For years Dianna’s medium was discarded brightly colored plastic bags. As she saw how they slowly broke down in her artwork, she realized how they were breaking down and polluting the environment. Her education inspired her motivation to make a difference. She quickly learned that cleaning up the gyres is not the answer—it’s a drop in the bucket. The real solution is to turn off the faucet—to stop the rushing flow of plastic pollution we are all creating every day.

She stresses that the plastic pollution that is in the middle of the ocean starts very close to home. “I’m concerned about the gyre of plastic in the supermarket,” she said. She points out that nearly everything we eat is packaged in plastic. It’s what we do in our daily life that can put an end to horrors like the gyres of plastic in the ocean. This is why the Plastic Pollution Coalition has launched the REFUSE campaign. Reduce, reuse, recycle isn’t enough—for us to really get control of plastic pollution, we all need to REFUSE disposable plastic!

“It’s a problem we created,” says Dianna. “It’s a problem we can solve.” Be inspired by her video on TED, then sign the REFUSE pledge yourself and tune in on Nov. 6 when TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch will be Livestreamed from Santa Monica, CA.

Costa Salvaje / Wild Coast is a nonprofit on both sides of the Mexican-US border and their mission is to protect and preserve coastal ecosystems and wildlife in the Californias (US state of California and Baja California, Mexico) and in Latin America by

• Building grassroots support
• Conducting media campaigns
• Establishing protected areas

One of their main areas of concern is the Tijuana Valley watershed, which is a major contributor to the plastic pollution that contaminates the ocean and beaches in the border area and beyond.

Please check out their websites at Costa Salvaje / Wild Coast and also the videos on their terrific YouTube channel, and support their work.  We are excited to start exploring synergies between Costa Salvaje / Wild Coast and the work of other members of the coalition.

Bienvenidos! Welcome! Onward! Adelante!

PS: with our new friends comes the invaluable help of several Mexican celebrities, including El Hijo del Santo, a larger than life character in Mexico and beyond. Enjoy the video!

Sea Studios Foundation announces the launch of the Think Beyond Plastics Southern Sail, in partnership with Sealife Conservation, a sailing journey along the California Coast from November 4 to November 21, to raise awareness on plastic pollution in the ocean.

The sailing expedition will visit the California coastal communities of Morro Bay (Nov 4), Santa Barbara (Nov 9), Santa Monica (Nov 12), Long Beach (Nov 13) , and San Diego (nov 18-21). Full schedule here.

Each city will host a screening of the Sea Studios film Dirty Secrets from Strange Days on Planet Earth, an award-winning PBS series, hosted and narrated by Academy Award nominee Edward Norton.  In addition, at each stop there will be an opportunity to go out on an educational sail aboard the marine research vessel Derek M. Baylis.

This sailing tour is a part of the Sea Studios program Think Beyond Plastics, an ongoing collaborative effort to educate the public on the dangers plastic pollution, and to inspire people to eliminate single-use containers and plastic items. The Think Beyond Plastics campaign recently won Best 360 Campaign at the 2009 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.

Don’t miss this opportunity to watch films and go sailing while learning about plastic pollution.

Full program and schedule here.

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.

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.