It's a Small World After All

Plastic. Bought locally. Acting globally.

Here's Mexico, Denmark, Oman, Serbia, India, and Cyprus.

Here's the USA west coast, England, USA east coast, Norway, Bali, and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

This is Lebanon, the Atlantic island of Cape Verde, Tanzania, Australia, China, and Peru.

This list could cycle through every nation, every province, every state, every city. In the entire world. Everywhere that plastic has reached -- including many deserted lands where it shouldn't have reached -- the world has been changed.

Maybe in some parts of the world we can still ignore it, or pretend it's not a problem, or that it'll just go away.

But who's kidding -- There is no "away."

So what do we do? Simple. We fix it. Or we drown in it.

Hunger

In Tolkien's Silmarillion -- the backstory mythology to the Lord of the Rings -- there is the tale of Ungoliant, one of the original "gods" who came to earth, and turned to evil.

"Melkor Calls Forth Ungoliant" by
renowned artist John Howe

Ungoliant took the form of an enormous black spider, and she began spinning & weaving webs to catch light. She hungered for light. She devoured & consumed it. Everywhere on earth that she roamed, she consumed. And yet her hunger grew, and grew. She even entered the Blessed Realm and devoured the very light of the Two Trees of Valinor, and cast darkness across the realm.

But she wasn't satisfied. Grown horrible in size & might, she kept on consuming -- loving light & hating it wherever she found it. Eventually, she holed up in dark mountains of the mortal world. There, she spun webs through the long years, and consumed, and darkness spread out in all directions.

And she bred offspring, huge beasts of terror and evil. When her offspring grew of age, she mated with them, and hungered for them, and consumed them.

Eventually she had no more mates, and no more offspring. There was no more light, no more food. And yet her hunger still grew. Never satisfied, never fulfilled, always growing. Finally, in the end, sitting in absolute darkness and doubled over with hunger, she consumed herself.

The image above, linked from Inhabitat, was created three years ago by artist & filmmaker Chris Jordan of Midway Journey fame. It consists of 2.4 million individual scraps of plastic, all pulled from the Pacific Ocean. 2,400,000 is a significant number: it represented (at the time) how many pounds of plastic were estimated to be entering the oceans of the world every hour.

Do you think that rate has gone down, or up, since then?

Breaking It Down

"It doesn't go away." A phrase repeated a number of times already in the short life of this blog. Modern flotsam is a problem because so much of it is persistent -- it doesn't go away.

But everything rots, right? I mean, a plastic bag or flowerpot gets brittle and shreds if left out in the sun over a summer.

(photo courtesy flickr/wygd and licensed by Creative Commons)

So clearly, plastic does go away over time, right?

Wrong. With other trash, like, say, a napkin (which is just tree pulp) or nail or chicken bone, nature has had hundreds of millions -- in some cases billions -- of years of trial and error in figuring out how to recycle it.

Not so with plastics. The first artificial plastic was created in 1862, but plastic use only really exploded after World War II. For all intents and purposes, nature has only been exposed to plastics for a few generations.

And it has no idea what to do with them.

Plastics are synthetic polymers - long, large chains of (mostly) carbon and hydrogen molecules composed of repeating structures that are tightly bound together. The bonds that make them strong also make them incredibly resistant to microbes, weathering, rainwater, freeze/thaw, anything that can break a plastic back to its carbon and hydrogen. Science still knows of nothing that can be used in nature to break it up. (A high-schooler made big news in 2008 with a possibility, but there has been no effective follow-up since.) Estimates on how long plastic takes to break down in nature range from a century to thousands of years, for a simple reason: nobody knows.

Back to the shredded plastic bag. It's not biodegrading, it's photodegrading. Sunlight can make plastics brittle and break apart. But they're not breaking down -- they're just becoming smaller versions of themselves. Eventually they get small enough to swirl around the ocean as a "soup" of tiny colored fragments that can be ingested by plankton and then work their way up the food chain.

This picture, courtesy the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, shows the contents of a brief sample trawl in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex in the ocean hundreds of miles from any island or shipping lane. That's all plastic, brought in by the currents.

Sometimes, plastic doesn't have to break down too small to have an effect.

This image, from CBC News, shows a dead albatross on Kure Atoll in the middle of the Pacific. This and other atolls around Midway are dotted with the carcasses of hundreds (thousands?) of albatross like this one. They ingest colorful plastic bits floating in the water, which (surprise!) don't break down in stomach acid. Eventually, the bird always feels full and stops eating altogether, ultimately dying of starvation.

Kure Atoll is 1200 miles from the nearest inhabited island.

When you see a piece of milk bottle floating in the harbor on a cruise, or see plastic wrappers on the beach at low tide that all get washed into the ocean at high tide, just remember: they don't go away.