The InterDependent

In 1784, a shipwrecked Japanese sailor in the Pacific carved the tale of his disaster into slivers of wood and sealed them into a glass bottle that he cast into the waves. In 1935, the bottle bobbed up near his home village in Japan, and the message was found.

Bottles have long been used to carry messages vast distances in the seas, proving that a well-sealed one that escapes rocks and ships can have a long life indeed. Now that more of the trash cast off by societies all over the world is synthetic and also buoyant, that refuse is also proving to be very durable when it reaches the oceans. Scientists and environmentalists have gotten the message: it’s time to stanch this flood of garbage into the seas and to start thinking of ways to clean up what’s already there.

That was the focus of a conference this spring jointly organized by the United Nations Environment Program and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Representatives from 38 countries attended the gathering, which was held in Honolulu. The UN and NOAA planned the meeting, the Fifth International Marine Debris Conference, to reach out and build ties among the experts, governments and industries that are addressing the problem of marine debris.

The conference’s goal was explained by the UN Environment Program’s executive director, Achim Steiner, in a message to delegates: “Marine debris – trash in our oceans – is a symptom of our throw-away society.” However, he added, “one community or one country acting in isolation will not be the answer. We need to address marine debris collectively across national boundaries and with the private sector.”

The Honolulu Commitment adopted by the conference delegates offers a blueprint for such cross-border efforts. Through a global network, said Kris McElwee, the Pacific Islands coordinator for the NOAA Marine Debris Program, “people of all levels, all geographic areas, all capabilities, can do appropriate action and see real outcomes. . . . People can pick out one string they’re going to work on, and then people will report up on a local, regional and global scale.”

The Honolulu meeting received substantial cooperation from the private sector, with the American Chemistry Council, PlasticsEurope and Coca-Cola acting as major sponsors.

F.P. Barretto

Common marine debris collected and laid on a beach in Brazil. Plastics are a big part of marine trash, but the extent is unknown.

Plastics are known to be a big part of the marine debris problem, but just how big is not known. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans, and much of that area is unexplored. Plastics slowly break up into tiny pieces in the ocean, and those small pieces are hard to see and study. McElwee said, “One coffee cup lid can make thousands of little pieces.” Many pieces can float below the water’s surface, and others sink into the water columns or down to the seabed.

So though the term “garbage patch” has been widely used, especially to describe debris in the northern Pacific, there is no large blanket of seaborne trash that can be seen by satellite or aerial photographs, says NOAA, yet there are smaller areas where winds and currents concentrate floating debris, most of it made up of plastics. Despite publicity over so-called garbage patches, particularly one in the northern Pacific, the trash in the ocean areas with high concentrations of debris is hard to spot, even though winds and currents can whip together moving spots of surface debris. Even experts like McElwee can find visible signs of the pollution elusive.

“The name makes you think you could walk on it,” McElwee said, “which of course is not true."

“I have done one cruise and two overflights and have seen remarkably little debris,” she added.

Perhaps an affected area is more like a garbage broth or soup than a patch, she suggested; if a ship trawls long enough while taking samples, it will find some pieces of plastic. To get a clear idea of the scale of the ocean garbage, you can look at the desecrated beaches. Some in Hawaii are magnets for plastic.

It’s hard to say how much effect plastics are having on the animals and plants in the marine environment. A photo of an albatross carcass will reveal small pieces of plastic jammed throughout its digestive system, but that in itself does not attest that the plastic killed the bird. Scientists just don’t know how many die prematurely because they ate the pieces of plastic, which look like food.

Chris Jordan

The photographer found carcasses of albatross chicks on the Midway Atoll in the Pacific full of plastics. They had been fed the debris by their parents, thinking the colored trash they foraged in the ocean was food. For more information, go to www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%

While it is clear that garbage does not belong in the marine environment, much of the work that follows the Honolulu Commitment will be done without all the data the experts would like to have on hand. Ever since the ancient Greeks, people have thrown glass bottles into the oceans to answer questions about currents. The discarded plastic bottles that have washed into the seas are now prompting the kinds of research that will answer questions about the health of the seas.

One good thing about this problem, McElwee says, is that people and groups around the globe can work on it at many levels, even before research turns up more information. It will take governments, businesses and advocacy groups to tackle the big problems, like keeping fishing nets and gear from being dropped into the sea and finding new ways to keep plastics and other trash from being washed into the seas. But individuals can play an important role by keeping the amount of garbage they generate to a minimum, and small groups can clean beaches and encourage others to recycle. There are plenty of strings to pull before the marine debris problem can be untangled.