By Maggie Romuld

Within the past few years, the media has been full of sobering, frightening and occasionally nauseating articles decrying a planetary scourge of plastic ocean trash. Disturbing images accompany the stories. Albatross carcasses stuffed with colored bits of toothbrushes and bottle caps; dolphins hopelessly tangled in derelict fishing nets; a heart-wrenching picture of a turtle wearing a tiny plastic ring around its grossly misshapen shell like a many-times-too-small cinched-in belt. And the headlines are no less disturbing - according to the news we are either: Bobbing in Poison Seas (LA Times), a Sea of Trash (NY Times), or Plastic soup (flymedia.com); Sailing the Synthetic Seas (WEND Magazine); ingesting Fish and Paint Chips (DCBureau.org); or suffering a Plague of Plastic (Patagonia.com).

Marine researchers agree that plastic constitutes the largest percentage of ocean trash by far, and the numbers are staggering. An article written by Jacob Silverman (HowStuffWorks.com) quotes several alarming numbers. Greenpeace suggests that, "Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean," and further states that, "In some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton by a ratio of six to one." The United Nations Environmental Program estimated in 2006 that, "Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic" and the LA Times suggested that plastics make up "90% of all trash floating in the world's oceans." (In 2007, Kenneth Weiss of the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative series on marine plastic debris.)

Estimates suggest that over three-quarters of ocean debris enters the ocean with urban runoff from storm drains. Other sources include abandoned fishing gear, garbage from commercial and recreational marine traffic, illegal dumping, and shipping spills (thousands of containers go overboard every year.) In May 1990 - during a storm in the mid-Pacific - a ship lost five containers that held tens of thousands of running shoes. Oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer took advantage of "the largest (and cheapest) ocean drift experiment ever undertaken," and tracked the runners to their source. He followed that with other drift experiments - bathtub toys (rubber ducks!) and more - and eventually traced the paths of eleven huge, ocean-spanning, inter-locking circular currents called "gyres."

In 1997, on his way home from a sailing race in Hawaii, Charles Moore accidentally discovered one of Ebbesmeyer's gyres and the accumulation of trash that had become imprisoned by the immense in-spiraling of wind and ocean currents. Most of the research on ocean plastic - and most of the stories that appear in North American media - refer to this area, called the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG.) This "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has been divided into an "Eastern Garbage Patch" (EGP), adrift between Hawaii and California (estimated to be twice the size of Texas), and a "Western Garbage Patch" (WGP), closer to Japan. Several other oceanic garbage patches have also been identified around the globe, including one in the Sargasso Sea of the South Atlantic, and others in the South Pacific and Indian oceans.

Oceans are choked with pieces of plastic because there are no natural processes that quickly break them down. Plastics photo-degrade over time, breaking down into tiny, confetti-like bits called "nurdles" or "mermaid tears," but will not biodegrade or break back down into their chemical ingredients in our (or our children's) lifetime. Mr. Moore is credited with being the first person to have conducted scientific research in the EGP by scooping up these small pieces of plastic and comparing their weight and volume to that of ocean water. Ten years ago he dedicated the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF) to sampling and studying the EGP, and he has inspired many others, and logged thousands of kilometers examining plastic debris, ever since.

While the original outcry about marine plastic was related to its potential to kill marine wildlife, current headlines focus on the chemical compounds that are being unleashed into the ocean food chain and making their way up to us. Plastic is not only made up of chemicals, it also readily absorbs them, including those known to be toxic to humans. (A team of Japanese experts found that "plastic pellets can contain toxin levels up to a million times higher than that in the surrounding water.") Researchers with the 2008 AMRF North Pacific Gyre Expedition discovered the "widespread ingestion of plastic particles by fish that forage on plankton at night on the ocean surface," and in their trawls, they captured 660 fish of which 35% had ingested plastic particles. (The average number of plastic pieces found per fish was two; one fish had 83 pieces of plastic.) Scientists from the AMRF say that fish tissues contain some of the chemicals found in plastic and they speculate that "toxic chemicals are leaching into fish tissue from the plastic they eat." And we eat the fish.

Many people believe that any action to clean up the oceans must centre on managing the sources of the waste on land. In 2003, the AMRF received funding to implement "Plastic Debris, Rivers to Sea," a project designed to assess, and begin to reduce, plastic debris and other waste in urban runoff. The AMRF also sponsored the 2008, California-to-Hawaii voyage of the "Junk Raft," a vessel built from thousands of recycled bottles and various bits of reclaimed trash. The purpose of the trip was to call attention to the accumulation of plastic in the oceans and promote environmental projects, including California-based "Heal the Bay" (another sponsor of the voyage). The AMRF 2009 summer research program included another "media initiative to help bring awareness to the issue of ocean plastic pollution" because the Foundation believes, like many others, that while we can't remove what is already there, especially the small micro-plastics, we can use education as a tool to reduce the amount going in.

Mr. Moore and his AMRF toiled alone in relative obscurity for a number of years, but public awareness of the issue has grown exponentially and several initiatives have recently been launched. Project Kaisei is a non-profit organization dedicated to finding solutions for marine debris in the ocean in general, and the NPSG in particular. The project launched its first expedition to the NPSG in 2009, and in 2010 will send several vessels to "continue marine debris research, and in particular, to test an array of marine debris collection systems." The expedition will also "study the feasibility of converting this to fuel or other useable material." And next year, the Plastiki, a 20-metre catamaran made from reclaimed plastic bottles, intends to sail across the Pacific on a mission to "inspire sustainable solutions and highlight ecological damage being done to the world's oceans." Let's wish them "Fair winds and following seas." www.algalita.org www.projectkaisei.org www.theplastiki.com www.junkraft.blogspot.com http://www.google.com/earth/changetheworld/