NYCkayaker Fwd: L.A. Times: Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas

[moonshine109 at verizon.net]

>From the Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-me-ocean2aug02,0,5274274,full.story

ALTERED OCEANS

Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas

On Midway Atoll, 40% of albatross chicks die, 
their bellies full of trash. Swirling masses of 
drifting debris pollute remote beaches and snare 
wildlife.

By Kenneth R. Weiss
Times Staff Writer

August 2, 2006

MIDWAY ATOLL — The albatross chick jumped to its 
feet, eyes alert and focused. At 5 months, it 
stood 18 inches tall and was fully feathered 
except for the fuzz that fringed its head.

All attitude, the chick straightened up and 
clacked its beak at a visitor, then rocked back 
and dangled webbed feet in the air to cool them 
in the afternoon breeze.

The next afternoon, the chick ignored passersby. 
The bird was flopped on its belly, its legs 
splayed awkwardly. Its wings drooped in the hot 
sun. A few hours later, the chick was dead.

John Klavitter, a wildlife biologist, turned the 
bird over and cut it open with a knife. Probing 
its innards with a gloved hand, he pulled out a 
yellowish sac — its stomach.

Out tumbled a collection of red, blue and orange 
bottle caps, a black spray nozzle, part of a 
green comb, a white golf tee and a clump of tiny 
dark squid beaks ensnared in a tangle of fishing 
line.

"This is pretty typical," said Klavitter, who is 
stationed at the atoll for the U.S. Fish and 
Wildlife Service. "We often find cigarette 
lighters, bucket handles, toothbrushes, syringes, 
toy soldiers — anything made out of plastic."

It's all part of a tide of plastic debris that 
has spread throughout the world's oceans, posing 
a lethal hazard to wildlife, even here, more than 
1,000 miles from the nearest city.

Midway, an atoll halfway between North America 
and Japan, has no industrial centers, no 
fast-food joints with overflowing trash cans, and 
only a few dozen people.

Its isolation would seem to make it an ideal 
rookery for seabirds, especially Laysan 
albatross, which lay their eggs and hatch their 
young here each winter. For their first six 
months of life, the chicks depend entirely on 
their parents for nourishment. The adults forage 
at sea and bring back high-calorie takeout: a 
slurry of partly digested squid and flying-fish 
eggs.

As they scour the ocean surface for this 
sustenance, albatross encounter vast expanses of 
floating junk. They pick up all manner of plastic 
debris, mistaking it for food.

As a result, the regurgitated payload flowing 
down their chicks' gullets now includes Lego 
blocks, clothespins, fishing lures and other 
pieces of plastic that can perforate the stomach 
or block the gizzard or esophagus. The sheer 
volume of plastic inside a chick can leave little 
room for food and liquid.

Of the 500,000 albatross chicks born here each 
year, about 200,000 die, mostly from dehydration 
or starvation. A two-year study funded by the 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed that 
chicks that died from those causes had twice as 
much plastic in their stomachs as those that died 
for other reasons.

The atoll is littered with decomposing remains, 
grisly wreaths of feathers and bone surrounding 
colorful piles of bottle caps, plastic dinosaurs, 
checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles, 
fishing line and small Styrofoam balls. Klavitter 
has calculated that albatross feed their chicks 
about 5 tons of plastic a year at Midway.

Albatross fly hundreds of miles in their search 
for food for their young. Their flight paths from 
Midway often take them over what is perhaps the 
world's largest dump: a slowly rotating mass of 
trash-laden water about twice the size of Texas.

This is known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, part 
of a system of currents called the North Pacific 
subtropical gyre. Located halfway between San 
Francisco and Hawaii, the garbage patch is an 
area of slack winds and sluggish currents where 
flotsam collects from around the Pacific, much 
like foam piling up in the calm center of a hot 
tub.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been studying the clockwise 
swirl of plastic debris so long, he talks about 
it as if he were tracking a beast.

"It moves around like a big animal without a 
leash," said Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in 
Seattle and leading expert on currents and marine 
debris. "When it gets close to an island, the 
garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered 
with this confetti of plastic."

Some oceanic trash washes ashore at Midway — 
laundry baskets, television tubes, beach sandals, 
soccer balls and other discards.

Nearly 90% of floating marine litter is plastic — 
supple, durable materials such as polyethylene 
and polypropylene, Styrofoam, nylon and saran.

About four-fifths of marine trash comes from 
land, swept by wind or washed by rain off 
highways and city streets, down streams and 
rivers, and out to sea.

The rest comes from ships. Much of it consists of 
synthetic floats and other gear that is 
jettisoned illegally to avoid the cost of proper 
disposal in port.

In addition, thousands of cargo containers fall 
overboard in stormy seas each year, spilling 
their contents. One ship heading from Los Angeles 
to Tacoma, Wash., disgorged 33,000 blue-and-white 
Nike basketball shoes in 2002. Other loads lost 
at sea include 34,000 hockey gloves and 29,000 
yellow rubber ducks and other bathtub toys.

The debris can spin for decades in one of a dozen 
or more gigantic gyres around the globe, only to 
be spat out and carried by currents to distant 
lands. The U.N. Environment Program estimates 
that 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating 
on every square mile of the oceans. About 70% 
will eventually sink.

Albatross are by no means the only victims. An 
estimated 1 million seabirds choke or get tangled 
in plastic nets or other debris every year. About 
100,000 seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, other 
marine mammals and sea turtles suffer the same 
fate.

The amount of plastic in the oceans has risen 
sharply since the 1950s. Studies show a tenfold 
increase every decade in some places. Scientists 
expect the trend to continue, given the 
popularity of disposable plastic containers. The 
average American used 223 pounds of plastic in 
2001. The plastics industry expects per-capita 
usage to increase to 326 pounds by the end of the 
decade.

The qualities that make plastics so useful are 
precisely what cause them to persist as trash.

Derived from petroleum, plastics eventually break 
down into carbon dioxide and water from exposure 
to heat and the sun's ultraviolet rays.

On land, the process can take decades, even 
centuries. At sea, it takes even longer, said 
Anthony L. Andrady, a polymer chemist at the 
Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina who 
studies marine debris. Seawater keeps plastics 
cool while algae, barnacles and other marine 
growth block ultraviolet rays.

"Every little piece of plastic manufactured in 
the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is 
still out there somewhere," Andrady said, 
"because there is no effective mechanism to break 
it down."

Oceanographers have counted on beachcombers 
around the world to help them plot the course of 
plastic flotsam as it circumnavigates the globe. 
Ebbesmeyer has found that some debris gets hung 
up for decades in gyres before being spun out 
into different currents, flung ashore or picked 
up by animals.

A piece of plastic found in an albatross stomach 
last year bore a serial number that was traced to 
a World War II seaplane shot down in 1944. 
Computer models re-creating the object's odyssey 
showed it spent a decade in a gyre known as the 
Western Garbage Patch, just south of Japan, and 
then drifted 6,000 miles to the Eastern Garbage 
Patch off the West Coast of the U.S., where it 
spun in circles for the next 50 years.

The Hawaiian archipelago, which stretches from 
the Big Island of Hawaii westward for 1,500 miles 
to Kure Atoll, acts like 19 unevenly spaced teeth 
of a giant comb, snagging debris drifting around 
the Pacific. Most of the archipelago's atolls are 
awash in plastic junk, as are some beaches on the 
main islands.

Native Hawaiians, seeking wood for dugout canoes, 
used to go to Kamilo Beach at the southernmost 
tip of the Big Island to collect enormous logs 
that had drifted from the Pacific Northwest. Now, 
locals like Noni Sanford pick through the debris 
for novelties to enter in a trash-art show in 
Hilo every fall.

Sanford, 58, a free-spirited great-grandmother 
with long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, 
once won second place for a mobile fashioned out 
of fishing line, floats and a colorful palette of 
plastic toothbrushes.

As a lifelong beachcomber, she is fascinated and 
horrified by the transformation of Kamilo Beach 
since she first set foot there in 1959. She was 
searching for driftwood with her father, a 
sculptor.

She remembers seeing a few tires back then. Now, 
plastic debris litters the crescent-shaped beach 
for more than a mile.

"This is nothing," Sanford said, stepping over a 
pile of twisted lines and nets. "This used to be 
8 and 10 feet high. Of course, that was three or 
four cleanups ago."

Sanford and her husband, Ron, have joined in 
regular cleanup efforts, organized most recently 
by Bill Gilmartin, a retired wildlife biologist 
who studied monk seals.

"The rule is, don't pick up anything smaller than 
your fist," Gilmartin told a team of volunteers. 
"Otherwise, it'll take forever. We'll never be 
done."

Noni Sanford reached down, scooped up a handful 
of beach sand and let it trickle through her 
fingers. Most of the grainy mix was bits and 
pieces of plastic. The beach itself, it seemed, 
was turning into plastic.

Cleanup efforts in Hawaii and elsewhere have 
focused on "ghost nets," tangles of abandoned 
fishing lines, nets and traps that snare and kill 
marine life.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration dispatches scuba divers every year 
to cut tons of these deathtraps off Hawaiian 
coral reefs. It's dangerous and costly work. In 
July 2005, a 145-foot charter vessel brought in 
to haul away nets ran aground on the reef at 
Pearl and Hermes Atoll, about 100 miles from 
Midway. The ship was lost. The Coast Guard flew 
the 23 divers and crew 1,200 miles back to 
Honolulu.

If it were easier to find them, it would make 
sense to round up the medusas of nets and 
synthetic lines at sea before they snagged on 
coral reefs and endangered monk seals and other 
coastal wildlife.

But the Pacific spans millions of square miles, 
and even the debris circulating in the Eastern 
and Western garbage patches is often diffuse and 
hard to see, bobbing just below the surface.

Connecting the two patches is a ribbon of oceanic 
highway that stretches 6,000 miles, an extension 
of Japan's Kuroshio Current heading east. 
Oceanographers call this the Subtropical 
Convergence Zone, where the cold, green, heavier 
waters from the north slide under the warm, blue 
waters of the south.

A team of scientists working on NOAA's GhostNet 
Detection Project suspected that flotsam 
collected along this line, making it an ideal 
place to concentrate cleanups. Yet they couldn't 
be sure. They needed to see it.

The team got its chance last year, after 
persuading NOAA to lend them an 
instrument-packed, four-engine reconnaissance 
plane often deployed to study hurricanes. Wearing 
life jackets while flying 1,000 feet above the 
ocean's surface, observers were positioned at 
windows to spot nets and floats. They were to 
call out each sighting over the plane's intercom. 
Others were poised to jot down the location of 
each sighting.

"When we got into it, we couldn't write fast 
enough," said Tim Veenstra, an Alaskan pilot and 
private researcher working with government 
scientists. The meandering line of buoys, nets, 
life rings, buckets and other castoffs stretched 
for hundreds and hundreds of miles — until the 
airplane had to turn back.

"It was sort of a bittersweet feeling," Veenstra 
said. "Sweet in the fact that what we had 
postulated was proven true. Bitter in the fact 
that there was actually that much debris floating 
around."

Tuna fishermen have long known about the 
convergence zone and the debris. They know that 
fish like to congregate beneath anything that 
floats.

Off the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, 
recreational fishermen like Guy Enriques will 
race miles offshore to fish beneath the flotsam.

It's important to get close to the trash, but not 
too close, Enriques explained, or the nets and 
lines will wrap around a boat's propeller.

He said the best fishing was around what looked 
like an enormous metal garage door floating just 
below the water's surface. Even some charter boat 
skippers learned of that one, Enriques recalled, 
and took fishermen there day after day, until it 
vanished.

But it wasn't a garage door. He and other 
fishermen were looking at the top of an 
8-by-40-foot cargo container that fell off a 
ship. Such containers can float for as long as 
nine months. Until they sink, they are the bane 
of sailors in fiberglass boats who watch for them 
like icebergs on the high seas.

Charles Moore, a member of the Hancock Oil 
family, was on his way home from the Los 
Angeles-to-Hawaii Transpacific Yacht Race in 1997 
when he took a shortcut through the Eastern 
Garbage Patch. It's a place that sailors usually 
avoid because it lacks wind.

As he motored through on his 50-foot catamaran, 
Moore was startled by what he saw thousands of 
miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, 
there was trash floating by," he said. "How could 
we have fouled such a huge area? How could this 
go on for a week?"

The experience changed Moore's life, turning him 
from an adventurer into a self-taught scientist 
and environmental activist.

Two years later, he returned to the garbage patch 
with a volunteer crew to survey its contents. He 
knew he would collect plenty of plastic bags, 
bottle caps, nets and floats.

He didn't expect what turned up in a special net, 
one with a tight mesh for collecting plankton, 
the bottom link in the oceanic food chain. 
Instead of plankton, it was choked with a 
colorful array of tiny plastic fragments.

"It blew my mind," Moore said. "We are filling up 
the oceans with this confetti stuff, and nobody 
cares."

Over the last decade, Moore, 59, who lives in a 
waterfront home in Long Beach, has spent his own 
money and some from a family foundation on a 
quest to track the plume of plastic so he can 
figure out how to stop it.

On a cloudless spring day, Moore waded up to his 
knees into the Los Angeles River in Long Beach 
wearing shorts, sandals and a white hard hat. He 
was tethered to a volunteer standing on the dry 
riverbank, in case he slipped on the slick 
concrete channel.

The Los Angeles River carries enough trash each 
year to fill the Rose Bowl two stories high, and 
despite efforts to corral some of it near the 
river mouth, most slips through to the ocean.

Moore adjusted a trawlnet to collect trash 
flowing downriver. At Moore's signal, a crane 
operator lifted the net out of the water. 
Volunteers swarmed around the trawlnet, extracted 
the contents and loaded them into more than a 
dozen jars.

The jars were filled with plastic pellets the 
size and shape of pills. They come in all colors 
and are the raw material for a vast array of 
plastic products, from trash bags to medical 
devices.

About 100 billion pounds of pellets are produced 
every year and shipped to Los Angeles and other 
manufacturing centers. Huge numbers are spilled 
on the ground and swept by rainfall into gutters; 
down storm drains, creeks and rivers; and into 
the ocean.

>From his river sampling, Moore estimated that 
>236 million pellets washed down the Los Angeles 
>and San Gabriel rivers in three days' time. Also 
>known as "nurdles" or mermaid tears, they are 
>the most widely seen plastic debris around the 
>world. They have washed ashore as far away as 
>Antarctica.

The pellets, like most types of plastic, are 
sponges for oily toxic chemicals that don't 
readily dissolve in water, such as the pesticide 
DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Some 
pellets have been found to contain concentrations 
of these pollutants 1 million times greater than 
the levels found in surrounding water.

As they absorb toxic chemicals, they become 
poison pills. Wildlife researchers have found the 
pellets, which resemble fish eggs, in the bellies 
of fish, sea turtles, seabirds and marine mammals.

Over time, plastic can break down into smaller 
and smaller pieces, eventually turning to powder 
and entering the ocean in microscopic fragments. 
Some plastic starts out as tiny particles, such 
as the abrasives in cleaning products that are 
washed down the sink, through sewage systems and 
out to sea.

The chemical components of plastics and common 
additives can harm animals and humans. Studies 
have linked the hormone-mimicking phthalates, 
used to soften plastic, to reduced testosterone 
and fertility in laboratory animals, and to 
subtle changes in the genitals of baby boys. 
Another additive, bisphenol A, used to make 
lightweight, heat-resistant baby bottles and 
microwave cookware, has been linked to prostate 
cancer.

Moore has tried, without success, to get 
manufacturers to improve their efforts to clean 
up spills of pellets that wash off lots and into 
storm drains. He considers beach cleanups a waste 
of time, except to raise public awareness of the 
problem. In his view, the cleanup has to start at 
the source — many miles inland.

To make that point, Moore tromped through rail 
yards in Vernon and La Mirada. On the side of a 
rail car a faded decal read "Operation Clean 
Sweep." It had three check boxes:

"Keep Plastics Off Ground.

"Close and Lock Caps When Outlets Not in Use.

"Pick Up All Spills."

Beneath the sign was a cone-shaped pile of 
pellets, as white as freshly fallen snow. Moore 
shuffled his sandaled feet through another drift 
nearby.

"This is a plastic sand dune," he said. "It's 
very slippery, very roly-poly. What makes them so 
good for the factory makes them good for getting 
into the ocean."


Times staff writer Usha Lee McFarling contributed to this report.