Midway. The State of the World

Plastic on the Beach

From The Japan Times:

Umbrella handles. Pens. Popsicle sticks. Lots and lots of toothbrushes. These are just a few of the items that make up the approximately 13 million sq. km Eastern Garbage Patch, an immense plastic soup in the Pacific Ocean that starts about 800 km off the coast of California and extends westward. Sucked from the coasts of Asia and America by ocean currents, or discarded at sea, plastic debris accumulates there in an ever-growing mass that does not biodegrade and is said to be already larger than the United States.

Scientists have long known that plastic in the garbage patch and elsewhere is stuffing the stomachs of seabirds and causing them to starve, suffocating fish and choking marine turtles.

But what is now becoming clear is that when pieces of plastic meet other pollutants in the ocean, the results can be even more toxic. That's because, as a growing number of studies are showing, the plastic debris absorbs harmful chemicals from the seawater it floats in, acting like a "pollution sponge" that concentrates those chemicals and poses a different, more insidious threat to marine and other life.

Evidence of the problem can be found as close to home as Tokyo Bay. That's where Hideshige Takada, a professor of organic geochemistry at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology — and one of the world's leading researchers on the interaction between plastic garbage and chemicals in the ocean — headed one windy morning this February to collect samples for his studies.

Looking like a grown-up version of the children collecting seashells nearby, Takada, 49, knelt with his nose centimeters from the sand, a pair of tweezers in one hand and a foil bag in the other. The object of his search was not shells, however, but plastic resin pellets — a form of marine plastic pollution he's been studying since 1998.

It's easy to overlook plastic resin pellets. Ranging in diameter from 1 mm to 5 mm, and in color from clear to dingy brown, they look a lot like overgrown sand. And, like sand, they're now found on beaches all around the world.

According to Charles Moore — a U.S. sea captain-turned-researcher who discovered the Eastern Garbage Patch in 1997 while crossing the Doldrums, a windless part of the ocean that mariners usually avoid — resin pellets account for around 8 percent of annual oil production and are the raw material for the 260 million tons of plastic the world uses each year (they're also used in smaller quantities for purposes such as cleaning pachinko balls and stuffing teddy bears). Lightweight, small, and seemingly harmless, they escape in untold volumes during transport and manufacture and eventually wash into the ocean. Once there, as a 2001 paper by Takada, colleague Yukie Mato and four other Japanese researchers first showed, they suck up a range of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).

Specifically, the 2001 paper focused on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a highly toxic group of industrial chemicals, and DDE, a degraded form of the pesticide DDT. Though PCBs are now banned, and in most countries DDT use is restricted, neither breaks down readily and both are still present in seawater. Additionally, these toxins have been found to accumulate on the seabed, where storms frequently stir them back into the water, rendering them again liable to be gobbled up by floating plastic debris.


Both PCBs and DDE have been proven to disrupt the endocrine system, the extremely sensitive set of glands and hormones that regulate functions such as insulin production, metabolism and sexual development. And now, they're showing up in plastic garbage that acts as a magnet to leach them out of the marine soup.

"Chemicals like PCBs and DDE are very hydrophobic," explains Takada. "That means they have a very high affinity for oily materials. Basically, plastics are solid oil. Therefore, plastic pellets accumulate hydrophobic pollutants with a concentration factor that's almost 1 million times (compared to the overall concentration of the chemicals in seawater)."

Takada uses pellets in his research because they are a uniform size and shape and therefore easy to study and compare. But he says that other types of plastic debris — which comprise a greater proportion of the plastic in the ocean and include everything from discarded fishing gear to stray shopping bags and fast-food cartons — display the same tendency as the pellets to absorb toxins....

What happens next to this poison-laden debris is less certain. Some pieces certainly sink to the deep ocean floor or are washed up on beaches. Others, however, have been found in the stomachs of sea creatures, including fish, birds, marine mammals and reptiles. Scientists believe some animals may actively select the pellets because they resemble fish eggs.


Whether the chemicals contained in them are then desorbed to digestive fluids and transferred to tissues in quantities significant enough to harm the animals that have eaten them is the subject of intense, but as yet incomplete, research.

That, though, doesn't stop some scientists from worrying.

"We should be very concerned," says Theo Colborn, founder of The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX), a U.S.- based organization that focuses on the health effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Though these health effects are still the topic of much debate, she says a host of scientific studies have shown that even low-level exposure to endocrine disrupters may be linked to attention- deficit disorder, diabetes, falling fertility rates and more.

Hence Colborn is concerned that if fish eat toxic plastic, those same toxins may be absorbed into the bodies of people who eat the fish. "Endocrine-disrupting chemicals could also interfere with the ability of fish to reproduce," she adds.

Meanwhile, at the same time as plastic garbage is acting like a sponge for environmental pollution, research also shows it is releasing another set of chemicals into seawater — and possibly into the bodies of the creatures that eat it.

Chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA), nonylphenol and octylphenol are added to plastic for purposes such as fireproofing and stabilizing. But many of these additives are proven endocrine disrupters or carcinogens, and studies have shown beyond doubt that over time they can leach into seawater (just as they leach into drinking water kept in plastic containers).

It may be tempting to think of all these pollutants as literally drops in the ocean. Not so says sea captain Charles Moore, who has been studying the Eastern Garbage Patch since 1997 through the California-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization he founded.

"Subtropical gyres (areas of circular motion) make up 40 percent of the ocean. That's 25 percent of the globe. All of them are accumulators of debris," he says.

In other words, although the Eastern Garbage Patch has been studied the most so far, it isn't the only oceanic rubbish dump out there. A Western Garbage Patch also exists several hundred kilometers off the coast of Japan, connected to the Eastern Garbage Patch by a "superhighway" of garbage, says Moore. In addition, he points to four more vortex-like gyres scattered around the globe.

"IBM invents Earth-friendly plastic made from plants"

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – IBM researchers on Tuesday said they have discovered a way to make Earth-friendly plastic from plants that could replace petroleum-based products tough on the environment.

The breakthrough promises biodegradable plastics made in a way that saves on energy, according to Chandrasekhar "Spike" Narayan, a manager of science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center in Northern California.

Almaden and Stanford University researchers said the discovery could herald an era of sustainability for a plastics industry rife with seemingly eternal products notorious for cramming landfills and littering the planet.

"This discovery and new approach using organic catalysts could lead to well-defined, biodegradable molecules made from renewable resources in an environmentally responsible way," IBM said in a release.

The "green chemistry" breakthrough using "organic catalysts" results in plastics that could be repeatedly recycled, instead of only once as is the case with petroleum-based plastic made using metal oxide catalysts.

Plant plastics could also be made "biocompatible" to improve the targeting of drugs in bodies, such as cancer medicines aimed at killing cancer cells but sparing healthy ones, according to IBM.

"We're exploring new methods of applying technology and our expertise in materials science to creating a sustainable, environmentally sound future," said Almaden lab research director Josephine Cheng...

Plant plastics for things such as car parts could be made at lower costs than petroleum-based plastics while materials of soda bottle quality are "competitive," according to Narayan.

Details of the work are in a paper published this week in the American Chemical Society journal Macromolecules.

"The world's rubbish dump... from Hawaii to Japan"

From the Independent.UK:

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.

"Jellyfish Ingesting Plastic"

From the Epoch Times:

SAN FRANCISCO—Green plastic netting entangled in a derelict piece of rope and other plastic debris moving slowly along the ocean surface are inhabited by crabs, barnacles, and sea anemones taking a free ride carried by the currents of the North Pacific Ocean. These materials comprise just a small piece of a massive plastic pile-up beneath the waves.

The random clumps of plastic litter that a group of California scientists found in the Pacific Ocean, just 1,000 miles off of the California coast and about the same distance north of Hawaii is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

“It’s very upsetting for all of us to see the amount of plastic we were collecting,” said Mary T. Crowley, the founder of Ocean Voyages Institute, at a press conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. She had just returned from an exploration of the vortex of floating plastic garbage.

The problem, according to the scientists, is that much of the plastic has already broken down under the ultraviolet rays from the sun and is now spread over a vast area as molecular strains that are impossible to detect with the naked eye or satellites....

Anything floating away from the west coast of North America or the East Coast of Asia is captured in the currents of the North Pacific Ocean and begins to turn slowly clockwise, according to scientists.

On one occasion, scientists pulled out of the garbage-littered ocean water large quantities of jelly fish and pieces of plastic mixed together, which made the scientists realize that a lot of the sea life may be ingesting the plastic.

“You could see pieces of plastic inside and outside the jellyfish, and you could see the jellyfish ingesting the plastic,” says Crowley in one video filmed during the August mission.

A second ship was launched from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego early last month aided the Kaisei. The New Horizon ship, was funded by a $600,000 grant from the University of California. With a crew of 20 graduate students, the Horizon sailed off to measure the size of the patch and its effects on wildlife throughout the food chain...

“I really feel that oceans are the blue heart of our planet, and the ocean currents are the veins that are now getting clogged with plastic,” Crowley said.

Different fragments of plastic often turn up in the bellies of marine mammals, and fish, and a study cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that more than 100,000 marine mammals die as a result of trash each year.

In her blog posted Sunday, Crowley said, "We all know that plastic lasts. There is no away when we throw plastics away. Every bit of plastic made is still on the planet."

"Plastics in oceans...release hazardous chemicals"

From the American Chemical Society:

In the first study to look at what happens over the years to the billions of pounds of plastic waste floating in the world’s oceans, scientists are reporting that plastics — reputed to be virtually indestructible — decompose with surprising speed and release potentially toxic substances into the water.

Reporting here today at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the researchers termed the discovery “surprising.” Scientists always believed that plastics in the oceans were unsightly, but a hazard mainly to marine animals that eat or become ensnared in plastic objects.

“Plastics in daily use are generally assumed to be quite stable,” said study lead researcher Katsuhiko Saido, Ph.D. “We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.”

He said that polystyrene begins to decompose within one year, releasing components that are detectable in the parts-per-million range. Those chemicals also decompose in the open water and inside marine life. However, the volume of plastics in the ocean is increasing, so that decomposition products remain a potential problem.

Saido, a chemist with the College of Pharmacy, Nihon University, Chiba, Japan, said his team found that when plastic decomposes it releases potentially toxic bisphenol A (BPA) and PS oligomer into the water, causing additional pollution. Plastics usually do not break down in an animal’s body after being eaten. However, the substances released from decomposing plastic are absorbed and could have adverse effects. BPA and PS oligomer are sources of concern because they can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and can seriously affect reproductive systems.

Some studies suggest that low-level exposure to BPA released from certain plastic containers and the linings of cans may have adverse health effects.

Saido described a new method to simulate the breakdown of plastic products at low temperatures, such as those found in the oceans. The process involves modeling plastic decomposition at room temperature, removing heat from the plastic and then using a liquid to extract the BPA and PS oligomer. Typically, he said, Styrofoam is crushed into pieces in the ocean and finding these is no problem. But when the study team was able to degrade the plastic, it discovered that three new compounds not found in nature formed. They are styrene monomer (SM), styrene dimer (SD) and styrene trimer (ST). Styrene is a suspected human carcinogen. BPA ands PS oligomer are not found naturally and, therefore, must have been created through the decomposition of the plastic, he said. Trimer yields SM and SD when it decomposes from heat, so trimer also threatens living creatures.

Funding for Saido’s research came from Nihon University.

"UN (official) calls for global ban on plastic bags"

From Mongabay:

The UN’s top environmental official called for a global ban on plastic bags yesterday. "Single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere. There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program.

Steiner’s call comes after the U.N. Environment Program released a comprehensive report on litter in the world’s ocean, which identified plastic as the most common form of ocean litter. When plastic enters the marine food -chain it can devastate marine life and even affect humans when they consume seafood that have eaten plastic debris.

The plastic problem is so bad that a floating island of plastic debris has been discovered in the northern Pacific which is double the size of the United States.

China and Bangladesh have both banned plastic bags, while Ireland has reduced plastic bag consumption by 90 percent by levying a fee on each bag. Such measures have only just reached the United States: San Francisco is the only city to ban plastic bags, although Los Angeles will have a ban in place next year. New York City rejected such a fee on bags last year, but Washington D.C. is considering a 5-cent-fee this week.

I noticed plastic bags and pop bottles floating done the Ohio river when I was in Louisville last weekend.

Mission To Retrieve & Recycle Pacific Plastic Soup

From the TimesOnline.co.uk:

A high-seas mission departs from San Francisco next month to map and explore a sinister and shifting 21st-century continent: one twice the size of Texas and created from six million tonnes of discarded plastic.

Scientists and conservationists on the expedition will begin attempts to retrieve and recycle a monument to throwaway living in the middle of the North Pacific.

The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Navigators usually avoid oceanic gyres because persistent high-pressure systems — also known as the doldrums — lack the winds and currents to benefit sailors.

Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one.

The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals.

“You can buy certified organic farm produce, but no fishmonger on earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is our legacy,” said Mr Moore.

Because of their tiny size and the scale of the problem, he believes that nothing can be solved at sea. “Trying to clean up the Pacific gyre would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went.”

In June the 151ft brigantine Kaisei (Japanese for Planet Ocean) will unfurl its sails in San Francisco to try to prove Mr Moore wrong. Project Kaisei’s flagship will be joined by a decommissioned fishing trawler armed with specialised nets.

“The trick is collecting the plastic while minimising the catch of sea life. We can’t catch the tiny pieces. But the net benefit of getting the rest out is very likely to be better than leaving it in,” says Doug Woodring, the leader of the project.

With a crew of 30, the expedition, supported by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Brita, the water company, will use unmanned aircraft and robotic surface explorers to map the extent and depth of the plastic continent while collecting 40 tonnes of the refuse for trial recycling....

"Drowning in plastic..."

...The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France

From the Telegraph.co.uk:

There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?

Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.

It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.

For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.

'It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,' says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. 'Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn't identify. It wasn't a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.'

Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn't even close. 'We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,' he says. 'No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.'

So ended Moore's retirement. He turned his small volunteer environmental monitoring group into the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, enlisted scientists, launched public awareness campaigns and devoted all his considerable energies to exploring what would become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and studying the broader problem of marine plastic pollution, which is accumulating in all the world's oceans.

The world's navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in
the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land, and the United Nations Environmental Programme agrees.

The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source.

Plastic does not biodegrade; no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across.

Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.

During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids' tears. You can find nurdles in abundance on almost any seashore in Britain, where litter has increased by 90 per cent in the past 10 years, or on the remotest uninhabited Pacific islands, along with all kinds of other plastic confetti.

'There's no such thing as a pristine sandy beach any more,' Charles Moore says. 'The ones that look pristine are usually groomed, and if you look closely you can always find plastic particles. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until you dig a foot down. On Pagan Island [between Hawaii and the Philippines] they have what they call the "shopping beach". If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of all the plastic trash that's washed up there from thousands of miles away.'

On Midway Island, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan, the British wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found that many thousands of Laysan albatross chicks are dying every year from eating pieces of plastic that their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.

Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles.

A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.

Plastic particles are not thought to be toxic themselves but they attract and accumulate chemical poisons already in the water such as DDT and PCBs – nurdles have a special knack for this. Plastic has been found inside zooplankton and filter-feeders such as mussels and barnacles; the worry is that these plastic pellets and associated toxins are travelling through the marine food chains into the fish on our plates. Scientists don't know because they are only just beginning to study it.

We do know that whales are ingesting plenty of plastic along with their plankton, and that whales have high concentrations of DDT, PCBs and mercury in their flesh, but that's not proof. The whales could be getting their toxins directly from the water or by other vectors.

Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are six major subtropical gyres in the world's oceans – their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earth's surface – and that they are all accumulating plastic soup...

When Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist, started tinkering around in his garage in Yonkers, New York, working on the first synthetic polymer, who could have foreseen that a hundred years later plastic would outweigh plankton six-to-one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

Baekeland was trying to mimic shellac, a natural polymer secreted by the Asian scale beetle and used at the time to coat electrical wires. In 1909 he patented a mouldable hard plastic that he called Bakelite, and which made him very rich indeed.

Chemists were soon experimenting with variations, breaking down the long hydrocarbon chains in crude petroleum into smaller ones and mixing them together, adding chlorine to get PVC, introducing gas to get polystyrene. Nylon was invented in 1935 and found its first application in stockings, and then after the Second World War came acrylics, foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, Plexi glass and more: an incredible outpouring of new plastic products and the revolution of clear plastic food wraps and containers...

Single-use plastic bags first appeared in the US in 1957 and in British supermarkets in the late 1960s; worldwide there are more than a trillion manufactured every year, although the upward trend is now levelling off and falling in many countries, including Britain. We reduced our plastic bag use by 26 per cent last year, to 9.9 billion. Bottled water entered the mass market in the mid-1980s. Global consumption is now 200 billion litres a year and only one in five of those plastic bottles is recycled. The total global production of plastic, which was five million tons in the 1950s, is expected to hit 260 million tons this year...

The stuff is absolutely ubiquitous, forming the most basic infrastructure of modern consumer society...

The benefits of plastic, most of which relate to convenience, consumer choice and profit, have been phenomenal. But except for the small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic that has ever been manufactured is still somewhere in the environment, and some 100 million tons of it are floating in the oceans.

A dead albatross was found recently with a piece of plastic from the 1940s in its stomach. Even if plastic production halted tomorrow, the planet would be dealing with its environmental consequences for thousands of years, and on the bottom of the oceans, where an estimated 70 per cent of marine plastic debris ends up – water bottles sink fairly quickly – for tens of thousands of years. It may form a layer in the geological record of the planet, or some microbe may evolve that can digest plastic and find itself supplied with a vast food resource...

What we cannot do is clean up the plastic in the oceans. 'It's the biggest misunderstanding people have on this issue,' Moore says. 'They think the ocean is like a lake and we can go out with nets and just clean it up. People find it difficult to grasp the true size of the oceans and the fact that most of this plastic is in tiny pieces and it's everywhere. All we can do is stop putting more of it in, and that means redesigning our relationship with plastic.'

...For consumers, the easiest way to make a difference is to give up plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles, which contribute more to plastic pollution than any other products. Then comes plastic packaging, which is a little more complicated. It is easy to point out examples of excessive packaging, but plastic does have the virtue of being lighter than paper, cardboard and glass, which gives it a smaller carbon footprint. For food especially, recyclable plastic packaging is probably the best option...

"State panel recommends strict measures to reduce plastic marine debris in California"

LAtimes

In a report to be release next week, the Ocean Protection Council advocates banning plastic foam cups and plastic bags, items that often end up in coastal waters and on beaches.

California's leaders should ban smoking on beaches, forbid fast-food joints from distributing polystyrene cups and containers and require markets to recycle plastic bags or ban them outright as part of an aggressive campaign to reduce plastic marine debris.

These and dozens of other recommendations are included in a report to be released next week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Ocean Protection Council, a policy body designed to coordinate the patchwork of local efforts to protect California's waters and beaches.

Some of the recommendations would compel the state to catch up with coastal cities that are outlawing single-use plastic containers and plastic supermarket bags.

"We need to charge forward and have an overarching policy that is no less vigorous than these cities'," said Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who was instrumental in ordering the report when he was a member of the council.

Some recommendations in the 23-page report could push California to the forefront of the anti-plastic litter campaign, by regulating toxic chemicals used in plastics and going after litterbugs more aggressively.

Besides the traditional public education campaigns, the report recommends attaching redemption fees or punitive charges to items that commonly wind up in coastal waters and on beaches.

Notably, the report says, bottles with monetary redemptions are rarely found amid the debris.

"The debris that is found on our beaches has no value," the report said. "There are costs associated with cleaning up litter, and there is no financial incentive to the individual who caused it to do otherwise."

Meanwhile, plastic bags, which are often free and can't be redeemed, make up 25% of the tonnage of debris scooped each year from storm drains in Los Angeles.

The council's report suggests toughening enforcement of anti-litter laws and increasing fines to $2,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for subsequent infractions....

An estimated 19 billion plastic bags are distributed in California each year. Fewer than 5% are recycled...

Bottled water "debate"

I thought the debate was over. Bottled water is a waste of plastic that fills landfills unnecessarily - and is often the same as tap water - which it supposedly replaces. ...

Story on Yahoo...

A debate over water is boiling over in the United States and elsewhere amid growing environmental concerns about bottled water and questions about safety of tap water.

The US Conference of Mayors in June passed a resolution calling for a phasing out of bottled water by municipalities and promotion of the importance of public water supplies.

While largely symbolic, the vote highlighted a growing movement opposing regular use of bottled water because of its plastic waste and energy costs to transport drinking supplies.

Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, cites a "backlash against bottled water as more people are realizing what they get out of the bottles is not any better than what they get out of the faucet."

The Pacific Institute, a California think thank on sustainability issues, contends that producing bottles for US water consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil in 2006, not including the energy for transportation.

The group says bottling water for Americans produces more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide and consumes three liters of water for each liter of bottled water produced.

The debate in the US mirrors that taking place worldwide in places such as Paris; Liverpool, England; Florence, Italy; Vancouver, Canada. According to the EPI, the issue making waves among policymakers in locations including Denmark and New South Wales, Australia, among others.

The backlash comes even amid surging sales of bottled water in the United States. Some of this is linked to concerns about contamination of public water supplies, although critics of the industry say marketing hype is a greater factor.

Aficionados of Evian from France or Fiji from the South Pacific swear by the taste and health benefits of those waters, but others decry the high cost of energy for a product that may not be any better than local water.

A Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that "most of the tested waters were found to be of high quality (but) some brands were contaminated."

The group said bottled waters "are subject to less rigorous testing and purity standards than those which apply to city tap water."

In fact, says the group "about one-fourth of bottled water is actually bottled tap water" while government rules "allow bottlers to call their product 'spring water' even though it may be brought to the surface using a pumped well, and it may be treated with chemicals."

Americans drank about 8.8 billion gallons (33 billion liters) of packaged water in 2007, or 15 percent of their total liquid intake, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp. Per capita bottled US water consumption is up to 29 gallons (109 liters) per year, from 20 gallons in 2002.

The US is the largest consumer of bottled water, but on a per capita basis it ranks far behind Italy, the leader which consumes nearly twice as much, and others such as the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and France....

Beyond questions of safety and environment, some activists say the bottled water industry is seizing a public resource.

In the northeast state of Maine, a battle is brewing over access to a large aquifer by Poland Spring, a large US bottler owned by Swiss-based Nestle.

"Nestle's water grab is ruining streams, ponds, wells and aquifers," said Judy Grant of the activist group Corporate Accountability.

"Nestle's practices are raising serious questions about who should be allowed to control water, our most essential resource, and to what end."

"China Sacks Plastic Bags"

Scientific American

SHANGHAI—Thin plastic bags are used for everything in China and the Chinese use up to three billion of them a day--an environmentally costly habit picked up by shopkeepers and consumers in the late 1980s for convenience over traditional cloth bags. Fruit mongers weigh produce in them, tailors stuff shirts into them, even street food vendors plunk their piping hot wares directly into see-through plastic bags that do nothing to protect one's hands from being burned or coated in hot grease. They even have a special name for the plastic bags found blowing, hanging and floating everywhere from trees to rivers: bai si wu le, or "white pollution," for the bags' most common color.

Yet, the Chinese government is set to ban the manufacture and force shopkeepers to charge for the distribution of bags thinner than 0.025 millimeters thick as of June 1—and no one seems prepared. "I don't know what we'll do," Zhang Gui Lin, a tailor at Shanghai's famous fabric market, tells me through a translator. "I guess our shopping complex will figure it out and tell us what to buy to use as bags."

His wife adds: "Maybe it will be like this," tugging a thicker mesh orange plastic bag she is using to carry some shoes. Such thicker bags may prove one replacement for the ubiquitous thinner versions.

The clothes makers are not alone. "I don't know actually," says a vendor of Chinese tamales, known as zong si, who declined to give her name. "I'm sure the government will come up with a solution. Maybe people will just eat it [the zong si directly.]"

The Chinese government is banning production and distribution of the thinnest plastic bags in a bid to curb the white pollution that is taking over the countryside. The bags are also banned from all forms of public transportation and "scenic locations." The move may save as much as 37 million barrels of oil currently used to produce the plastic totes, according to China Trade News. Already, the nation's largest producer of such thin plastic bags, Huaqiang, has shut down its operations...

"Floating rubbish dump... 'bigger than US'"

It has been described as the world's largest rubbish dump, or the Pacific plastic soup, and it is starting to alarm scientists. It is a vast area of floating plastic debris.

It is a vast area of plastic debris and other flotsam drifting in the northern Pacific Ocean, held there by swirling ocean currents.

Discovered in 1997 by American sailor Charles Moore, what is also called the great Pacific garbage patch is now alarming some with its ever-growing size and possible impact on human health.

The "patch" is in fact two huge, linked areas of circulating rubbish, says Dr Marcus Eriksen, research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, founded by Moore.

Although the boundaries change, it stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the northern Pacific to near the coast of Japan.

The islands of Hawaii are placed almost in the middle, so piles of plastic regularly wash up on some beaches there.

"The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup," Dr Eriksen says.

"It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States," he says.

The concentration of floating plastic debris just beneath the ocean's surface is the product of underwater currents, which conspire to bring together all the junk that accumulates in the Pacific Ocean.

Moore, an oceanographer who has made the study of the patch his full-time occupation, believes there is about 100 million tonnes of plastic circulating in the northern Pacific - or about 2.5 per cent of all plastic items made since 1950.

About 20 per cent of the junk is thought to come from marine craft, while the rest originates from countries around the Pacific like Mexico and China...

Historically, flotsam in the gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics do not break down like other oceanic debris, meaning objects half a century old have been found in the North Pacific Gyre.

Instead the plastic slowly photodegrades, becoming brittle and disintegrating into smaller and smaller pieces which enter the food chain and end up in the stomachs of birds and other animals.

Because the plastic is translucent and lies just beneath the surface, it is apparently undetectable by satellite photos.

If the waste is to be controlled people must stop using unnecessary disposable plastics, otherwise it is set to double in size during the next 10 years, Moore warns.

Dr Eriksen said the small plastic particles acted like a sponge to trap many dangerous man-made chemicals that found their way into the ocean, like hydrocarbons and DDT.

"What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate, It is that simple," Dr Eriksen said.

"Paper, Plastic or "Bioplastic?"

From the Christian Science Monitor - by way of CBSnews.com - by Tony Azios

Paper, plastic ... or biodegradable? Yes, get ready to add a third option at the grocery store checkout line as biodegradable plastics enter the mainstream consumer market.

It is hard to imagine that the plastic grocery bag made its debut only 30 years ago. But now, even in Antarctica, scientists regularly find them blowing about.

The problem is that, unlike many other overnight sensations, plastics stick around. It can take roughly 1,000 years for some petroleum-based plastics to disintegrate. And when they do disintegrate, traditional plastics leave behind a messy legacy of fragments and chemical residues that get absorbed into streams and soil. In the meantime, they clog landfills and rivers, or kill whales and sea turtles that mistake them for food. With up to 1 trillion plastic bags manufactured annually and 2.7 million tons of plastic used just to bottle water each year, concern is rising worldwide.

Enter bioplastics, designed to degrade into an ecofriendly mix of water, carbon dioxide, and biomass. While biodegradable plastics have been introduced before in the past 20 years, they have failed to achieve widespread use due to their inferior strength and higher cost. But this is changing, says Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) in New York City....

Currently, both companies' products are primarily made of modified corn feedstock, as opposed to petroleum byproducts. Ultimately, the natural polymers biodegrade as microorganisms consume them. While this source of plastic seems earth friendly, some environmentalists say the footprint of corn cultivation should be considered.

"Corn, overall, is very energy intensive, requiring a considerable amount of fertilizer and gasoline to produce and transport each bushel," says Janet Larsen, research director of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. "The nitrogen-rich fertilizer then often becomes runoff in streams, rivers, and oceans, creating algal blooms that kill marine life."

Using feedstock for plastic further exacerbates record high corn prices, says Ms. Larsen, adding that corn supplies are already stretched thin by demands for food and ethanol. "This should make society ask, 'Do we really want to be turning food into plastic?'"

..."There is a widespread confusion that all [bioplastics] are made from renewable resources and that all of them are biodegradable," says BPI's Mojo. "Not all plastics made from renewable resources are biodegradable, and not all that are biodegradable are based on natural resources."

Mojo, who works closely with the American Society for Testing and Materials International to develop specifications for products that biodegrade in various environments, says that "the industry is in its infancy" and work is being done to develop more uniformity in composting and recyclability. "We will see more bioplastics in the next five to 10 years as technology advances, and we will see visible improvements in strength, cost, and degradability," he adds.

In the meantime, Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute suggests the environmentally conscious choose a fourth option at the checkout line: "We would do better to bring our own canvas bags shopping or buy reusable water bottles and move away from the throwaway mentality that one-time use products afford us."

"Bio-plastic production coming to Seymour" (IN)

ereplast, a designer and manufacturer of bio-based plastic resin, announced today it will locate what is billed as the world’s largest bio-based plastic resin manufacturing and distribution facility in Seymour, creating up to 200 new jobs.

The Hawthorne, Calif. company designs, manufactures and distributes plastic resin based on plant starches instead of petroleum.

It will initially invest more than $7 million to equip an existing 100,000-square-foot industrial building, the Indiana Economic Development Corp. said in a news release.

"Cereplast is exactly the kind of business that we’re most interested in attracting. A unique company like this that has market-changing possibilities and the potential for rapid growth is a big win for Indiana," said Gov. Mitch Daniels in a statement.

The six-year-old company manufactures two families of plastic resins based on biopolymers and mixtures of plant starches.

Its Cereplast Compostables product line, which has earned certification as biodegradable and compostable in the United States and Europe, replaces 100 percent of the petroleum-based additives found in traditional plastics with renewable, plant-based starches.

Its Cereplast Hybrid Resins replaces half or more of the petroleum-based content in plastic resin with bio-based compounds such as cornstarch or tapioca starch.

The IEDC offered Cereplast up to $665,000 in performance-based tax credits and up to $60,000 in training grants based on the company’s job creation plans.

Indiana will provide Seymour with a grant of up to $200,000 to assist in off-site infrastructure improvements needed to serve the new facility.

Eco Plastic Formed with Water & Plantsc

By Tom Shelley @ hemp-resource.com

By grinding up natural cellulose-containing materials with water, it is possible to produce a mouldable polymer. It can be made from a wide range of normally waste materials, and spray moulded or formed into commercial products with mechanical properties similar to those of hard wood. The material contains no toxic materials and is completely recyclable, sustainable and biodegradable.

The first commercial factory producing the material in bulk goes on stream this month. The Zelfo process was invented in Europe in 1992 and patented in early 2000 by an Austrian team now based in New South Wales in Australia. The principle inventor was Martin Ernegg, now the company’s technical director.

It relies on the fact that wet cellulose fibres stick to each other, as in the manufacture of paper and papier maché. “The material is cost effective in some specific applications,” says managing director Paul Benhaim. “Our current business model means Zelfo is best suited for objects with runs of 1 to 10,000 – any more than that, and regular plastics usually beat us.”

The material cannot be injection moulded, but can be formed using relatively low cost tooling – hence its suitability for short to medium production runs. The cellulose-containing material is ground up with water and optional natural additives, such as plant-based pigments. The material may then be spray moulded or pressed to shape. Several moulding processes can be used, which may involve pressure and interim drying and reshaping, according to the product being manufactured. A pre-coating may be applied after which the moulding is dried slowly to the required density and stiffness.
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This could be good stuff for my "planet" making. I would like to find something other than the acylic polymers that I use.

"Scientists issue warning about chemical in plastic"

By Marla Cone / From The LA Times

In an unusual effort targeting a single chemical, several dozen scientists on Thursday issued a strongly worded consensus statement warning that an estrogen-like compound in plastic is likely to be causing an array of serious reproductive disorders in people.

The compound, bisphenol A or BPA, is one of the highest-volume chemicals in the world and has found its way into the bodies of most human beings.

Used to make hard plastic, BPA can seep from beverage containers and other materials. It is used in all polycarbonate plastic baby bottles, as well as other rigid plastic items, including large water cooler containers, sports bottles and microwave oven dishes, along with canned food liners and some dental sealants for children.

The scientists -- including four from federal health agencies -- reviewed about 700 studies before concluding that people are exposed to levels of the chemical exceeding those that harm lab animals. Infants and fetuses are most vulnerable, they said.

The statement, published online by the journal Reproductive Toxicology, was accompanied by a new study by researchers from the National Institutes of Health finding uterine damage in newborn animals exposed to BPA. That damage is a possible predictor of reproductive diseases in women, including fibroids, endometriosis, cystic ovaries and cancers. It is the first time BPA has been linked to female reproductive tract disorders, although earlier studies have found early-stage prostate and breast cancer and decreased sperm counts in animals exposed to low doses.

The scientists' statement and new study -- along with five accompanying scientific reviews that summarize the 700 studies -- intensify a highly contentious debate over whether the plastic compound poses a public threat. So far no governmental agency here or abroad has restricted its use.

Uganda Bans Plastic Bags

From the BBC

This weekend Uganda joins the growing number of East African countries which have banned the plastic bag in an attempt to clean up cities and prevent environmental damage including blocked drains.

Before your eyes become accustomed to the sight and the stench, the Chitezi municipal dump - which serves the Ugandan capital, Kampala - is like a scene from a painting by Bosch, a premonition of the Apocalypse, or a vision of Hell.

High in the sky, great birds wheel around on the thermals. At first glance, they look like giant vultures, casting ominous shadows on the ragged human scavengers strewn around below.

But as they touch down on the grey, stinking moonscape, they seem to take on a ghastly sub-human form themselves. Like cowled priests bent over the rotting piles.

With their moth-eaten plumage, grotesque "alopecia-ed" heads, and sinister reptilian eyes, these are Africa's nightmare birds - marabou storks - fencing with their murderous bills over the carcass of a plastic sack they have ripped apart.

Flocking here in their hundreds, the ravenous birds are making a feast of Kampala's refuse, squabbling with their human competitors over the richest pickings...

Here they are called buveera, and they are everywhere.

Only a tiny fraction of them end up at Chitezi. Instead, once discarded, they are blown in the wind, washed into drains and water courses and eventually ground into the earth.

Uganda is blessed with some of the richest soil in Africa, but around the towns and villages it is laced with plastic.

New strata are forming - a layer cake of polythene and poisoned soil, through which Uganda's rains can never percolate.

Instead, dotted around Chitezi are stagnant pools where even the storks will not drink. Their fetid waters bubble with the methane brewing beneath them.

In the slums and shanties buveera are breeding grounds for disease.

With no mains water and no sewerage system, the bags are used as toilets. Flying latrines they are called, because when you have filled them, you throw them as far away as you can.

And when the rains come and wash them out there is a good chance that some little boy or girl sent on an errand will see a bag in the street and use it again, to carry firewood or maybe food...

After a fair amount of stalling, the government has just announced that from 1 July the manufacture, import and use of plastic bags thinner than 30 microns will be banned. All other polythene will be subject to a whopping 120% tax....

With disarming frankness, the country's environment minister, Jesca Eriyo, confessed to me that she was embarrassed by her capital city's lamentable standards of waste management; by Chitezi; by its sea of polythene, and its flying latrines.

Now, at last, they could all be headed for the exit door. And not just in Uganda. Neighbouring Kenya is introducing similar legislation. Tanzania wants to go even further and ban plastic drinks containers as well.

Despite its problems and its poverty, East Africa is blazing a trail which many in prosperous Middle England can only dream of following.

And the people I spoke to - the minister, the pop star, the shopkeepers of Kampala, or Ezekiel at the dump - all seemed happy to be pioneers in a post polythene age.

As one man in a corner shop put it: "Good riddance, who asked for all this plastic in the first place?"