It’s an endless trail of toothbrushes, bottle caps and plastic bags, according to scientists who have seen it firsthand. Two of those scientists were in Santa Barbara on Monday to talk about their research on the North Pacific Gyre, thousands of miles from land, where much of the world’s plastic ends up.
Dr. Marcus Eriksen and his wife, Anna Cummins, stopped in at the Cabrillo Arts Pavilion for their forum titled “Synthetic Sea.” They talked about their research as part of the last leg of a 2,000-mile bike ride down the West Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Tijuana, Mexico. They’ve given nearly 40 presentations along the way.
Eriksen holds a doctorate in science education from USC, and Cummins studied international environmental policy. Both do educational outreach for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a nonprofit based in Long Beach.
The couple have been studying how plastic has built up in the oceans in 10 years. “What we saw on the last research trip a year ago January was so disturbing that we thought of this project to get people’s attention,” she said. On that sixth research trip, they found that the density of plastic in that area had doubled in just 10 years.
Cummins said she hears people asking if much of the trash comes from boating and people dumping things overboard. “The truth is that most of it comes from you and I, right here on land,” she said.
Even something as small as a trash can tipping over and spilling plastic onto the ground ultimately can lead to that refuse ending up in the ocean, via storm drain. Cummins talked about a study that tracked ocean currents and found that a single bottle cap can make the entire loop around the North Pacific Ocean in 10 years.
“We think of this as the world’s largest toilet bowl,” she said. “It just circulates our junk around and around.”
According to Cummins, many people have heard that the area is a Texas-sized garbage patch in the middle of the ocean. In reality, plastic is dispersed throughout the entire North Pacific Gyre, which is about twice the size of the United States. It’s not an island one could walk on, but more like a thin, plastic soup stretching all the way across the North Pacific Ocean.
There are five gyres on the planet, and the group has data from only the North Pacific. “We’ve literally just scratched the surface,” she said. The group is hoping to start gathering data from the South Pacific Gyre next year.
Along their trip, the couple have been giving away little jars of the plastic ocean soup to lawmakers, city officials and the media as a reminder.
“In a throwaway society, where is away?” Eriksen asked. Twenty-five percent of the world’s waste is unaccounted for, meaning it doesn’t show up in landfills or to be recycled. Because much of that is plastic, it just travels with the ocean tides, until it’s ingested by fish or broken into smaller pieces.
“It’s designed to last forever,” he said.
The couple took video of a turtle that had gotten stuck inside a milk ring and its body had continued to grow around the ring on both sides. Another image was shown of a turtle caught inside of a decomposing lawn chair.
Eriksen talked about a trip he took with students to Midway, a tiny island in the Pacific where thousands of birds make their home. He held up a string that tied together a cigarette lighter, a toothbrush, toy pieces and other small plastic items, items he had discovered on the island but not on the shore. “I pulled these out of the carcass of a single albatross,” he said.
Almost half of the world’s sea birds have ingested or are entangled in plastic, he said.
The couple also are researching how ingestion of plastics in fish could affect human beings if consumed.
In addition to the research trips, Eriksen also sailed with a friend, Kon-Tiki style, on a raft of 15,000 plastic bottles from California and Hawaii. It took them 12 weeks, and brought a lot of media attention to trash in the gyre.
Even when something can be recycled, it doesn’t mean that’s the best option, the couple say. They’ve had the opportunity to stop at several recycling plants in California, one in Burbank and one in Marin. They learned that when post-consumer plastics are wet and dirty, no one will accept them, so to truly recycle the plastics they need to be washed. No one wants to do that, Eriksen said, so dirty plastics usually end up in landfills. He said the Burbank and Marin recycling centers ship clean plastic to China, and neither of the supervisors at those plants could say what is done with it at that point.
Eriksen and Cummins ended their talk on what people can do help remedy the problem, and although Eriksen said there isn’t much hope for the trash that’s out there already, people can watch how much plastic they use in their daily lives.
Buying products that can be reused or turned into other products at the end of their life cycle also is important. Both acknowledge that most of the change needed would come from pushing for legislation. Laws that put bans or fees on plastic bags also are key, and the couple said they talked to legislators in Sacramento three weeks ago on the steps of the state Capitol.
Even though they’ve seen all that trash firsthand, they’re still hopeful things can change.
“Faced with environmental doom and gloom everyday, it’s hard to be optimistic,” Cummins said, “but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do all we can in our daily lives.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com.
