Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (13 page)

Researchers have found all five of the major gyres have higher concentrations of plastic than other parts of the ocean (although plastic confetti has been observed in waters and beaches all over the world). The North Pacific Gyre, home to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, occupies the zone of the Subtropical High between Hawaii and California. It is the largest and best studied of the gyres, though still fraught with unknowns. It is thought to be the trashiest, though this question is still being studied. Covering more than 20 million square miles, it is the largest ecosystem on earth—and therefore the planet’s largest garbage dump.

I
N 1997,
a sailor and ocean researcher based in Long Beach, California, was heading home from a boating race in Hawaii aboard his vessel, the
Alguita.
Charles Moore’s strategy during the race had been to avoid the waters of the gyre, as most sailors and fishermen do, because they are notorious for their low winds. Parts of this area of the Pacific have been called “the doldrums” for centuries because of their tendency to leave sailing vessels sitting still for days and weeks at a time. It’s an area sailors have learned to skirt, a vast oceanic desert.

But the
Alguita
had powerful twin engines and plenty of fuel to supplement its sails and compensate for the gyre’s lack of wind, and so Moore chose to take a shortcut through the doldrums. As the ship approached the gyre’s center, he noticed the trash. First a little, then more. It was a transformative experience that Moore later wrote about in the journal
Natural History
:

I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day,
Alguita
was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.

It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.

After returning home, he contacted Seattle-based oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who had become well known among ocean researchers for mapping currents by tracking the fate of the spilled Friendly Floaties bath toys. When Ebbesmeyer heard what Moore had seen, he said it made perfect sense that those zones would aggregate floating trash, and he dubbed it the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The name was catchy and it stuck, although Moore came to regret it, as it misleadingly suggests the existence of some large and clearly visible trash island swirling around the Pacific rather than what it is: a soup bowl—or, as Moore once suggested, a “swirling sewer”—of barely visible particles circling endlessly.

Moore was the first person to bring the garbage patch into the public eye—and the first to devote his time and resources to researching it, with the
Alguita
outfitted as a research vessel and his family fortune, made in the oil business, fueling a foundation dedicated to tackling the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. His first scientific paper, published in 1999, made what was then a shocking revelation to scientists who thought they understood ocean pollution: that in the Pacific gyre area, plastic fragments appeared to outweigh zooplankton by a factor of six to one. He followed up with a study that showed the waters off the coast of California had two and a half times more plastic than plankton, which was perhaps even scarier than the earlier study because those waters were not inside a gyre with currents that might be concentrating plastic debris.

In other words, Moore told the world, the plastic chowder is everywhere.

“No matter where you are, there’s no getting over it, no getting away from it,” he has said. “It’s a plastic ocean now … We’re putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.”

Moore is passionate about continuing to publicize and study the garbage patch, and equally adamant about the solution: changing the way we live, removing disposable plastic from our daily lives. Shut off the supply, he says, and maybe the ocean can begin to heal. But trying to clean up what’s already there? He reserves words such as “impossible” and “bullshit” for that. He’s nothing if not candid.

And there’s Mary Crowley’s inspiration to found Project Kaisei: Moore’s passion, his revelations. And his conviction that cleanup is bullshit. She begs to differ. Moore is half right about his solutions to the problem, she says. “We need to do both.”

M
ARY
C
ROWLEY
is a trim, soft-spoken sixty-one-year-old sailor, her face weathered from years of salt and sea, her gait marred by a slight limp—not from a mishap in her element at sea, she’s quick to say, but from a Christmas shopping expedition. A dark street, an awkward encounter with a curb and arms laden with presents produced a tumble that left her with multiple fractures to ankle and knee. The prognosis from her surgeon: In all likelihood, she wouldn’t walk without a cane again. Capable of only one response to such a pronouncement, Crowley immediately set out to prove her doctors wrong. Months of painful therapy and exercise later, there was no cane for Crowley, no slowing down, no backing down. It’s no different with plastic.

Mary Crowley is a classic “second act” baby boomer. After thirty-two years building a successful career and business, she has seized upon a new passion and pursuit with the same doggedness she applied to physical therapy. Championing the marine side of the ocean-versus-trash dilemma is her second act in life, her opportunity to give something back in the battle against her own 102-ton legacy.

When we spoke, she had just learned of an incident that horrified yet energized her, involving a scientist at a marine mammal center in the San Francisco Bay Area and a young sperm whale, only two year old, that had foundered and died. The scientist performed a necropsy to determine the cause of death, because the whale seemed outwardly healthy. She found 450 pounds of debris, most of it plastic, in the whale’s digestive tract, just taking up space. The whale, its stomach full, had starved to death.

“This is a dreadful story,” Crowley says. “Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual story. If we’re lucky, someday it might be.”

It’s not hard to trace the path that led her to take on this issue and the work of Project Kaisei. Some of her earliest memories of growing up in Chicago are of sailing with her family on Lake Michigan, her father, a state court judge, teaching her and her brother the ins and outs of piloting their small sloop. By age twelve she had devoured a series of books about sailing around the world and had started picturing herself at the helm; by high school graduation, the class yearbook was predicting her most likely career: sea captain. After college and a major in psychology, she moved to Sausalito (where she is still based) and took jobs delivering yachts, sailing the boats to ports all over the world. By twenty-two, she had sailed more miles and visited more ports than she could count. That was when a crew member on a delivery to Tahiti told her about a job he had just accepted teaching aboard a tall ship out of Norway, a floating college program. She, too, ended up signing on to the floating faculty, teaching philosophy, psychology and navigation for a school year while earning her Norwegian seaman’s papers. After that, she worked for five years for the then-new Oceanic Society, a marine environmental protection and exploration group. She ended up directing its expeditions programs, introducing hundreds of people to the sea, to sailing, to conservation and to far-flung destinations—and building a global network of maritime contacts and resources.

In 1979, all of her experiences at sea, in leading expeditions and captaining vessels large and small, culminated in her going into business for herself when she launched Ocean Voyages, her yacht charter and vacation company. Along the way, she married and divorced and had a daughter, Colleen, who sailed all over the world with her while growing up and is now a molecular biologist. And then, she recalls, after years at sea, she began to see the changes. She began to see the tide of trash washing in.

At first she would just talk about it with her fellow captains, grumbling about the pristine places they had long loved to visit that were no longer so pristine. The change was gradual at first, but undeniable, first a little trash here, a little there, then more, then a wave of it. The oceans she sailed thirty years ago, twenty years ago, even ten years ago had not been so trashed as they appeared now, she says. She knew she wanted to do something, but her course of action didn’t crystallize until she grabbed on to the idea of researching the garbage patch with an eye toward finding ways to clean it up. An amorphous and huge problem suddenly became, to her at least, a clearly defined mission. Our health is tied to the health of the ocean—that, she knew, was axiomatic. “This,” she says, “is a matter of survival.”

Crowley partnered with two like-minded friends in founding Project Kaisei—Doug Woodring, an economist based in Hong Kong and expert swimmer and paddler, and George Orbelian, a real estate broker and surfboard designer. Different networks and skills, same love of the ocean: Together they brought in $600,000 in donations and grants to finance the first
Kaisei
expedition, the partnership with Scripps and its research vessel
New Horizon
. With the project’s own science team aboard the
Kaisei
, the two ships together were able to cover twice as much of the gyre as would have been possible for Scripps alone, gathering water samples from more than 3,500 miles over three weeks. The result was a vast amount of data—still being analyzed—with which to begin to map the size and plastic concentrations of the Pacific Garbage Patch, and to measure the ingestion and toxicity of plastic eaten by nocturnal lantern fish and other sea creatures.

Then there was the science of cleanup to be tested, because Crowley wanted the trip to be about solving the problem as much as it was about studying it. This job fell to
Kaisei
’s consulting engineer, inventor Norton Smith, who arrived at the San Diego docks from Jacksonville, Oregon, with four different disassembled prototype plastic capture devices to haul aboard the tall ship. Mimicking nature in his designs, Smith named prototypes The Lagoon, The Beach, Sweep and Pyramid, after the objects or natural features they resembled.

Smith’s design criteria were simple. First, there had to be a complete rethinking of how to capture the plastic. The standard manta tow nets that the two research vessels used to gather water samples and measure plastic concentrations were great scientific tools, but they would be terrible for large-scale cleanup operations because they capture great quantities of sea life. They are indiscriminate. Using that sort of capture would end up wreaking far more havoc than the plastic, killing the very organisms that were supposed to be saved from the dangers of plastic. Second, such a cleanup method would be fabulously expensive, requiring an enormous fleet of ships towing many thousands of nets for years, expending huge amounts of fuel. It would basically require the same energy and resources currently used for fishing, without any of the financial return. It has been suggested that the plastic gathered in this way could be used and even sold as fuel, but Smith’s analysis found that, even assuming a completely efficient operation (an unrealistic assumption at best), only one-hundredth of the fuel needed could be generated from burning the ocean plastic. It would be a losing proposition of unprecedented magnitude, which is why so many smart, concerned people say cleanup is impossible.

The only way around these twin obstacles, Smith concluded, would be through inexpensive, passive plastic gathering devices using common materials and requiring very little expertise to assemble. And once deployed, they would have to be able to do their job without a fuel supply and without being towed by ships, but merely tended once or twice a day while the devices went about their work.

Out in the garbage patch, plastic bits swirling about them, Smith, Crowley and Smith’s niece, Melanie, dove in the water to hook up what turned out to be the most successful of his prototypes, The Beach. In its design, Smith tried to re-create the physics of a typical inclined beach, in which plastic debris is readily washed ashore, but relatively few healthy sea creatures are beached. His device consists of a plywood inclined plane with a leading edge one foot below the water’s surface and a trailing top edge that’s about three inches above the water—basically a five-foot-wide floating boat ramp with plywood walls on either side. The Beach is anchored to a weighted parachute submerged twenty to forty feet below the surface, where currents in the gyre are stronger and tow the device through the water. At the surface, water breaks over the top end of The Beach, where a net is attached to capture the flow.