year, it includes 5 million plastic bags and mountains of plastic drinking straws (we use 500 million every day in the U.S.); you name it, it’s floating around out there, disintegrating and working its way into the food chain.

The good news is that there is action afoot to do something about it. The European Union is pushing for singleuse plastics to be phased out by its 27 member nations by 2030.

Sixteen cities and countries have already taken steps to ban single-use plastics, such as plastic bags. Some countries, municipalities and states are moving even faster than that.

Then there’s the industrial discards, notably, 640,000 tons of fishing nets discarded every year, damaging on two counts: First, there’s the solid waste itself, but secondly, there’s the sustained damage and killing of marine life by so-called ghost nets.

Proactive interests see opportunity here. For one, a company named Bureo collects discarded commercial fishing nets off the coast of Chile and recycles them to manufacture skateboards and sunglass frames. Costa del Mar started its Kick Plastic campaign a few years ago and recently augmented it with its Untangle Our Oceans line, incorporating sunglass frames sourced from Bureo’s recycling program.

In Europe, Sea2see, among other companies, is doing the same thing. Similar and much grander recovery and recycling programs are up and running worldwide. It’s a start. Plastic in our daily lives (and our fishing) isn’t going away. But changing our tolerance of single-use plastics, the way we choose to discard or recycle them, has become a global necessity. At the current rate of pollution, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans.

Changing attitudes isn’t all that hard. Nobody smokes on planes anymore. It’s common sense.

I knew an artist who worked in synthetics and claimed plastics were organic. Her reasoning: They’re manufactured from oil, and oil comes from ancient swamp plants and dinosaurs, organic materials. It’s an odd way of thinking, and it rather falls apart when a sea turtle shows up with a straw stuck in its nose.

In the same manner, will consuming foods loaded with preservatives make us live longer? Maybe all those microplastics fish are ingesting just make them more durable. Funny thing about humans: We’re able to justify almost anything.

Even going fishing and calling it work.