Charles Moore and his crew found a large entanglement of debris off the coast of Hawaii in 2002. (Photo by Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

Read related: ‘Shocking’ amount of plastic pollutes oceans ^[1]

Captain Charles Moore has seen a lot in his 60 years navigating the ocean currents, each voyage to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre revealing more egregious inequities than the last. In February 2008, for instance, Moore and his crew found a two-and-a-half-inch long lantern fish with 84 plastic particles in its stomach. One fish. Eighty-four pieces of plastic.

“This is like putting little, tiny polluted life preservers inside the thing,” Moore explained from his Long Beach-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

Plastic-laden fish aren’t an anomaly in this part of the sea. In the 671 fish Moore’s crew found on that seventh voyage to the Gyre, lay 1,391 individual scraps of multi-colored plastic. This is why these waters - roughly a thousand miles west of California and a thousand miles north of Hawaii - where trade wind-driven currents converge in a continent-sized spiral, have been aptly named by one of Moore’s colleagues as the Eastern Garbage Patch. Moore lobbied for alternate metaphors reflective of the liquid environs such as a “swirling sewer,” but Garbage Patch has stuck.

Moore was the first to discover the massive accumulation of trash gyrating in the North Pacific in 1997. Then, he approximated the garbage-dense region was twice the size of Texas.  Moore has since elevated his estimate of the Patch to an area one and a half times the landmass of the United States. Although, the sea captain is the first to admit that “oceans don’t have fences” and no one really knows the true scale of the problem.

What is clear: large amounts of rubbish from the western United States and Asia - things like bath toys and shopping bags, industrial waste and water bottles - travel down storm drains, rivers, creeks and bays to the ultimate downstream destination: the ocean, which carries floatables inevitably into the Gyre. Moore says there could be as much as 100 million tons of flotsam.

“I’m starting to use astronomical terms to describe it because I don’t think people grasp the immensity of it,” said Moore. “I’m calling it a spiral nebula of debris. The idea that it’s a patch is a misnomer. It’s spread out. It’s diffuse. I have seen lines of debris sort of like a windrow about a meter wide that we followed for miles and never got to the end before darkness fell.”

This explains why the translucent debris is not visible from space. But Moore says the “cemetery of trash” is plenty real, more like a plastic soup.

By its chemical make-up, plastic doesn’t biodegrade, which is why it outlasts other trash in the ocean’s mighty swirl. Plastic, rather, photodegrades or breaks down into small, even dust-size pieces in sunlit, endlessly spiraling water. By trawling fine nets through higher-concentration areas, Algalita estimates there are a million pieces of plastic per square kilometer - which is about 247 acres. That’s a million pieces of plastic in an area roughly a third the size of Central Park.

Animals Eating Plastic

Other than the unsightly aesthetic of giant tangles in a once unspoiled sea, marine life is one of the most visible casualties of plastic accumulation. United Nations scientists estimate at least a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die each year from plastic debris. Researchers say larger discards - especially derelict fishing gear - entrap, suffocate and drown animals. Fish, mammals and birds mistake smaller plastic parts for food.

“Birds on remote Hawaiian Islands with no civilization are turning up keeled over dead with stomachs full of plastics,” said Bill Hickman, the San Diego Surfrider Foundation chapter coordinator. “Basically there’s so much plastic that the brain says hey, ‘I’m full of food, I don’t need to eat anymore.’ But they’re not able to digest it. So they die of starvation with full stomachs of trash.”

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation found this Albatross carcass filled with plastic debris, not uncommon on plastic-strewn beaches.

Images of turtles strangled by six-pack rings and whales beached by plastic bags have captured hearts and minds of animal lovers and beach stewards. The San Diego Surfrider Foundation launched a “Rise Above Plastics” campaign in 2005, which has since spread to its 80 U.S. chapters.

Surfrider volunteers - Hickman is the only paid employee - set out on cool, sea-breezy mornings to collect castaway junk and cigarette butts. Last year, the beachcombers plucked 116,627 pieces of litter from twenty beaches, from Tourmaline in Pacific Beach to Tamarack in Carlsbad.

Most of the discards, about 80 percent, are plastic, according to Hickman. Plastic bottle caps: 4,935. Plastic bags: 2,975. Random plastic items - they need an extraneous category for their spreadsheet tabulations - such as toys, Tupperware, sandals and syringes: 10,663.

These are just the items Surfrider volunteers nabbed from the sands in 2008 - litter that would have otherwise likely washed out to sea, and quite possibly, if they float and are non-biodegradable, landed either on foreign shores or in the North Pacific Gyre.

Unseen effects beneath the surface

The unknown effects of plastic beneath the ocean surface are fueling an upcoming Scripps Institution of Oceanography expedition to the North Pacific Gyre. A team of UC San Diego graduate student researchers will set out this August to take samples of the flotsam, plankton and small fish.

This North Pacific Gyre map highlights Moore's voyage through the convergence zone. (Image by Patricia J. Wynne)

Miriam Goldstein, who is leading the oceanographic cruise, says there’s not a lot of science on the Garbage Patch, particularly when it comes to plastic’s effects on the bottom of the food chain. Scripps scientists want to survey the plastic, where it’s coming from and what kind of pollutants the oily debris is harboring. Since plastics absorb persistent organic pollutants, like DDT and dioxin, researchers suspect synthetic poisons could accumulate in the ocean’s minute organisms.

“Those are really nasty toxins,” said Goldstein. “The question is, if the zooplankton are ingesting these particles, are they getting a big whopping dose of PCBs that is going up the food chain?”

The Scripps team will study “microplastics,” which are less than a centimeter long. Microplastics make up the vast majority of the remnant debris, largely because sunlight breaks plastic down into ever-smaller pieces, “although it will never become anything else except for plastic,” adds Goldstein.  Scientists suspect contaminant-rich microplastics could accumulate in fatty tissues of sea creatures, and work their way up the food chain, possibly to humans.

“There’s potential of real contamination of food webs and long-lasting impacts of essentially the human footprint from the land extending into vast areas of open ocean,” said Dr. Jim Leichter, an associate professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who is involved with the expedition.

But Leichter and Goldstein say scientists don’t know how plastic pollutions ranks, in the bigger picture of large-scale climate change.

“I think it’s really interesting scientifically and I think it’s bad to have plastic floating around in our oceans,” said Goldstein. “But I am far from convinced that this is worse than for example, ocean acidification, which is essentially the oceans becoming more acidic as more carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere.”

Goldstein says there aren’t infinite resources to fix the plethora of environmental problems. Trying to clean up tiny particulates of plastic floating in the ocean would be extremely expensive, if not impossible.

Slowing the Tide

Seeing the contributions of just one coastal town in one snapshot of time, the Surfrider Foundation felt the enormity of the problem and launched a “Rise Above Plastics” campaign. The nonprofit group says 80 percent of ocean debris originates from land and 20 percent from ships at sea.

“Unfortunately we’ve seen the enemy and it’s us,” said Bill Hickman. “People cause pollution so people should be able to stop pollution as well, including just making sure you throw away your trash properly.”

Hickman says they’re focused on reducing disposable plastics, the kind you use once and toss in the trash, or worse, on the ground. He suggests people reuse what they already have and buy things with less plastic packaging. The two easiest targets, he says: trade in that plastic grocery bag for a canvas version and plastic water bottles for a stainless steel or glass canister.

The garbage-littered shores of Pacific Beach on July 5, 2007 host an array of plastic bottles, aluminum cans and styrofoam coolers. Trash that is not cleaned up washes out to sea. (Photo by Surfrider Foundation)

“Those are the two easiest things,” said Hickman. “Everyday, a lot of people take it for granted, ‘oh, a water bottle, it’s no big deal, I’ll recycle it.’ But it takes energy to recycle and it adds up over time. So you can actually save money by using a reusable bottle.”

Hickman says like diamonds, plastics are forever, and meant to be used sparingly.

Captain Moore says plastics can never be retrieved from the Gyre, which is why he advocates slowing the tide of trash into the sea. The self-trained oceanographer believes the solution will require a shift away from a throwaway consumer culture. Moore says governments must require the makers of plastic to take back that plastic and remake it into new widgets. He advocates a closed-loop cycle, like the forests, or even agriculture where compost makes new plants.

“If India and China are going to have the same standard of living and the same kind of growth economy we have in the United States, we need two more earths to provide the resources,” speculates Moore. “I just don’t think Mars and the moon are going to provide that for us.”

Meanwhile, the intrepid oceanic explorer who inadvertently discovered the plastic sea sails on, with his eighth research trip to the Gyre ahead this summer.

Rebecca Tolin is SDNN’s environment editor.