Changing the Game: A Resolution or Three

Can't believe another year has come and gone. As something of a summary of all I've learned & studied over the past two years, I sent in an op-ed to Maine's largest newspaper, The Portland Press Herald this week. And it was published today! (Text below if the link isn't working.)

Toothbrushes, golf balls, glue-sticks, pacifiers, lip balm, kids’ toys, deodorant roller balls, combs, printer cartridges, pens & markers, pregnancy tests, clothes pins. These are just some of the ordinary plastic household items found inside the stomachs of dead albatross on Midway, a remote island chain in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Every year, thousands of albatross die from consuming plastics that have floated in on the waves. Midway lies 1200 miles from civilization. This is just one heartbreaking -- and completely predictable -- result of a plasticized global culture. By now most people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- the swirl of plastics floating in the deep ocean, far from land. Midway and Kamilo Beach, Hawaii are its poster children. But what most people don’t know is that this garbage patch isn’t alone. Every ocean in the world now has plastic swirling in it. There’s plastic in the Sargasso Sea. Plastic washes up on the Azores. 80% of Arctic fulmars have plastic in their bellies. Islands and inlets around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are choked with it. It’s everywhere. Including the Maine coast. Plastic comes onshore with every tide. I’ve studied flotsam at Bay View beach in Saco for the past year and a half. The realities are sobering. Tampon applicators, a hypodermic needle, sauce packets, squirt nozzles, combs, car seat vinyl, a plasticized menu from a defunct Bar Harbor restaurant -- thousands of pieces, in one small stretch of one beach. Many with obvious fish bite marks. Elsewhere it’s the same story. Lubec has plastic amid its coastal rocks. Otter Cove in Acadia National Park has plastic in it. Curtis Cove in Biddeford collects so much that there is literally plastic every step of the way. How could this happen? How could it not? We have filled our households and our lives with stuff we use for a month or a day or five minutes, but which persists for a dozen lifetimes. The average American goes through 220 lbs. of plastic a year. Garbage has always escaped from the waste stream. It always will. Despite our best efforts. (Not to mention from windstorms, floods, and worse disasters.) Now that most garbage is plastic, every escapee adds to the persistent fouling of our shores & waters. Nothing eats plastic, nothing biodegrades it. Those K-cups, straws, toothpaste tubes, grocery bags, takeout boxes, single-serve sauce packs, disposable razors -- they don’t go away. (Cigarette butts either. They’re plastic -- you knew that, right?) Every piece of plastic that’s escaped a hand, bag, dumpster, trash truck, landfill, or recycling plant still exists, even if crumbled into small bits beyond recognition. Each will foul a shore, collect toxins, or kill a sea creature. It’s what they do. Columbia University calculates that at least 73 million lbs. of plastic now floats in the world’s oceans. (That doesn’t count denser plastics that sink.) That’s what we’ve managed to do, in just two generations. Recycling is often touted as an answer. But true one-to-one plastic recycling is extremely hard, expensive -- and rare. Most recycled plastic is just downcycled at best, and ever more virgin plastic is required to restock store shelves. Worse, most plastic that the U.S. recycles gets dumped on China, to be turned into packaging & cheap consumer goods for our big box stores. Have you noticed that everything in our households is plastic now? Thank the huge glut of material that we’ve dutifully recycled and turned into an ultra-cheap resource. Besides, recycling rhetoric overlooks the obvious: plastic blows out of recycling bins, recycling trucks, and recycling centers just as easily as trash cans and landfills. So, how do we clean up the ocean and get a fresh start? How do we ensure that our children will enjoy clean shores like our grandparents did? We don’t. There is no “plastic magnet.” There’s no vacuum that will suck up plastic but spare the planktonic base of the global food web. In time, the ocean may spit its filth back onshore for us to collect and dispose of properly. But that only works if we stop force-feeding her. And that will only happen if we commit to using less plastic & wasting less plastic. Plastics certainly have their benefits and their place. But our gross overuse of them has polluted nearly every last pristine, remote place left in the world. As well as our own back yard. It’s time to change the game.
It's certainly been a strange road since picking up my first bag of beached garbage back in March 2010. But a good one.
For 2012, I have three resolutions:

• Pick up more flotsam from Maine shores.
• Learn more about how it's getting there and how to stop it.
• Share more of what I learn.

#1 is already a given. I just got clearance from the National Fish & Wildlife Service to do weekly cleanups at a protected beach called Curtis Cove in Biddeford:

It's an utterly untouristed little gravelly crescent that's a major catch basin for tons of oceanic plastic garbage. In 2012, in addition to Bay View in Saco, I'm going to be collecting regularly at Curtis Cove, where all the junk I find will be seaborne -- not local drops by beachgoers. For someone looking to learn exactly what and how much is out there in the Gulf of Maine, it's hard to do better than this!
So with Resolution #1 settled, it's up to me to make #2 and #3 happen. And I intend to keep my promise.
From my family to yours, may I wish you all a peaceful, healthy, and very Happy New Year!