Students at White Pine Academy in Leslie, Michigan are spreading the word on plastic pollution through sales of a book that they wrote and illustrated themselves. The fourth grade classroom of teacher Elana Waugh has been learning about all aspects of plastics and plastic pollution, taking those lessons and turning them into a story of their own to teach others.

This February, Ms. Waugh had the book published and students sold copies to raise money for the Plastic Pollution Coalition. The book quickly sold out, after students had raised $800 to help end global dependence on disposable plastics and stop plastic pollution. The fourth grade class is also in the running for Disney’s Planet Challenge competition, which challenges classrooms around the country to take on an environmentally focused action project that blends academic standards with technology learning.

Students also used elements from their story in a video, featuring students reading from their book while showcasing their colorful illustrations. Check it out: White Pine Academy Garbage Patch video.

Congratulations to Ms. Waugh’s classroom for putting together such an impressive publication, and thank you for your generous gift to the Plastic Pollution Coalition!

See local news coverage about the project from WLNS channel 6.

Media is sometimes the tail that wags the dog of science.  One oceanographer described finding plastic in his relatively tiny Texas-size study area of the North Pacific Ocean, while another began describing these areas of concentration as “garbage patches”.  A mis-information frenzie birthed a mis-conception of an island of trash.  Hurry, someone plant a flag – sell real estate!  Disappointing to the entrepreneurial spirit that aimed to fix it for a fee, there are no such islands.  They do not exist.  Having traveled 20,000 miles across 4 of the 5 subtropical gyres, returning from crossing the South Atlantic Gyre in December 2010, I assure you that reality is much worse.

It’s a patchy patch. In 1999 Captain Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation based in Long Beach, CA, published an observed 6:1 weight ratio of plastic to plankton in the swirling center of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.  I joined him in 2005 and 2008 to the same region.  In this decade of research, the foundation was heavily criticized by other oceanographers for quantifying plastic this way.  What was hidden in this criticism was the fact that the science of Oceanography was caught off guard.  No one knew of this plastic plague on the world’s oceans, until a Long Beach surfer/sailor turned scientist made it known.  It is true that plankton is extremely variable, and can bloom and dissipate with the season, temperature, moonlight, and a dozen other variables, therefore the margin of error is huge.  But the plastic/plankton ratio serves a good anecdote for relative abundance of plastic to available food for scavenging fish and filter feeders, like from jellies to baleen whales.  So, it’s important to describe plastic to plankton ratios as an anecdote, but not worth quantifying.

1999 was not the first time scientist studied plastic pollution in the ocean.  Thor Heyerdal observed plastic in 1969 crossing the North Atlantic on Ra I.  Two years later Edward Carpenter, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, netted pellets and fragments of plastic pollution between the east coast and Bermuda. Plastic pollution in the North Pacific Gyre was first described by Robert Day in 1989 near the coast of Japan, and in the South Atlantic Gyre near Cape Town, South Africa in 1980 by Robert Morris of the Institute of Oceanographic Science in the UK.  It was a quiet, poorly-understood menace that palled in significance and interest to oceanographers.  Then the story broke about an island of plastic, with sensationalized accounts beyond science, mythological masses of synthetic detritus, an illusive terra aqua.

“Somebody do something,” cried the ocean advocates, artists, celebrities and politicians. And the scientists followed. Media called them to action.  But not before the industrialists.  A problem precedes a solution ready to sell. Groups with little or no experience at sea rose to the occasion with fanciful technofixes, contraptions of grandeur, robotic vagabonds to sieve the sea in solitude and bring the trash back to land, or parachutes that spin sickle-shaped islands that net plastic pollution in their path.  All have failed, realizing that going to the ocean to remove floating plastic particles is like standing on the top of a skyscraper with a vacuum cleaner to remove air pollution.  It’s not impossible, just impractical.  There is no island to retrieve.  We have run expeditions across the North Pacific Gyre, North Atlantic Gyre, Indian Ocean Gyre, and in December 2010 we crossed the South Atlantic Gyre.  We found plastic in every surface trawl, in varying concentrations.  Imagine a handful of degraded plastic confetti spread across a football field of the ocean surface. That’s as thick as it gets, but it’s everywhere.  It’s a think plastic soup over 2/3rds of the earth’s surface.  So far the 5 Gyres Institute has traveled to 4 of the 5 subtropical gyres in the world, conducting over 400 surface trawls, with plastic in every one.   That is the menace of plastic pollution.  It’s everywhere, thinly distributed, and extremely impractical to clean up at sea.

But if no one cleans it up, will the garbage patches keep growing?  No.  Studies in the North Atlantic Gyre and North Pacific Gyre have been repeated with interesting results.  There’s no massive trend in plastic accumulation over time. Kara Lavender Law, of Sea Education, compiled data from 22 years of data from the North Atlantic Gyre, the same area that Carpenter studied 3 ½ decades earlier.   “We observed no strong temporal trends in plastic concentration…”  Last week we returned from 31 days crossing the South Atlantic Gyre.  As we sailed into Cape Town we revisited half of the locations that Morris studied 3 decades ago and repeated his exact methods. Though our samples have not been analyzed yet, I can anecdotally report that the samples do not appear to show a tremendous trend in plastic accumulation over this time.  Sure, there’s more, but the increase does not parallel the rapid increase in plastic production and consumption on land.  So where does it go?  We believe some sinks as absorbed chemicals, like PCBs, PAHs and other persistent pollutants, and biofouling make smaller and smaller particles more dense than seawater.  Much of it washes ashore on islands in the gyres, like Hawaii and Bermuda, or is kicked out of the gyres onto mainland beaches as the gyre’s center wobbles east and west.  Then there’s still room for unknown answers.  What we now know is that if we stop adding more plastic to the ocean, in time the gyres will kick out the plastic pollution they currently hold. If you want to clean the gyre, clean your beach.

We want to know a few things.  How much plastic is out there, what is the fate of plastic in the ocean, what is the impact of plastic pollution on fish, including fisheries we harvest to feed the world, and how do we end the plague of plastic in the ocean? The 5 Gyres Institute will sail across the South Pacific Gyre in the Spring of 2011 from Valdivia, Chile to Easter Island.  You can follow this expedition on 5gyres.org.  In January and February 2011, at the moment I’m writing this paper, we are crossing the South Atlantic Gyre again.  The South Pacific will be our 5th gyre, and provide a snapshot of the global distribution of plastic pollution.  We will also be freezing fish to look for toxins in tissues, which we are currently doing with fish collected from South Atlantic Expedition.  Other expeditions conducted by SCRIPPS, NOAA and Sea Education, are contributing answers to these questions with rigorous science.  All of this will be shared by colleagues in March 2011 in Hawaii during the 5th International Marine Debris Conference.

In the recent decade of rogue-science, media spun mis-information, a new revitalized science of synthetic pollution at sea has emerged, replacing confusion with clarity and commitment by many to solve the problem. The idea of cleanup at sea is no longer a sensible option, knowing that an island twice the size of Texas is actually a thin soup 2/3rds the surface of the planet.  Sensible solutions now focus on preventing the flow of waste to waves in the first place.

Language matters.  In fact, it’s a matter of life and death sometimes.

Captain Charlie Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation recounts the meeting when acceptance of the “marine debris” euphemism took hold among agencies and organizations, on the urging and support of the plastics industry.

By not fully appreciating the power of language, ocean advocates have since adopted and propagated the term.

Now, due to our inability and slowness to adequtely describe and respond to the threat, certain areas of our coasts and oceans have become overwhelmed by plastic.  The stomachs of some of the most spectacular ocean animals are increasingly full of plastic.  Chemicals in plastic are making their way through the food chain, back to us.

As the problems associated with plastic pollution, ranging from dead wildlife, despoiled beaches and human health concerns, continue to expand it makes good sense to get a grip on the language we use to describe both causes and solutions.

The most well-known plasticized area is called the North Pacific Garbage Patch, a continent-size region of the North Pacific Gyre (massive ocean-size currents) far away from most human activities.  Oceanographers now report similar mega-eddies of swirling plastic in each of the ocean’s five major gyres.  This past year a half dozen expeditions have gathered valuable data on this thickening “plastic soup” and countless coastal cleanup efforts have collected and cataloged thousands of tons of plastic washing up on our shores.

Here’s what we know: what’s in our ocean, on our beaches and in our trash cans is almost entirely made of plastic.  Plastic ropes and nets, plastic army men, plastic lighters, plastic lids and caps, plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cigarette filters, plastic syringes, broken plastic toys, endless plastic packaging and billions upon billions of unidentifiable plastic bits smaller than your fingernail.  Samples of everything ever made of plastic can now be found in the ocean.

Yet, one term we often hear used for all this ocean plastic is, somehow, “marine debris”.

Geologists refer to “debris flows” made of moving wet soil and rock.  Ecologists study “forest debris”, naturally occurring accumulation of wood, leaves, sticks, insects and seeds.  According to recycling centers, “yard debris” includes “leaves, weeds, pruning, grass clippings, brush and woody material”. Yard debris does not include “food wastes, household or hazardous wastes, animal waste, plastic or plastic bags…”  Debris “just happens”, it’s not the result of human activity and, as such, is a value neutral word.

So, one would expect “marine debris” to encompass natural, biodegradable material such as driftwood, kelp, leaves and coconuts.  Right?  Wrong.

In fact, NOAA defines marine debris as, “any persistent solid material that is manufactured or processed and directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, disposed of or abandoned into the marine environment or the Great Lakes.”  As stated earlier, the vast majority of that human-made solid material in the marine environment is plastic.

Some organizations and researchers continue to favor the term “marine debris”, as do the American Chemistry Council and plastic industry lobbyists.  From a scientific point of view, the term is inadequately generic and vague in reference to a very specific, egregious environmental reality.

How did we end up with that definition?  How did a common word, debris, most often associated with biodegradable and compostable material become so closely associated with plastic pollution in the ocean?  Could it have been chosen to soften the blame on plastic production?  Was an innocuous sounding term chosen instead of an accurate one?  What’s a better, more accurate term that we could use instead?

The Plastic Pollution Coalition suggests simply calling the stuff what it is, “plastic pollution”.  Since as much as ninety percent of the items removed by volunteers from our beaches and nearly all material found in the gyres is human-made plastic, this is a clean, clear and useful improvement to our vernacular.

Some people prefer to use the phrase “plastic pollution and other solid waste” to reflect non-plastic, human-made contributions such as glass, wood, metal and paper.  The phrase “plastic pollution and ocean refuse” also gets at the core of the problem: all types of trash pollute our ocean.

But there’s no doubt that the phrase “marine debris” is both intentionally and unintentionally misleading.

My recommendation is to jettison the term “marine debris” unless you’re referring to natural, biodegradable materials that have been part of the ocean environment for hundreds of millions of years (logs, sticks, kelp, leaves, coconuts).  Instead, choose the term that does the best, most accurate job of describing the situation at hand.  If plastic is your concern, call it “plastic pollution”.  If it’s a combination of trash items, add “and ocean refuse”.  If coconut husks and driftwood are wreaking havoc on your beach or waterway, call it “marine debris”.

Language matters.  Don’t allow the plastics industry’s chosen language to cover up this growing insult to our planet.

Call plastic pollution, plastic pollution.

This video was premiered on October 24 at a private event in Malibu, California convened by the Plastic Pollution Coalition and hosted by our friends from  The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.  Composer and viola player Christen Lien played ‘15 Aftermaths‘ live, a piece she composed at the age of 15.

These photographs were captured by  Chris Jordan during Midway Journey, an expedition to Midway Atoll to document the effects of plastic pollution on baby albatrosses.  The PPC was a supporter of this effort.  Midway Journey expedition team members Victoria Sloan Jordan, Jan Vozenilek and Bill Weaver joined us for this event.

Poet Victoria Sloan Jordan read a powerful poem she wrote on Midway.  Some of the plastic objects seen inside of these baby albatrosses were displayed during the event.

An HD version (recommended) can be viewed here.

The original quicktime file (103 MB, great for education or events) can be downloaded fron this link.

Christen’s debut album, Battle Cry, is available for sale on her website.

Images and video: Chris Jordan. Music: Christen Lien .

In this interview, Angie Coiro asks Manuel about his recent trip to Midway Atoll with Chris Jordan, which leads to a discussion about plastic pollution in the ocean.   During the talk, Manuel has the opportunity to clarify common misconceptions regarding the possibility of cleaning up the ocean, recycling plastics, or switching to biodegradable plastics.

Manuel says it loud and clear: all of the above are “ways to avoid the question”.  “What we can do now is to stop single-use disposables” made out of plastic.

You can download this MP3 here. Original unedited podcast can be found here.