Imagine a world in which one can not go to the beach without having to look upon a shore full of plastic refuse. A world in which we humans can no longer eat seafood because it is all too filled with plastics that are harmful to ingest. A world, for that matter, with oceans so polluted that the amount of biodiversity in them has been reduced to record-breaking lows. While this world you’ve just imagined as just that, an imagination, the current consumption and disposal habits that our society has become all too used to are on track to turn this imagination into a sobering and dismal reality. Each year, humans dump more than four million metric tons of plastic into the oceans (Grush, 2015). To put that into perspective, 8 million metric tons of plastic, just twice as much as we pollute annually, would cover an area thirty-four times the size of Manhattan ankle-deep. These plastics are more than just an eyesore, however. Plastics polluted in the oceans are directly and indirectly hurting or outright killing countless species of animals from birds, to sea turtles, to many fish. Not only this, but these plastics are consumed on every level of the aquatic food chain and are literally poisoning some of our main food source: the fish we eat. Given the dire state of marine life and the very likely detrimental impacts on the health of people themselves, human society needs to begin cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as well as other “plastic gyres” in our oceans, and reduce or altogether cut out disposable plastics from our everyday lives.

In 1955, the American publication Life published a now infamous article titled “Throwaway Living” promoting the use of use-once and throw away household items such as plastic cutlery so that housewives didn’t have to waste their time cleaning up after every meal (Cosgrove, 2014). This “throwaway lifestyle” evolved, as anything does, into what we see today: plastic cutlery, plates, cups, water bottles and shopping bags; the list could go on almost indefinitely. By the turn of the century, everywhere we turned there was, and still is, a disposable plastic option for a vast number of our everyday items, but nobody seemed very worried about where all of this plastic is going. That is, until 1997 when Captain Charles Moore diverted his path through the pacific ocean and wound up sailing through what could only be described as a literal sea of plastic. Now it is 2017, and we are well aware of the fact that plastic is not decomposable, it has only detrimental effects on the natural world, and it is certainly not edible. For some reason though, these facts have not yet been enough to spur any sort of real effort for change. New information consistently shows that non-reusable plastics only serve to hurt the world around us, and by association, findings point to the fact that it is probably hurting us as well. 

In 2011, Captain Charles Moore and Cassandra Phillips published a book recounting Moore’s extensive time and reasearch in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch titled Plastic Ocean: how a sea captain’s chance discovery launched a determined quest to save the oceans. On the garbage patch, Moore says “Here we are finding alarming quantities of plastic—more than we have ever found before—in an area of tremendous biological richness and commerical significance. We’re finding the highest levels of pollution in a highly productive zone. The significance of this is far greater than people may have realized.” (Moore et. al. 214). In this “area of tremendous biological richness,” Moore and his team found undeniable evidence that organisms even on the lowest level of the food chain, phytoplankton and zooplankton too small to even see with the human eye, were consuming plastics. This is made possible through a process known as photodegradation in which plastics in the water are heated up by the sun until they break down into miniscule, almost untraceable particles that can be consumed by the phytoplankton which at their biggest are only two millimeters long. Because plastic cannot be properly digested by any organism in the ocean, much of it never leaves the body of the plankton, which are then eaten by fish bigger than them. This process of plastic making its way up the food chain through consumption of smaller fish by larger ones, and not negligable amounts of plastic, is bad widespread enough that scientists have studied it in various areas of the ocean. 

Nate Seltenrich touches upon this issue of plastics making their way up the food chain in his piece “New Link in the Food Chain” for the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. He says “Marine organisms throughout the food chain commonly consume plastics of vaious sizes. The tiniest microplastics are small enough to be mistaken for food by zooplankton, allowing them to enter the food chain at very low trophic levels. Some larger predators are thought to confuse nurdles (which typically measure less than 5 millimeters in diamter) with fish eggs or other food sources.” (Seltenrich, 2015). Seltenrich cites studies that have found microplastics in the stomachs of marine life of all sizes as proof that plastics are actually moving up the food chain through the bodies of prey organisms. Another finding that supports this theory is that laboratory experiments have shown that chemical additives, absorbed pollutants, and metals on the surface of these microplastics are commonly desorbed into the organs and tissues of the marine life that consumes it. (Engler, 2012). Basically what this shows is that the plastic and its components don’t just pass through the fish and get excreted, but rather they enter the inner workings of the marine organisms’ bodies and stay there to be consumed up the food chain. (Marcus Eriksen, et. al. 2014). Believe it or not however, it is not just the marine life swimming around the oceans that are being affected by the sea plastics, and in fact also harms quite a few land animals that rely on the ocean for their food. 

Albatross in the Midway Atoll provide food for their youth by hunting marine life from the top of the water in their habitat, which just so happens to coinside with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Unsurprisingly, they are well documented for mistaking plastics such as bottle caps floating on the ocean surface as food which they pick up and feed to their babies. In fact, more than twelve percent of the food they bring back is actually plastic. (Andrew, 2016). The result of this very common mistake, of course, is that the babies pass away because no organism can digest and survive on plastic. Unlike mature albatross, babies are unable to regurgitate food so once the plastic is in, it stays in their stomachs. (National Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, 2016). This issue is quite common and leaves a trail of young dead albatross in the area, decaying to reveal stomachs full of almost exclusively plastic. Furthermore, the damage extends to more than just the young albatross, as the adults also consume some of the plastics through marine life they hunt, evidencing that plastics make their way up the food chain, and all of the harm that comes along with that. Comparing recent measurements of Perfluoroalkyl sulfonates, a byproduct of plastic degradation, in black-footed albatross to meaurements from 1994 of laysan albatross in the same area as well as other seabirds in different areas shows a steep increase, seven times greater than the 1994 measurements. (Shaogang Chu, et. al. 2015). This is another example of how plastic and its byproducts desorb into the inner workings of animals that consume them, as the above referenced measurements of black-footed and laysan albatross were taken from the liver, muscles, and tissues of the birds. With this evidence alone, the argument could be made that comparing the damage to such isolated areas where the gyres collect the plastic versus the cost of cleaning plastic up, but alternate studies have found evidence that ocean currents spread plastics collected in the gyres back out into the rest of the ocean, especially after photodegradation has occurred. 

Meaurements taken throughout and nearby the Great Pacific Garbage Patch evidence the fact that some of the plastics accumulating in the gyre are undeniably dispersed throughout the surrounding area and by association the rest of the ocean, presumably by wind currents as well as other ocean currents. (Miriam Goldstein, et. al. 2013). Furthermore, the same study that found evidence of plastic dispersion by wind currents also found very high concentrations of plastic and its byproducts in fish that they collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and surrounding waters. These findings support both the claims that fish are consuming plastics from the water and that plastics disperse far and wide from the gyres rather than only staying in proportionally small areas of concentration. The implications of this dispersion are fairly straight-forward: plastics in the ocean that ultimately converge in the gyres do not only harm the habitats immidiately surrounding the gyres, but through this redistribution also harm wildlife in whatever areas the plastics ultimately end up in, and not just through ingestion. 

Many marine animals are in danger of entanglement in plastic waste such as six-pack rings and fishing nets. This entanglement often results in cut off circulation or airways as the animal grows. (Andrew, 2016). Another common result of entanglement is that the marine animal gets caught in netting that is stuck to something on the sea floor such as rock. This sort of entanglement leaves the animal unable to move from the spot, and ultimately results in death by starvation. Entanglement is a problem that affects many species far and wide across the oceans. 44 sea bird species, nine cetacean species, eleven pinniped species, 31 invertebrate species, and six sea turtle species have been reported entangled in marine debris in the United States alone. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Marine Debris Program, 2014). Some animals are disproportionately affected, such as how 0.7% of all monk seals in the oceans end up entangled, usually in discarded fishing nets. All of these numbers and findings about plastic harming marine environments and wildlife are disheartening, but far from a death sentence for the oceans and their inhabitants. 

Governments across the globe have made efforts to limit the plastic pollution from some of the pollutants that account for much of plastic debris in the oceans. Legislation such as banning or taxing lightweight plastic bags in parts of North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia as well as bans on microbeads in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and Australia has been introduced or passed. (Chelsea Rochman, et. al. 2016). These are steps in the right direction that governments around the world are starting to take, but they are far from fix-all solutions to the problem at hand. Although lightweight plastic bags and microbeads are huge polluters of the oceans, they are extremely far from the only ones. Furthermore, while limiting the pollution of certain products that account for much of oceanic plastic debris will do wonders for the environment going forward, it does nothing about the upwards of 250,000 tons of plastic currently floating around the worlds oceans. (Marcus Eriksen, et. al. 2014). Realistically, we can not clean up all of that 250,000 tons for plenty of reasons, mainly that much of it has already degraded to a point where it is no longer traceable or retrievable. That said, a huge portion of it is absolutely cleanable, and yet there are those against doing just that. 

Many people argue against cleaning up the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other ocean gyres that consolidate vast sums of plastic pollution. The most common argument against such clean-up efforts is that they would be unsustainably expensive. One estimate says that just for the estimated boat fees, it would be between 122 and 489 million dollars per year, to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and that is before supplies and labor costs. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012). The other argument some in the science community have made against clean up efforts is that the areas are high in biodiversity that would be further harmed by trawling the waters for plastic. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012). While these facts and figures may have been accurate when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published them in 2012, since then there have been advancements in understanding and technology that make them irrelevent. A new barrier system developed by The Ocean Cleanup, a foundation dedicated to developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of pollution, recently debuted an artificial barrier system that uses the oceans natural currents to collect the garbage floating in it. It is essentially a floating curtain that extends up to five feet below the oceans surface and is capable of capturing up to ninety-eight percent of the plastics in the water (the other two percent is degraded too much to be caught in the screens). (T.J. Raphael, 2016). These devices are estimated to be able to clean up as much as half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within 10 years; that is more than 150 million pounds of trash. They are both exponentially less expensive than previous clean-up plans and made in such a way as to not disturb wildlife in the waters, essentially nullifying the two biggest arguments against large-scale cleaning efforts. While this may not be an end-all solution to the problem at hand, it is independent projects such as that of Boyan Slat, the chief executive officer of The Ocean Cleanup, that governments need to look into backing and funding if any real change is to come around in a timely manner. All of that said, it is not simply up to governments with a lot of money to spend to initiate change in the problem our society has with plastic pollution. 

While no, you the reader probably can not travel one thousand miles off of the coast of California and help pick trash out of the water in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there is so much one can do to stop the problem at its source. One can bring their own reusable shopping bags to the store and refuse to use the lightweight plastic bags that all too commonly carry our groceries home and end up right in the trash after a single use. More examples of easy changes we can make in our daily life with real world consequences are refusing to use plastic silverware that will inevitably be thrown out as soon as one finishes his or her meal, or using a refillable water bottle rather than buying a new use-once plastic bottle. This may seem like a negligable thing, but the United States alone uses approximately fifty billion plastic water bottles each year, only twenty-three percent of which are recycled. (Ban The Bottle, 2015). Small-scale boycotts of single-use plastics such as the above mentioned examples have real, and large, world effects. Ultimately, it is up to the individual to start making small changes if they would like to see governments and bodies of higher power making the bigger ones. At the current rate, our plastic consumption is entirely unsustainable. Should we continue down the path we are currently on, the world we leave behind for our children could be very different, and worse, then the one we have had the priviledge to grow up in. What with the current and dangerous state of marine life, combined with the fact that we are likely poisoning ourselves by introducing toxins into one of our main food sources, the time has come to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and end the production and consumption of single use plastic products before it gets to be too late. 
