12/26/2007: "Drowning in Plastic"

By Doris Estabrooks

Although some plastic products are recycled, the great majority of those that have ever been manufactured still exist -- buried in our landfills, polluting our land, or floating in our oceans. Only 50 years since we began mass-producing plastic, our plastic waste has built up into a poisonous mountain we have never really learned how to deal with.

A recent study found that plastics now make up 90% of all floating marine debris. In 2004, the congressional Commission on Ocean Policy identified synthetic marine debris as “a serious threat to wildlife, habitat, and human health and safety,” calling for a set of immediate measures to address the crisis. And the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has found that the amount of micro plastics in the Central North Pacific has tripled in the last decade. Because plastic debris can travel thousands of miles across the sea, shoreline areas worldwide are fast becoming the industrial world’s junkyard.

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Virtually every kind of petroleum-based plastic leaches chemicals into the substances it encounters. Some of the chemicals added to make plastic products more flexible, durable and flame-retardant are thought to affect the development of creatures exposed to them. Plastics also can absorb hazardous synthetic chemicals such as PCBs and pesticides.

Plastics are wreaking biological havoc on marine animals, including sea birds and fish. When animals ingest plastic, their digestive tracts become blocked, leaving them dehydrated and undernourished; in addition, their blood becomes contaminated by the chemicals that are leached into their systems from the plastic. This in turn impacts humans: there is now some level of plastic present in all of the seafood we eat.

The Algalita Foundation reports that each person throws away an average of 185 pounds of plastic every year, and observes that if there’s not a garbage or recycling can nearby, the plastic they discard becomes litter.

It has been said that there is no such thing as complete recovery from an environmental insult. But that’s not to say we shouldn’t try!