After Sailing 3,000 Miles … It’s Official Microplastics Are Everywhere

 Published in EcoWatch by

Marcus Eriksen, Sandra Meola, Brian Smith, Sherri A. Mason, Reece Paecheo and David T. Conover | August 17, 2015 

 

The 5 Gyres Institute sailed 3,000 miles in June—from Miami to the Bahamas to Bermuda and ending in New York City—sampling the sea surface along the entire voyage for plastic pollution. Sadly, our research once again demonstrates how prolific and widespread plastic is in our oceans. We found microplastics, pieces smaller than a grain of rice, dominating each of the 38 samples taken during the three week-expedition through the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, a series of clockwise rotating currents between the U.S. and Europe.

What we found in our samples, confirms our understanding that plastics quickly shred in the open sea due to UV sunlight. We have dubbed this abundance of fragments, which are being consumed by sea life as well as slowly settling to the seafloor, as plastic smog. This plastic smog that overwhelmingly pollutes our oceans has gone global, emanating from our densely populated coastlines.

Consider the smog that hovers in the air above our major cities. It is composed of fine particles of carbon swirled by atmospheric currents and sometimes adrift for hundreds of miles before settling to the ground. The plastic smog in our oceans is a particulate of hydrocarbons swirled by ocean currents and drifting for thousands of miles before possibly settling to the seafloor. If you can imagine a plastic smog in our oceans, then you can imagine our cities are the horizontal smokestacks pumping plastic into the ocean.

On June 23, the 5-Gyres’ ship the Mystic, a 172 foot three-masted schooner, sailed into the New York Harbor. Our surface nets dragged up and down the Hudson River and the bay, and we were shocked by what we found.

Our last sample collected south of Manhattan was the most polluted of them all, with nearly 500 bits of plastic filling our tiny net in just one hour. New York City is pumping millions of particles of plastic into the Atlantic Ocean every day. The objects found included cigar tips, tampon applicators, condoms, straws, fragments of plastic bags, preproduction plastic pellets and hundreds of unidentifiable plastic fragments. New York City is feeding the plastic smog.

A small sampling of plastic found while dragging

The situation may seem hopeless, but there is tremendous ambition in the resilience of environmental organizations throughout the state of New York that are working to reduce plastic waste entering New York waterways. More than 40 organizations from every corner of the state are working together to stem the tide of plastic into New York’s waters.

This coalition worked tirelessly throughout the 2015 New York state legislative session to pass a ban on plastic microbeads in personal care products. Tiny plastic microbeads in products such as facial scrubs and toothpastes (yes, some toothpastes leave plastic particles between your teeth and in our gums) are designed to be washed down the drain, where they often escape sewage treatment and pollute our waters.

While the bill passed the Assembly and enjoyed overwhelming support in the Senate, it fell victim to Albany dysfunction, and did not pass into law this year. Fortunately, our neighbors in Connecticut successfully passed a ban on microbeads this year and we are poised to win the fight in New York next year.

Therefore, it is essential that residents of New York remain vigilant and aware of our plastic consumption. The reduction of plastic bags, foamed polystyrene and microbeads in personal care products will collectively have a meaningful and positive effect on the quality of the waters surrounding New York and beyond.

Individual, voluntary efforts are a great start. However, legislation is undeniably needed to solve our plastic problem once and for all. All of us, including the industries that make plastic products, are responsible for the problem, and through smart and fair legislation we can be the solution.
Signed,

Marcus Eriksen, Ph.D. director of research at The 5 Gyres Institute; Sandra Meola, communications and outreach at NY/NJ Baykeeper; Brian Smith, associate executive director at Citizens Campaign for the Environment; Sherri A. Mason, Ph.D. professor of chemistry. at SUNY Fredonia; Reece Paecheo at Surfrider, New York City; and David T. Conover, education director at Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Inc.

How much plastic is in our oceans? Ask the woman trying to clean it up

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Published on Grist.org by Ana Sofia Knauf on 17 Aug 2015

When Carolynn Box left for her first 5 Gyres research expedition in 2011, it was Christmas Eve. She talked her way onto the organization’s trip, and had been peppering the ship’s captain with safety questions for weeks. She traveled with a friend from San Francisco to Namibia to meet up with the 5 Gyres boat, which was set to comb the vast South Atlantic Ocean gyre for plastic waste. She was abuzz with nervousness.
“I’m not a professional sailor … I was scared of sinking, or things going wrong during a really big storm. I didn’t want to die,” says Box. 

“My first trip was 33 days. We had a problem with our engine. The engine broke a thousand miles from anywhere. It was crazy. … So then we had to sail home. I remember my captain, Clyde, said ‘Well, this is a sailboat. We’re going to sail to Uruguay.’ And that’s what we did. It took a lot longer than we expected because we had to wait for wind. So that was startling,” Box says.

Carolynn Box

Sergio Izquierdo

5 Gyres is a nonprofit that organizes plastic pollution research expeditions at sea. In addition to trawling for plastic garbage, 5 Gyres and their volunteers have restored beaches through international citizen science programs and developed laws banning plastic microbeads from cosmetics.

Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of source material: In 2010 alone, an estimated 10.5 billion to 28 billion pounds of plastic waste entered the oceans. When Box returned from the 5 Gyres trip, she went back to her coastal management job in California, but the weight of all that plastic junk wore heavily on her mind.
In 2012, Box joined 5 Gyres as the org’s environment and education programs director. (The nonprofit’s name refers to ocean gyres, in which currents swirl together with the help of wind. These water systems notoriously attract tons of marine trash.)

Today, Box helps train expedition volunteers and supports a new wave of first-time sailors. We talked to Box about what she’s learned from life on the deck of 5 Gyres’ research vessels. Here’s an edited and condensed version of what she had to say:

Q. How do you prepare newbies for being out on the ocean?

A. Most of the people that come with us are very well prepped for the experience. If they’ve never sailed, some have tried out sailing just to get a sense of it. But I don’t think you can prepare yourself for being so remote.

Most people can handle it. We’ve had people get scared, but you just talk them through. Most people don’t show that they’re scared. The [first couple days] can be very rough because people get really seasick.

Q. Are people seeking out these expeditions? Why do they want to do it?

A. On all of our expeditions, we’ve had students, activists, surfers, sailors, partnering scientists with their own projects, artists, musicians, and other nonprofit partners.

I think many people who work in the field of plastic pollution are looking to have first-hand knowledge. You can really speak to the issue stronger when you can say, “I’ve been out there. I’ve seen this firsthand.”
What’s so great getting people from different communities [is that] you reach more people.

Q. You’re basically a seasoned sailor at this point. How do you prepare for these long expeditions? 

A. On this last expedition, I was made fun of because I had been exercising quite a bit beforehand. Many of the people [running] the boat are used to being sailors, they have a lot of strength. When I’m on the boat, I want to be as strong as I can be and I want to pull my weight. I don’t like to sit back and just let the guys do it.

Q. Some of your trips can last for more than three weeks. What’s it like, being on the water for that long?

A. You know that feeling you get when you watch the sunset? It’s almost overwhelmingly beautiful. When you’re on a sailboat, at least for me, even when it’s a wild and crazy ocean, it’s this really amazing and exciting world that’s all around you. I love it. I love being out there engulfed in all of it. When you see whales or dolphins around the boat. It’s so exciting and so meaningful. It’s kind of like, “Hey guys, we’re here to help you!”

Q. That being said, how does it make you and your fellow sailors feel when you are trawling for plastic?

A. It’s terrifying and you’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s clear that what you’re pulling in [isn’t] natural. It’s clear that it’s plastic.

I’ve been on six oceans trips and it’s very rare that we pull up a sample that’s plastic-free. For the most part, every single sample we collect has plastic fragments in it. That’s really powerful when you’re on a trip in the middle of the South Atlantic. 

Seeing all the [pollution] samples … lights a fire under you. Something needs to change.

Q. Terrifying amounts of plastic aside, what is your most memorable moment at sea?

A. I made eye contact with a humpback whale as I left Honolulu to head out to the North Pacific Gyre. The whale followed our boat for a few minutes and leaned over and looked up at us — she just stayed on her side looking at us — she was very curious. I like to think she understood we were working to keep her ocean healthier.

FAO-backed research ship investigates the occurrence of trash in the southern Indian Ocean

Published in Environmental Expert.com / Aug. 11, 2015

Rome -- The Dr Fridtjof Nansen is plying the waves of the southern Indian Ocean, trawling for trash.

Every time the ship's scientific crew threw down special nets, they hauled in pieces of plastics, underscoring the risk of dramatic upheavals in marine ecosystems even in one of the world's least-known and least-visited environments.

An estimated 5 trillion pieces of plastic currently float in the world's oceans, up from none in 1950 and posing a question about their potential impact on a food supply chain that stretches from plankton - which have been filmed eating plastic pellets - up through shellfish, salmon, tuna and eventually humans, not to mention whales.

Laboratory tests have shown that fish fed such plastics suffer poisoned livers and consequent metabolic problems. Yet little is known about just how much rubbish is being eaten in wild marine ecosystems, nor whether toxic chemicals remain in plastics after  long exposure to sea water and pounding waves.

A research vessel operated by the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research (IMR) in collaboration with FAO, the R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, has since 1975 plied the world's oceans to collect information on marine resources and the health of the marine ecosystems and to help train scientists from around the world.

Some 18 scientists from eight countries and crew are aboard now, in the second of two seasonal missions. Researchers typically measure ocean temperatures, oxygen levels, chlorophyll and biological processes like plankton production and fish distribution, but there are two particular additional goals this year: to assess the scale and nature of industrial rubbish in remote parts of the southern Indian Ocean, and to study how the local Gyre, a cyclical vortex of currents, operates to spread plankton and tiny fish.

'We have found some plastic particles in almost all the stations we sampled,' said Reidar Toresen of IMR, cruise leader of the first leg. IMR is providing scientific services to the FAO EAF-Nansen Project financed by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

Huge floating islands of trash twice the size of Texas have recently been located in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but the southern Indian Ocean is relatively unexplored. The Trans-Indian Ocean Survey will yield critical information to scientists concerned about the extent and impact of so-called plastic beads in the ocean.

Promoting sustainable oceans and fishing practices is a priority for FAO as capture fishery production is the source of 80 million tonnes of nutritious food each year. Together with aquaculture, the world's capture fisheries provide nearly 3 billion people with 20 percent of their protein intake, as well as almost 60 million jobs.

Let them eat resin pellets?
Ocean-borne plastic trash can be ingested by wildlife- some sea creatures have even been seen to prefer beads of a particular color - causing harm. Even tiny plankton have also been observed consuming plastic beads. Such menu choices can have tragic outcomes; sea turtles that eat plastic bags, for example, often die of dehydration and sunburn as their digestion is paralyzed and decomposing food turns into gas that forces the animals to float.

Myctophid fish that spend their daytime in the ocean depths but come close to the surface at night to feed, are prone to ingesting such pellets, but the extent to which they do this will require more work analyzing the samples, said Melody Puckridge of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation of Australia,  who led the search for plastics. More and bigger pieces of plastic tend to be found nearer coastlines - where fish stocks are greatest - but little is known about how the Gyre transports them and the kind of harbour it offers the smallest particles, she said.

Microplastics - beads less than five millimeters in diameter - are of particular interest as they may be entering the human food chain.

Microplastics are used in human products such as cosmetics and shower gels and are also used in resin pellet form by manufacturers. Virtually non-existent in 1950, more than 250 million tonnes are now produced each year, and some of that finds its way eventually to the sea,. The lion's share of their degradation occurs on beaches, aided by pounding waves and ultraviolet rays, while the process virtually halts for beads that sink to the bottom of the sea.

While the possible chemical and toxicological impact of the beads can be studied in laboratories, information on the location and quantity of microplastics, as well as how they move - fish themselves can be a biological vector and so can the Indian Ocean Gyre moving between Australia and Madagascar --, has to be obtained as it is on the survey with the R/V Dr Fridtjof Nansen. That means releasing and hauling in special nets several times a day, and poring over their contents.

Not just trash
The crew is also launching new, high-technology sinking sensors to measure levels of a range of deepwater biological elements. Provided by Australia with help from India, these robotic sensors are a step beyond the floating robots already in use to monitor ocean temperatures and salinity, as they are programmed to dive down as deep as 2,000 meters to sample oceanic health indicators.

When they resurface, these diving devices gather data at various depths, then resurface and transmit the data to scientists by satellite. The sensors will collect data on levels of chlorophyll, an indicator both of trends in the ocean's carbon storage capacity as well as in the basic food supply that plankton and the fish that eat them can rely on.

A new research vessel on the way
A new Dr Fridtjof Nansen research vessel will be launched in 2016, the latest in a series of Norad-owned ships of the same name that began the collaboration with FAO in the 1970s. The new ship, replete with seven scientific laboratories and an auditorium, will be equipped with modern sonar sensors able to map fish distribution quickly as well as a remote-control submersible vehicle able to take photos of life on the ocean floor.

Mapping the ocean floor is another key part of the EAF-Nansen Project's long-term work, of which FAO is the executive agency and Norad the principal funder. It helps expand understanding of fish demographics, allowing more informed fishery management measures to be set. The FAO-hosted EAF-Nansen Project has helped 16 coastal African countries develop sustainable marine resource management plans and in September will hold a marine taxonomy workshop in Mozambique.

Past efforts have shown that the ocean floor is often deeper than existing maps suggest, especially around so-called sea mounts, which are underwater mountains often formed by volcanos that create a series of unique maringe habitats and whose role in fostering biodiversity has been recognized by the United Nations.

Bayfield resident sharing documentary on Atlantic Ocean expedition

Published Friday, March 27, 2015 by Dave Flaherty, Goderich Signal-Star
 

Bayfield resident Jennifer Pate took part in an expedition across the Atlantic Ocean to study the effect of plastics and toxins on oceans and marine life late last year. 

Her documentary “eXXpedition – Jen Pate: Making the Unseen Seen” will be shown at Bayfield Town Hall on Thurs., Apr. 2 at 7:30 p.m. (Contributed photo)

Sailing across the Atlantic Ocean is something the majority of people will never experience.

Bayfield resident Jennifer Pate can stake claim to that experience and wants to share it with others.
This upcoming Thursday, Blue Community Bayfield will present “eXXpedition- Jen Pate: Making the Unseen Seen” at Bayfield Town Hall at 7:30 p.m.

The film documents an expedition of 14 women, including Pate, who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to study the impact of plastics and toxins on oceans and marine life.

Pate has been participating in world expeditions for about five years now.

“After my first, I set up my own film company when I was still living in England,” Pate said.
As her films focus on environmental issues and social responsibility, Pate said her interest was peaked immediately when she heard about this particular expedition.

She was chosen out of a field of 300 applicants.

It was an all-female team, which Pate admitted caused some uncertainty for her at first.
“It was a first of kind for me, all of my other expeditions have been a mix of men and women. Before we left, a lot of us were wondering if it would get catty, you know, the typical stereotypes of a bunch of woman being together,” she said. “But I found it was the exact opposite – it was the most calm expedition I’ve been involved with.”

Beyond the experience of traveling across the Atlantic itself, Pate said she left the expedition with 13 new friends.

“We all said we can’t get rid of each other – when you go through an experience like that you’ve got friends for life,” she said. “We all came out like family and made a connection we will have for the rest of our lives.”

Although she has a mind for environmental issues, this was the first time Pate had become directly interested in the oceanic effect of plastics and toxins.

“The adventure was what drew me in, but the more and more I’ve read the more I have come to be so involved with this issue.”

The negative effect of smaller pieces of plastic such as beer and pop can rings and shopping bags has been known for a considerable amount of time, but Pate said they were looking at micro plastics, which never really break down, just disintegrate into smaller pieces and “become sponges for toxics”.

Sea creatures eventually ingest these pieces of plastic and the toxins along with them.

The expedition left from Lanzarote in the Canary Islands on Nov. 16, 2014 and arrived at Martinique in the Caribbean islands on Dec. 5.

“It 100% exceeded my expectations,” Pate said. “It was an incredible trip.”

The team traveled on a 72-foot vessel with a varying amount of sailing experience amongst the crew members.

“Half our team was brand new and even the ones who were experienced hadn’t necessarily sailed an ocean before.”

Pate had many more responsibilities than just holding a camera.

Each crew member took their turns handling cooking, cleaning and navigation duties.
The documentary premiered on March 7 in London, England, hosted by the Royal Geographical Society.

Pate said about 200 people attended, including 13 of the 14 crew members of the expedition.
The event at Bayfield Town Hall is sponsored by the Bayfield Photography Club and admission is by donation.

The documentary is available for streaming at www.vimeo/ondemand/exxpedition

Proceeds from film streams will go towards to creating an education package, which will be facilitated by British company Digital Explorers.

For more information on the film, visit www.exxpedition.com.

Pate said she hoping to organize a similar expedition for the Great Lakes in the near future.

Want to see an ocean garbage patch in person?

A new contest from the 5 Gyres Institute offers to let one winner join a three-week research voyage — described as a 'hardcore sailing adventure' — through garbage patches in the North Atlantic Ocean. 

 

Published in the MotherNatureNetwork Fri, Apr 04, 201

A view of marine debris from below, as fish or sea turtles might see it. (Photo: U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

 

Are you at least 18 years old, capable of swimming 660 feet and concerned about plastic pollution in Earth's oceans? If so, the 5 Gyres Institute has a new online contest that may interest you.

 

While the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the most famous, it's just one of several ocean vortices, or gyres, whose currents pick up marine debris and amass it into giant, nebulous swirls of junk. These garbage patches mostly contain countless plastic specks that slowly crumble without decomposing, but they also lure larger detritus such as bags, bottles, lost fishing nets and shipping containers.

 

This can harm wildlife in a variety of ways. Sea turtles choke on plastic bags, seabirds fatally fill their stomachs with plastic scraps and marine mammals become hopelessly entangled in stray fishing lines. Even the tiniest bits of plastic are dangerous, absorbing toxins like mercury from water and tempting fish to eat them. As larger predators eat those fish, the toxins bioaccumulate up the food chain.

 

The 5 Gyres Institute is helping lead efforts to investigate this plastic plague, including a series of expeditions into Earth's five major subtropical ocean gyres to study what's out there and how it's affecting wildlife. The California-based group is also big on educating the public, since ocean pollution is a crowd-sourced problem that's difficult to prevent without widespread cooperation.

 

The new contest by 5 Gyres aims to address both missions: The group is requesting brief videos from members of the public, between 30 and 45 seconds long, explaining why they should be chosen to join its next research expedition. That expedition — a three-week sailing trip across the North Atlantic Ocean — will depart June 7 from Bermuda and end June 29 in Iceland. It will enter the North Atlantic Gyre as well as the Viking Gyre, two areas where marine debris has yet to be studied.

 

"The video doesn't need to be fancy, just a quick and sincere appeal to gather online votes," says Stiv Wilson, 5 Gyres' policy director. "Whoever gets the most votes wins a spot on the expedition plus airfare to Bermuda and back from Iceland. That's a prize worth $10,000."

 

All onboard meals as well as foul-weather gear will be provided for the winner — who must be at least 18 years old — but 5 Gyres is careful to warn this is "not a pleasure cruise."

 

"[T]he voyage is a 'hardcore sailing adventure' aboard 5 Gyres' partner vessel, the Sea Dragon, a working ship where crew will be expected to participate in every aspect of the expedition," the group explains in a statement. "This will include participating in plastic research, ship navigation and handling, and sharing of all onboard duties such as cooking and cleaning. No sailing experience is required but participants must be able to swim at least 200 meters."

 

5 Gyres will be accepting applications until 11:59 p.m. PDT on April 22, which is Earth Day (or 6:59 a.m. UTC on April 23). To submit your video or to vote for others, check out the contest homepage.

 

Russell McLendon is science editor at MNN. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

 

Related plastic pollution stories on MNN:

• Great Lakes plagued by tiny plastic beads
• Ocean trash reborn as art in Alaska [Photos]
• Wild bees are recycling plastic, study finds

Stephanie Carrow: In the waters of Trash Creek

Published in CT Post, Friday, July 19, 2013 by Stephanie Carrow

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Summer is a time of abundance, and most of it -- the blossoms, sunshine and songbirds -- we welcome appreciatively. But it's also the time for a proliferation of another sort -- that of plastic garbage in our waters. This plastic endangers marine wildlife and human health, both locally and as it makes its way out to sea. 

 

I've been paddling the lower Connecticut coastline for 16 years, and every day in the season that I go out on my kayak, I come back in a mini garbage scow.

After every trip, the back well of my sit-on-top holds a variety of balloons (latex and Mylar), shopping bags, food wrappers, Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles, bottle caps, lighters, beer cans, yards of monofilament line with floaters and hooks, and empty No. 2 bottles for cleansers, motor oil and other toxic fluids. I've also picked up basketballs, soccer balls, beach balls, a good pair of men's sneakers, two-gallon buckets, a bright pink Croc shoe, and countless neon green tennis balls, apparently used in forfeited games of fetch with dogs. And I'm retrieving only a small part of what's out there.

While I've observed -- and picked up -- plastic refuse throughout my kayaking excursions, I'm sad to note that Ash Creek, between Fairfield and Bridgeport, has by far the highest concentration of garbage I've seen in waters along the coast -- so much so, that on my first or second paddling trip there, I dubbed it "Trash Creek."

It's a shame, too, because Ash Creek is also a place of sublime summer beauty: I don't think I've seen more of a range of shorebird species in one discrete patch of this coastline as I've seen while paddling Ash Creek. But the herons, egrets, osprey, cormorants, belted kingfishers and others there must wade and fish amidst garbage.

Knowing the damage that plastic refuse can do to marine life, I can't in good conscience pass it by -- I feel compelled to pick it up. I think of sea turtles choking on plastic bags and balloons they mistake for jellyfish, and of albatross chicks dying with bellies full of bottle caps and other plastic debris mistaken by their parents for lookalike zooplankton. I imagine all this local refuse drifting seaward and choking marine animals; or adding to the toxic Atlantic Garbage Patch, cousin to the now infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

But this plastic does its damage even here in local waters. I myself came upon a lifeless cormorant who, tangled in snagged plastic fishing line, had drowned just inches below the water's surface. I met a man who'd saved an osprey from a similar fate -- both birds dive for their fish. And I met a couple who similarly saved a horseshoe crab -- not a cuddly animal, but vital to the ecosystem and even to human health (its blood is used in pharmaceuticals).

A reading of the book Plastic Ocean, by Capt. Charles Moore (with Cassandra Phillips), provides an even more vivid picture of the magnitude of the problem, some of which begins in coastal waters. Capt. Moore is credited with having discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- which he describes as actually a soup of microplastic fragments and whole objects that swirl in two vast gyres in the remote North Pacific Ocean.

The fragments occur when plastics, which never biodegrade, become brittle and break into pieces that mix with and mimic plankton, the oceans' food base. These fragments are accumulating in the oceans in such tonnage that they have been found to outweigh plankton by a ratio of six to one -- or greater in some places.

Since his discovery in 1997, Moore and others have engaged in rigorous scientific samplings of the plastic soup and its multiple consequences, among them: well over 140,000 marine animals -- birds, sea turtles, whales, dolphins, otters and seals -- die each year from plastics ingestion, entanglement or strangulation. Much of the plastics involved are bottle caps, shopping bags, balloons and fishing lines -- among the very items we can find in abundance along our shoreline and floating in our local waters.

The largest animal ever to roam the earth, the blue whale, lives solely on tiny plankton -- meaning that it is now ingesting large quantities of plastic with every giant gulp.

Another consequence is to our own health, since the toxic microplastics are also eaten by the fish that we consume. Plastics leech toxins into our waters, and they also attract other pollutants such as PCBs and pesticides -- which means that anything consuming plastics becomes contaminated. It's been determined that our favorite food fish -- including tuna and salmon -- consume plastic, or eat the fish that eat the plastic.

It doesn't require a kayak trip to see our contribution to the problem. On any given day in this season, many of our beaches are strewn with plastic, ready to be washed out into the Sound and the sea beyond in the next high tide.

A stroll by the shoreline could fill multiple garbage bags with plastic bottles, bags, cups and utensils, food wrappers, straws, cigarette butts (also plastic), lighters, a plethora of bottle caps, and the occasional tampon applicator or condom. There are also perfectly usable plastic beach toys -- pails, shovels, sand molds -- and shoes left for the tide to take them.

It's as though they were easily disposable, and they are: the cheapness of plastic has made them so. We live in a throwaway culture; but in the process, we might be throwing away the very health of our waters that makes coastline living so appealing.

The solutions to the problem are multilateral -- and a few beach cleanups per season aren't enough to tackle this scourge. Along with Moore's book (a lively, compelling and absorbing summer read), the website 5gyres.org provides clear steps we all can take to stem the plastic tide. Moore's website, algalita.org, also provides further information on the problem and solutions. We can begin by steering clear of single-use, disposable plastics; and by recognizing that everything we leave behind has a consequence.

It's a conundrum that our most disposable products are made from the least destructible, longest-lasting material.

For my part, I will continue to pick up garbage as I walk the shoreline or paddle the waters, with this vision in mind: My most astonishing sighting in Ash Creek was of an American white pelican, on the day after Hurricane Irene.

 Unheard of in this part of the world, it had been blown perhaps a thousand miles north of its home, as had dozens of other non-indigenous species, according to local birding groups. That dazzling survivor embodied for me the essence of Ash Creek, and our Sound beyond, as a haven of beauty and wonder -- not a careless dumping ground. Our efforts together as a coastal community can, for all our sakes, set things right again.

Stephanie Carrow, of Fairfield, is a writer, psychotherapist and avid kayaker, and has been published in Fairfield Magazine and other local publications.