Searchers scouring the waters of the Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast have not yet succeeded in locating the missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200, but they have focused global attention on just how many pieces of manmade detritus is floating in our oceans.
Search personnel have referred to the trash, which ranges in size as small as a plastic water bottle to as large as a 70-foot long shipping container, with different descriptors, from garbage to the more unfamiliar and nautical term “flotsam.”
Although the search area is not located in the famous Great Pacific Ocean “garbage patch,” it is located at the edge of one of five “gyres” where ocean currents and the atmospheric circulation draws in waste like a magnet.
“At least this is letting the world know that garbage patches are not confined to the Pacific,” said Captain Charles Moore, whose work first drew the world’s attention to the Pacific garbage patch. “The ocean itself has become this plastic soup,” Moore told Mashable.
“Families seeing this happen must feel terrible that they’re being told their deceased relatives and friends are in a garbage patch,” Moore said.
Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Institute that works to raise awareness and help reduce the amount of plastic pollution that goes into the world’s oceans, where it can remain for decades. Such trash harms wildlife, damages ships, and as seen in the current search for the missing plane, can frustrate urgent search and recovery operations.
Studies have shown that about 90% of the trash in the ocean is plastic, Moore says, and that there are probably up to 10,000 lost shipping containers drifting along with ocean currents around the world.
Pollution can magnify other challenges the oceans face. A new climate change report released this week predicts sweeping changes in marine life in the coming decades due to warming and acidifying seas, with pollution adding to the stress on marine species.
According to Moore, shipping companies do not have to report lost containers when they go overboard, despite the fact that they constitute a hazard to other vessels, as was driven home in the recent Robert Redford film “All Is Lost”.
According to Marcus Eriksen, the executive director and co-founder of the environmental advocacy group 5 Gyres, trash in such gyres usually drifts with the currents at about the same pace as a person walks. This means that if there is aircraft debris in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean Gyre, it is likely to be about 100 miles or more away from its original location.
The gyres have relatively slow-moving currents because they are located in areas where high pressure systems tend to dominate the weather, leading to light winds and docile seas. This can prevent trash from escaping a gyre for months or more. For this reason, Moore likens the gyres to “a toilet that doesn’t flush.”
Eriksen, who used to work with Moore but decided to set out on his own expanded effort to focus attention on all of the world’s garbage patches, rather than just the massive one in the Pacific, told Mashable that much of the waste in the five subtropical gyres consists of derelict fishing gear, in addition to plastic. “Because it’s designed to last forever it actually does,” Eriksen says.
Despite what many people think, he says, plastic bags don’t usually make it to the middle of a gyre, since they tend to disintegrate into flecks that fish then consume.
Eriksen says that during trips to all five gyres, he has come across many low quality durable goods, including umbrella handles, bottle caps, Starbucks straws and forks and knives. “It’s almost like a department store washed ashore when you come into these gyres,” Eriksen says.
In 2013, Eriksen sailed into the Bay of Bengal from Sri Lanka, and found an unusually large amount of trash floating off the coast of Sri Lanka and other South Asian countries with lax environmental regulations. “It is unreal how much trash is floating in the Bay of Bengal,” he says. Trash from the Bay can cross the equator and enter the Indian Ocean gyre, which partly encompasses the Flight 370 search area.
Trash there is most likely coming from a variety of distant places, Eriksen said, including the Bay of Bengal, South Asia, Africa and parts of the Southern Ocean north of Antarctica.
In fact, Eriksen said his research indicates that all subtropical gyres are connected, with trash moving between them over time. “Those three gyres communicate,” he said. In June, Eriksen's group is planning to study plastic pollution in the North Atlantic and Viking Gyres, and is running a video contest to bring a member of the public along with them.
What are the solutions?
While the current trash problem exists at sea, and appears to be worsening as plastics production increases worldwide, particularly in nations that don’t have stringent environmental protections, advocates say most of the solutions would need to take place on terra firma — back on solid ground.
Both Eriksen and Moore said they are seeking to alter the very paradigm of capitalism regarding manufacturers' responsibility for the end disposal of their products.
They say the plastics industry needs to take responsibility for their products from manufacturing to disposal. If you’re going to make products made of plastic, Eriksen says, “you’ve got to have a plan for its whole life.”
As Moore put it in an interview, every item that is built needs to have a “reincarnation pathway” for being reused or broken down in such a way that it cannot wind up traveling the global seas, going from gyre to gyre like a baton stuck in an endless relay race.
Such a plan could consist of providing incentives to consumers to return used plastic items for a financial gain, much as is currently done with aluminum soda cans. Similarly, Eriksen said fishermen could be given a monetary incentive to haul in and return used fishing gear that they find floating in the open ocean. Also, alternatives to plastic items could be used in many settings, such as by switching out plastic straws for paper ones at coffee shops like Starbucks, Eriksen says.