Cleanup Nets 50 Tons of Ocean Trash Near Hawaii

Published in Courthouse News, April 17, 2017 by Nicholas Fillmore


Marine debris being loaded into cargo containers at Midway Atoll. (Holly Richards/USFWS)

HONOLULU (CN) – Federal agencies and the state of Hawaii removed 50 tons of garbage from the newly expanded Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument this month during an annual multi-agency cleanup.

Twelve shipping containers holding an estimated 100,000 pounds of derelict fishing gear, bottles, lighters and plastics were loaded onto the charter vessel Kahana and shipped to Honolulu. The garbage will be cut up and incinerated for electricity at the Covanta Honolulu/H-POWER plant.

The annual cleanup of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands is headed by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Island Marine Debris Program in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Hawaii’s Division of Land and Natural Resources-Forestry and Wildlife division, and the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

Since the program began in 1996, some 985 tons of debris have been removed from the monument. At Midway and Kure atolls, plastic debris is found in albatross nests along the beach and often consumed by the chicks. Endangered green sea turtles also mistake plastic for their main food source, jellyfish. And marine mammals die after becoming entangled in discarded fishing gear.

According to regional coordinator Mark Manuel, removal efforts are accomplished “with two hands and lots of backs.” Barges carrying heavy machinery cannot be brought in because their drafts are too deep in the shallows, so 17-19 foot inflatables are used and abandoned fishing nets – often twined around coral heads – are hauled up by hand.

Purse-seine nets found in Papahanaumokuakea do not appear to be local, Manuel said, nor does much of the trash cleared. Weather events associated with El Nino tend to push the North Pacific gyre – an area formed by four prevailing ocean currents in which garbage from across the Pacific collects – south. The gyre then deposits debris along the 1,500-mile Northwest Hawaiian Island chain which, virtually pristine otherwise, acts to comb detritus out of the ocean.

Researcher Capt. Charles Moore first discovered the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in 1999, when he sailed his catamaran through the rarely traveled gyre.

“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic,” Moore wrote in an essay for Natural History. “It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot.”

Plastic takes centuries to biodegrade, breaking down into smaller pieces along the way. These fragments easily find their way into the food chain, Moore said, “adding to the increasing amount of synthetic chemicals unknown before 1950 that we now carry in our bodies.”

Research also implicates plastic in mammalian endocrine disruption. The resulting “feminization” of animal species threatens population collapse.

Complicating the picture, according to Moore – whose Algalita Organization is a pioneer in the study of ocean plastic – is the discovery of pre-manufacture microscopic plastic beads called “nurdles” in the water, suggesting that the problem is not just a post-consumption phenomenon.

The NOAA Marine Debris Program has led efforts to research, prevent and reduce the impacts of marine debris. Authorized by Congress through the Marine Debris Act in 2006, its staff supports projects “in partnership with state and local agencies, tribes, non-governmental organizations, academia, and industry. The program also spearheads national research efforts and works to change behavior in the public through outreach and education initiatives.”

The Hawaii Nets to Energy Program is one example of that partnership.

Technology has hurt our oceans, but we can also harness it to reverse the damage

Published in The Guardian, Friday 9 October 2015 by Catherine A Novelli

The ocean is being depleted of critical fish stocks, choked with discarded plastic and made increasingly acidic, and it’s our fault – but we can find the solution

The demise of global waters isn’t inevitable, but the time to act is now. Photograph: Marck Botha / Barcroft Media/Marck Botha / Barcroft Media 

• From the sea’s shore, it can be hard to believe that something as vast and deep as the ocean can be harmed by a human being. But individuals are parts of communities, and our global community has exploded to over 7 billion people. The multiplier effect of growing populations, increasing demand for food and 200 years of carbon-intensive industrial production have put a tremendous burden on the ocean.

The ocean is being depleted of critical fish stocks, choked with discarded plastic and made increasingly acidic from increased carbon emissions absorbed from the air. If things continue as they are, experts estimate that by 2025 there will be a ton of plastic in the ocean for every three tons of fish.

It doesn’t have to be like that. We can stop the flow of plastic into the ocean and move away from disposable plastics altogether using a variety of technological and scientific innovations.

One example is the Marine Debris Tracker, a free app developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Georgia. It allows people to report when they see litter in waterways or coastlines. The crowd sourced data is then plotted on maps to show areas most in need of clean up.

As for the plastic itself, companies are finding profitable ways to reuse it or replace it entirely. For example, US-based MHG uses microbial bacteria and canola oil to make safe, biodegradable products like food containers, bottles and fishing line.

It’s harder to visualize ocean acidification from carbon absorption – though its effects may become increasingly apparent. The ocean is 30% more acidic than it was before the Industrial Revolution, which has dramatic implications for marine ecosystems that we are only just beginning to understand.

 

We need more data to understand the impacts of acidification, especially in vulnerable habitats, so much of the focus of research on this problem has been on monitoring. The XPRIZE Foundation, which has spurred technological leaps in space exploration and healthcare, in July awarded grants to developers of affordable and accurate pH sensors. These sensors can be deployed in a variety of marine environments and are particularly needed in developing countries that currently lack monitoring capabilities.

To get the most out of these technological tools, we need strong global partnerships that can put them to use. This past week Secretary of State John Kerry and I joined hundreds of policymakers, scientists and business leaders in Chile for the second Our Ocean conference. There, we committed to expanding marine protected areas and to forming international partnerships to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. (Vessels doing this are often the same ships that traffic in arms and people.)

The challenge now is to establish shared protocols and integrated data systems to catch rule breakers and, in the end, reward the honest fishing industry.

One example in the works is the mFish initiative, a partnership between governments, NGOs and the private sector. This project puts GPS and smartphone technology in the hands of fishermen in developing nations. The devices are loaded with software that can report on catches, forecast the weather and track navigation.

Scientists and regulators get data on what’s being caught and where, while boat captains get tools to plan their expeditions and bring their fish to market. A pilot project of mFish this year in the Philippines will connect 13 coastal communities and 20,000 fishermen by the end of the year, expanding to 200 communities and 100,000 people in 2016.

The threats facing our ocean are profound, but it’s far from a lost cause. As the Our Ocean conferences have demonstrated over the past two years, the global community has woken up to the problem and is ready to take action to preserve our shared marine resources. Working together and harnessing new technological tools, we can undo the damage and protect our ocean.

Catherine A Novelli is the US Under Secretary of State for economic growth, energy and the environment

Hawaiian Marine Refuge Filled with Ocean Life... and Garbage

Published in Nature World News by Jenna Iacurci Nov 18, 2014

 

Pictured: Green sea turtle. (Photo : Greg McFall/NOAA's National Ocean Service/Flickr)

The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii, one of the largest marine refuges in the world, is filled with a wide array of ocean life, as well as 57 tons of garbage.

At least, it was until the NOAA sent a team to the World Heritage Site in October to clean up the trash, which had shockingly accumulated in just a year's time. This stretch of tiny uninhabited islands and coral reefs seems to be the endpoint of the massive amounts of garbage that humans dump into the oceans.

A group of 17 NOAA divers aboard the Oscar Elton Sette spent 33 days removing 57 tons of garbage, ranging from bottle caps and cigarette lighters to giant nets lost by factory fishing trawlers - one of which was 28 feet by 7 feet and weighed 11.5 tons.

(Photo : NOAA)

And among the thousands of pieces of plastic they retrieved were 7,436 hard plastic fragments, 3,758 bottle caps, 1,469 plastic beverage bottles and nearly 500 lighters.

"The amount of marine debris we find in this remote, untouched place is shocking," Mark Manuel, operations manager for NOAA Fisheries Coral Reef Ecosystem Division and chief scientist for the mission, said in a press release. "Every day, we pulled up nets weighing hundreds of pounds from the corals. We filled the dumpster on the Sette to the top with nets, and then we filled the decks. There's a point when you can handle no more, but there's still a lot out there."

And that's bad news for the collection of animals and plants like seabirds and endangered green sea turtles that call this marine refuge home. Divers rescued some of these turtles from derelict fishing nets dredged up from the ocean bottom.

The NOAA, which uses maps with GIS locations based on 15 years of data to locate the trash, has conducted this mission annually since 1996, removing a whopping 904 tons of marine debris in total.

"This mission is critical to keeping marine debris from building up in the monument," added Kyle Koyanagi, Pacific Islands regional coordinator for NOAA's Marine Debris Program.

To help shrink the amount of waste that ends up in our once-pristine oceans, the Environmental Protection Agency says reducing, reusing and recycling are the three key steps.

 

Videos:

The videos below show two men attempting to cut loose two loggerhead turtles they had found when surfing and somehow (loggerheads can weigh up to 400kg) contrived to bring ashore. Knowing the full moon was likely to bring huge waves, Fin had opened the internet to watch his mates performing their usual death-defying runs at the rocky Charco del la Condesa off the Valle Gran Rey.

And this one shows the now happily liberated creatures

57 Tons of Garbage Removed From Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Published November 3, 204 by Gina-Marie Cheeseman in Triplepundit.com


Last week, a team of 17 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) divers returned from a mission in which it removed 57 tons of debris from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The divers traveled on the NOAA ship Oscar Elton Sette for a 33-day mission to remove marine debris from Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii. The monument is a World Heritage Site and one of the largest marine conservation areas in the world. Most of the debris removed was either fishing nets or plastic letter.

NOAA has led missions to clean marine debris every year since 1996, removing 904 tons in total, including the 57 tons removed on this latest mission.

The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands include 5,178 square miles of the least disturbed coral reef habitat in U.S. waters. Divers found three sea turtles tangled in nets at Pearl and Hermes Atoll. The divers removed almost 6.25 tons of plastic trash on the shorelines of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. At the end of the voyage, they removed 7,436 hard plastic fragments, 3,758 bottle caps, 1,469 plastic beverage bottles and 477 lighters.

“The amount of marine debris we find in this remote, untouched place is shocking,” said Mark Manuel, operations manager for NOAA Fisheries Coral Reef Ecosystem Division and chief scientist for the mission. “Every day, we pulled up nets weighing hundreds of pounds from the corals. We filled the dumpster on the Sette to the top with nets, and then we filled the decks. There’s a point when you can handle no more, but there’s still a lot out there.”

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Where does all of that debris come from? It is part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean spanning waters from the North American West Coast to Japan. It is also called the Pacific Trash Vortex, and it is the largest plastic dump on earth. Most of the debris is not biodegradable and much of it is plastic, which breaks down into small pieces known as ‘microplastic.’

About 80 percent of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia, and 20 percent comes from boaters, offshore oil rigs and large cargo ships. The majority of the debris from ocean-based activities is fishing nets, about 705,000 tons in total.

Captain Charles Moore first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the early 1990s when he sailed through an area between Hawaii and the mainland that is rarely traveled. During a week, he noticed a steady stream of plastic debris float by although he was hundreds of miles from land.

Scientists have collected up to 750,000 microplastic pieces in just one square kilometer of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which equals about 1.9 million bits per square mile. Most of the debris comes from plastic bags, plastic water bottles, bottle caps and Styrofoam cups. Scientists predict it will likely double in size in the next 10 years.

In 2001, scientists documented that plastic particles outnumbered plankton by a factor of 6:1, or for every pound of plankton in some parts of the Pacific gyre, there were six pounds of microplastic. In one area, there was found to be an average of 334,271 pieces per square kilometer . Some fish and birds are eating the microplastic pieces. Five to 10 percent of fish in the area contain small pieces of plastic.

Where does all of the microplastic come from? Seven billion pounds of non-recyclable plastic is created every year. Unfortunately, some of it ends up in the Pacific Ocean.
Image credit: Bo Elde

Math Might Help Nail Oceans' Plastic 'Garbage Patch' Polluters

Published in NBC News by By Miguel Llanos Sept. 2, 2014

Who's flushing plastic pollution into the oceans, creating tiny time bombs that kill fish, birds and sea turtles ingesting what they think is food? That question has been around since 1997, when the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" was discovered, and a new mathematical model could provide the tool needed to track down the culprits.

The model shows that pollution can cross what scientists thought were boundaries between oceans and especially its five gyres — large circular currents that are now known to trap floating debris in what have been dubbed garbage patches. Most of that trash is not even visible: It's tiny plastic pellets floating at or just below the surface. 

"The breaking of the geographic ocean boundaries should shift the way people think of where oceans begin and end," modeler and mathematician Gary Froyland told NBC News. "The interactions that we've shown between the different oceans shows that no ocean is isolated and that local effects can have impacts far from the source." 

Large Garbage Patch Floating in the Pacific Ocean

Froyland and two colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, described their model in a paper published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Chaos. 

The work builds off an earlier, but less sophisticated, online tool (adrift.org.au) that allows users to project how plastic pollution travels in ocean currents. 

The trio's math comes from a field known as ergodic theory, which has been used to study interconnectedness — think complex systems like the Internet, or even humanity. 

For their model, the team divided the entire ocean into seven regions whose waters mix very little. Their projections tracked well with existing ocean circulation models and refined those to the point where they found that parts of the Pacific and Indian oceans are actually most closely coupled to the south Atlantic, while part of the Indian Ocean really belongs in the South Pacific. 

A follow-up study will look at how porous those boundaries are. "We first wanted to see where the boundaries are, the next step is to study the amount of plastic crossing these boundaries," said Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer with the team.

Scientist Andres Cozar Cabanas published a study last July showing where plastic debris has been found in the five gyres around the world.

Scientists not involved in the modeling welcomed the tool. 

"I could imagine using their model to generate hypotheses about the likely source regions of debris in each of the 'garbage patches' that could be tested with on-the-ground sampling in these coastal regions," said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer with the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass. 

"We already know that once debris leaves a harbor or coastline it is fairly quickly carried to the open ocean to these subtropical accumulation zones," she adds, "but what we might not have guessed is that debris in the accumulation zones may have originated from the next ocean basin over." 

For Spanish marine ecologist Andres Cozar Cabanas, who published a study last July that mapped plastic ocean debris across the globe, the model shows that plastic pollution "is a global issue that can be effectively addressed only … at a global level." 

That's exactly how the Aussie trio want the tool to be used. "At a political level," says Froyland, "the realization that even the garbage patches exchange garbage may make governments realize that 'we're all in it together,' hopefully producing some global action."

 

NOAA Marine Debris Program

Marine debris accumulation locations in the North Pacific Ocean.

More about Ocean Gyres:

The vastness of the oceans had once lulled mankind into a false sense of safety with little knowledge that the capacity of oceans to take garbage and refuse is not infinite. The plastics have compounded the problem still further. Plastic pollution in the oceans is killing fish, birds and sea turtles. The great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered in 1997 and the question, who’s flushing all the plastic pollution into the oceans?

The great Pacific Garbage is a collection of marine debris located in the North Pacific Ocean. The high-pressure area between the U.S. states of Hawaii and California is the precipitating factor for the Pacific Garbage phenomenon. The area lies in then centre of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which is a circular ocean currents which has been formed by Earth wind patterns and the forces created by the rotation of Earth. The middle of the gyre is very calm. The circular motion of the Gyre pulls in the debris into the center. A similar garbage patch exists in the Atlantic Ocean, in the North Atlantic Gyre.

Every single ocean has a massive swirling plastic garbage patch

Published in Vox.com by Brad Plumer on July 14, 2014

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one of many areas in the ocean where marine debris naturally concentrates because of ocean currents. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

What happens to our plastic bottles and lids and containers after we throw them out? This turns out to be something of a scientific mystery.

there are 35,000 tons of plastic floating in the ocean — and more may be hiding elsewhere

We know that the vast majority of plastic trash ends up in landfills, just sitting there and taking thousands of years to degrade. A smaller fraction gets recycled (about 9 percent in the United States).

But another large portion finds its way into the oceans, either by people chucking litter directly into the sea or by storm-water runoff carrying plastic debris to the coasts. One conservative estimate suggests that at least 1 million tons of plastic has entered the ocean since the 1970s.

Now here's the catch: We still don't know where all that ocean plastic actually went. Scientists have recently identified massive swirling garbage patches in each of the world's oceans that contain up 35,000 tons of plastic.

But those patches account for less than 1 percent of the plastic thought to be in the oceans — and no one quite knows where the other 99 percent went. One possibility is that fish are eating the rest of the plastic and it's somehow entering the food chain. But no one quite knows for sure.

Every ocean has a massive plastic garbage patch

Concentrations of plastic debris in surface waters of the global ocean. Colored circles indicate mass concentrations (legend on top right). The map shows average concentrations in 442 sites (1,127 surface net tows. Cozar et al, 2014.

Perhaps you've heard of the Great Pacific garbage patch — a giant patch of trash that's accumulated in a swirling subtropical gyre in northern Pacific Ocean.*

There are at least five giant floating garbage patches

Well, it turns out that there are at least five of these floating garbage patches around the world. That's according to a recent study in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, led by Andres Cózar of the Universidad de Cadiz and informed by the results of a 2010 circumnavigation cruise.

These garbage patches aren't visible from space — or even, necessarily, from a passing boat — since most of the plastic is bobbing just beneath the surface, and most of the particles are smaller than 1 centimeter in diameter. Over time, the plastic bits get broken down into ever smaller pieces as they get battered by waves and degraded by the sun.

But these garbage patches are massive, collectively holding some 7,000 to 35,000 tons of plastic in all. The patch in the North Pacific was by far the biggest — containing about one-third of all the floating plastic found. (Much of the plastic debris from eastern China, for instance, collects here.)

And yet, what was most surprising to researchers was that these plastic garbage patches weren't big enough. Conservative estimates had suggested that there should be millions of tons of plastic in the oceans. But these subtropical gyres only contained up to 35,000 tons.

In particular, there seemed to be much less plastic smaller than 1 millimeter in diameter than expected. 

So where did the rest of the plastic go?

99% of the plastic in the ocean is missing — where did it go?

Bo Eide/Flickr

In the PNAS paper, the authors offer a couple of possible explanations for why they didn't find nearly as much floating plastic as they expected. The most troubling is that fish and other organisms are eating all the plastic:

One possibility is that plankton and fish are eating the plastic

1) Maybe the plastic is washing back ashore. The problem with this hypothesis is that most of the missing plastic was less than 1 millimeter in diameter. It's unclear why only smaller bits would have washed up ashore.

2) Perhaps the plastic somehow breaks down into really, really tiny, undetectable pieces. This is possible, although the authors note that "there is no reason to assume that the rate of solar-induced fragmentation increased since the 1980s."

3) Maybe small organisms are growing on some of the plastic bits, causing them to get heavier and sink deeper into the ocean. This is also plausible, although the authors note that studies have found that when these plastic pieces sink, the organisms on them typically die and the plastic bobs back up to the surface.

4) Plankton and fish are eating the plastic. This one's a more plausible hypothesis. After all, the tiny plastic bits that seem to have vanished are small enough to be eaten by zooplankton, who are known to munch on plastic. The authors also argue that mesopelagic fish beneath the surface may be eating a lot of plastic too — and, perhaps, pooping it out down to the ocean bottom. This needs further testing though.

Assuming fish are eating all that plastic and it's entering the food chain, it's still unclear how dangerous that is. Obviously some marine organisms, like seabirds, can get digestive problems (and can die) if they eat large pieces of plastic. But what about very tiny pieces?

There's some evidence that toxic chemicals can cling to plastic in the ocean and accumulate — but there's still scant research on how much harm this might actually do as it passes through the food chain.

5) It's accumulating in the ice caps. Meanwhile, a separate recent study in Earth's Future suggested that a great deal of microplastic is accumulating in the polar ice caps. As sea ice forms and expands, the argument goes, it essentially "scavenges" the plastic from the seawater. This, too, might be part of the story.

6) Perhaps we're overestimating how much trash goes into the oceans. Of course, it's also possible that the estimates of how much plastic is entering the oceans in the first place are wrong. The seminal work on this was done by the National Academy of Sciences way back in the 1970s. That may need to be revisited.

Either way, something doesn't add up — the current numbers suggest that the vast majority of plastic trash in the ocean is vanishing, and no one seems to know where it went.

Further reading: Dianna Parker of NOAA's Marine Debris Program talks about possible ways to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Published by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Making Waves: Episode 126

An Ocean-Sized Problem

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one of many areas in the ocean where marine debris naturally concentrates because of ocean currents. In this episode, Dianna Parker from the NOAA Marine Debris Program explains what a garbage patch is and isn't, what we know and don't know, and what we can do about this ocean-sized problem.

Listen:

What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? What does it look like? Why can't we just clean it up?

 

Transcript

This is Making Waves from NOAA's National Ocean Service. I'm Troy Kitch. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I bet you've heard of it. It's a phrase that's really caught on in the past few years. And it's easy to see why: it conjures up a powerful image ... a vast vortex of human waste — plastic bags, tires, cans, barrels, you name it ... floating out there in the ocean. But here's the thing: it doesn't really look like that at all. What it looks like to the human eye, from satellites, is, for the most part, well ... not much at all. Most of it is all but invisible. How can that be?

Well, I recently sat down with Dianna Parker from the NOAA Marine Debris Program to find out what the garbage patch is and isn't, what we know and don't know, and what we can do about this ocean-sized problem. Dianna, welcome and thanks for joining us. Let's start with the obvious question: what are we talking about when we say 'garbage patch?'

[Dianna Parker] “A lot of people hear the word patch and they immediately think of almost like a blanket of trash that can easily be scooped up, but actually these areas are always moving and changing with the currents, and it's mostly these tiny plastics that you can't immediately see with the naked eye."

I noticed that you said garbage patch 'areas.' So the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is only one area in the ocean where marine debris concentrates?

[Dianna Parker] "There are garbage patches all over the world. These are areas where debris naturally accumulates. So there are garbage patches of all different sizes and shapes and compositions. The one that we know the most about is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which lies in an area between Hawaii and California. What we know about this area is that it's made up of tiny micro plastics, almost akin to a peppery soup, with scattered larger items, fishing gear, those kind of items swirling around."
A peppery soup? Could you explain that again?

[Dianna Parker] "Well, imagine tiny, tiny micro plastics just swirling around, mixing in the water column from waves and wind, that's always moving and changing with the currents. These are tiny plastics that you might not even see if you sailed through the middle of the garbage patch, they're so small and mixed throughout the water column."

I would think that most of the plastics that ends up in the ocean are bigger pieces ... like bags and bottles and plastic toys. But you're saying that most of the plastic is so small that's it's hard or impossible to see. Can you talk a little more about the plastic debris in the ocean ... why it's so small?

[Dianna Parker] "There are many different kinds of plastics out in the ocean and they come from a number of different sources. So, there are teeny, tiny micro plastics out there that were either manufactured to be small — for example, the microbeads in face wash can be plastic; there are also little, tiny plastic pellets that we sometimes call ‘'nurdles' that are used to make larger items  but then there are also tiny plastics that are shards of larger items. Plastics never really go away. They just break down over and over and over again until they become smaller and smaller from sunlight and other environmental factors [like] waves, big storms, those kind of things."

So we have these vast regions in the ocean where the water column looks like a peppery soup because of all these small bits and pieces of plastic.  I would imagine this plastic kind of looks like food. Do we know if fish and birds are eating this stuff?

[Dianna Parker] "We know that some species of birds and fish eat micro plastics. They even eat some larger plastics. So for example, the Laysan Albatross in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, we know that just about every dead albatross found on Midway Atoll has some form of plastic in its stomach. We don't know if that's what killed it, but we know that this is becoming a big problem. So we know that there are micro plastics in the ocean. We know that birds and fish and even some larger marine mammals eat these plastics. We know there are chemicals in the plastics and we know that the chemicals can absorb other toxic chemicals that are floating around in the ocean. So now the big question is, what are those plastics doing to the animals that eat them."

I'm sure you get this question a lot: we know marine debris in the ocean is a bad thing ... so why don't we just clean it up? Especially if most of the trash is contained in 'garbage patch' areas because of the way the debris naturally accumulates because of ocean currents.

[Dianna Parker] "The words 'garbage patch' accurately describes what it is, because these are patches of ocean that contain our garbage. But they're not areas where you can easily go through and skim trash off the surface. First of all, because they are tiny micro plastics that aren't easily removable from the ocean. But also just because of the size of this area. We did some quick calculations that if you tried to clean up less than one percent of the North Pacific Ocean it would take 67 ships one year to clean up that portion. And the bottom line is that until we prevent debris from entering the ocean at the source, it's just going to keep congregating in these areas. We could go out and clean it all up and then still have the same problem on our hands as long as there's debris entering the ocean."

And that's really the big problem — to prevent the debris from entering the ocean in the first place. So what can you, me, or anyone do to help?

[Dianna Parker] "There's so much that we can do to keep debris from entering the ocean. It's as simple as changing your individual behavior every day, creating less waste, reusing what you can, remembering to recycle ... littering is obviously a no-no. And then going out and joining a beach clean up. It's difficult to really understand the problem until you get out there and see it first-hand, how bad the problem is." And I imagine you've had plenty of opportunities to go out there and see how bad it is first-hand.

[Dianna Parker] "I absolutely have. For example, every year I go out with the International Coastal Cleanup and work to pick up trash from the Anacostia and Potomac in Washington, DC, and the amount of trash you find on the shorelines is just incredible. Bottles, bags, aerosol cans, all mixed together. In some places it's like a thick mat.

And so these are really populous, urban areas. But then we also see the same kind of trash on really remote beaches. For example, I was on beach in Lanai in Hawaii and we found everything from plastic bottles to flip flops, fishing gear, we found an entire couch. And some of this debris was clearly local and some of it had clearly come from other countries around the Pacific Rim. So debris can touch even the most remote places."

Given what you know, working on this problem day in and day out, I would think it would feel kind of like a hopeless, overwhelming problem.

[Dianna Parker] "It's not a hopeless situation. Marine debris is absolutely a solvable problem because it comes from us humans and our everyday practices. We can take any number of steps to keep it from entering the ocean and that can happen at the highest level with governments and it can happen at the lowest level individuals and everyday choices."

Thanks, Dianna, for taking the time to chat with us about this. That was Dianna Parker, communications specialist with NOAA's Marine Debris Program.

Want to learn more? Check our show notes for the links. You can find us on the web at oceanservice.noaa.gov. Have a question? Shoot us an email at nos.info@noaa.gov.

 And thanks for listening to Making Waves from NOAA's National Ocean Service.

Cleaning up plastic litter in remote, open ocean areas: Guidance for prospective inventors of plastic-capture systems

Read the Press Release, Scientists provide first public guidance on array of challenges in cleaning up plastic litter from oceans successfully here.

Distributed by MarineDebris.Info

Introduction
Marine debris, and particularly plastic marine debris, poses a significant global threat to marine life. Growing public awareness of this threat, including the recognition that floating ocean plastics tend to congregate in remote areas of the open ocean (the so-called “garbage patches”), has inspired some individuals and groups to conceive of systems for cleaning up debris at sea. These systems have ranged from simple net-based methods to ambitious giant filtering systems that would stretch hundreds of kilometers across the sea surface, among other ideas.

These ideas are laudable for their goal of removing plastics from the sea. However, the proposed systems typically fail to account for real-world ocean conditions and/or the many ecological and engineering-related challenges that would face any cleanup effort on the open ocean. In fact, the array and scale of challenges involved in any realistic cleanup of remote ocean areas have been cited often by experts as evidence that marine debris management should focus on preventing new litter from entering the ocean, rather than attempting to remove the litter that is already there.1

Still, many seemingly intractable challenges faced by humans over time have been solved by bright ideas. And as long as people are aware of and moved by the problem of ocean plastic debris, there will be attempts to solve it. In this light, we do not want to dissuade potential innovators from examining the issue of marine debris cleanup. Rather, we want to inform and channel their innovation.

Guidance
This document presents general guidance for the cleanup of floating plastic debris in the open ocean. This guidance was produced and edited in June-July 2013 by a team of experienced marine debris researchers (see “Background on this document”) and was shared in July with the global MarineDebris.Info community of marine debris managers, researchers, and conservationists for additional input. This list is intended to evolve and improve over time as further knowledge is gained. We also strongly recommend that all prospective inventors of cleanup systems consult experienced ocean engineers early in their development processes.

Systems for open ocean cleanup of marine plastics should account for, and overcome, the following challenges:

1. The size and depth of the ocean gyres within which floating marine plastics tend to gather. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the best-known location of a “garbage patch” or trash vortex, has a surface area of approximately 20,000,000 km² — more than twice the size of the U.S. Thus any system that would tow nets through the gyre to capture debris, for example, must either factor that surface area into its design or determine a way to avoid having to transit the whole area. In addition, in even the most densely polluted regions of the subtropical gyres, microplastics (particles smaller than 5 mm in size) are frequently present at concentrations of less than one piece per square meter, requiring extensive areal coverage to recover just one kilogram of plastic. Furthermore, average water depth of the open ocean is 4,000 meters (2.5 miles); therefore, any cleanup system relying upon moored structures must account for this extreme depth. 
   
2. Depth and concentration of microplastics. Floating plastic debris, and particularly microplastics, can be mixed below the surface in even light winds. The depth of the mixing depends on the strength of the wind and the physical structure of the ocean in that particular area. It may range from a few meters depth during typical low wind conditions in summer months to 100-150 meters depth during stormier winter months. Any cleanup system, particularly one that relies on surface-floating mechanisms, must account for subsurface mixing of debris. 
   
3. Capturing plastics while not harming marine life that is co-located with the plastics. The goal of ocean plastic removal is ultimately to help sea life. If cleanup systems hurt or kill sea life in the process — such as fish or even plankton — they are counterproductive. Most zooplankton, for example, do not survive being caught in a standard net, never mind spun in a centrifuge where they lose critical appendages like their antennae and feeding apparatus. A system that relies on nets or centrifuges will require engineered solutions to avoid or minimize these effects. In addition, indirect environmental impacts of cleanup systems — such as from fuel use by cleanup vessels scouring the ocean, or from incineration of collected plastics at sea — should be considered and mitigated.  
   
4. Potential for entanglement of marine life in the systems. Similar to the above guideline, any cleanup system that poses an indirect entanglement threat to wildlife, such as seabirds or cetaceans, must be reengineered. In the U.S., any activity that might harm protected species is illegal without a permit.  
   
5. Strength and stability in extreme sea conditions. Any cleanup system is in danger of becoming marine debris itself if it breaks up, such as from storm action, high waves, or ship collisions. A successful system must be able to avoid extreme weather or be sturdy enough to withstand such conditions, and must be detectable by fast-moving vessels. 
   
6. Maintenance and fouling. The reality of operating equipment in extreme environments, of which the open ocean is an example, is that equipment breaks down. There must be a cost-effective means to maintain and repair the cleanup system over time, particularly for systems that involve long-term deployment. Furthermore, there must be a way to account for, and address, the rapid biofouling that occurs when any equipment is placed in the ocean. 
   
7. The physical properties of ocean-weathered plastic. Floating marine debris is largely composed of polyethylene and polypropylene — common plastic types with a density less than that of seawater. (Polystyrene, which has a density roughly equal to that of seawater, may also be present but is much less abundant in floating debris.) Ultraviolet light degrades these plastic polymers, making them brittle and difficult to recycle. Cleanup schemes that propose to recycle and/or market the plastic they collect should be aware of the technical issues, and of the actual market value of the plastic they collect, which may be low. Recyclers with the technology to “upcycle” mixed ocean plastic into consumer-quality polymers remain very few (Envision Plastics, which partners with home products manufacturer Method on a recycled ocean plastic bottle, is one). As a result, the market for collected ocean plastic is underdeveloped at best. 
   
8. Legal issues. There are extensive laws and regulations governing the deployment of equipment at sea. For example, structures cannot be a hazard to navigation or a threat to protected species. In the U.S., multiple permits from state and/or federal agencies may be required for cleanup devices. The permitting process is lengthy, onerous, and expensive, and may require specialized legal consultation. On the high seas — marine areas beyond national jurisdiction — the applicability and relevance of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea must be evaluated in each case.

Background on this document
This guidance was drafted by:

• John Davis, M.M.A., of MARE
• Miriam Goldstein, Ph.D., of California Sea Grant and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego

Editors and contributors included:

• Courtney Arthur, M.S., Research Specialist, NOAA Marine Debris Program
• Pete Davison, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• Kara Lavender Law, Ph.D., Research Professor, Sea Education Association (SEA)
• Chelsea Rochman, Ph.D., Aquatic Health Program, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis

The guidance was submitted for additional review to the MarineDebris.Info community.
We welcome additional editors and contributors; this guidance is intended to be a living document. To provide input, please contact John Davis, project supervisor of MarineDebris.Info, at jdavis@marineaffairs.org.

Media
For interviews, please contact:

• John Davis, jdavis@marineaffairs.org
• Miriam Goldstein, miriam.goldstein@gmail.com

About MarineDebris.Info
MarineDebris.Info is the global knowledge-sharing community for marine debris management and research, with members representing government agencies, research institutions, conservation organizations, industry, and more (www.marinedebris.info).  It consists of a listserv, website, and live chat events allowing members of the MarineDebris.Info community to interact with leaders in the field.

MarineDebris.Info is a project of Marine Affairs Research and Education (MARE), a Seattle-based organization that provides a range of knowledge-sharing services to ocean managers and conservationists worldwide.  These services include the OpenChannels forum on ocean planning (openchannels.org), the MPA News service on marine protected areas (mpanews.org), and the Marine Ecosystems and Management information service (meam.net). MARE collaborates on several of its projects, including MarineDebris.Info, with the University of Washington.

Floating tsunami trash to be a decades-long headache

posted in the News Straits Times March 8, 2013

PARIS: The tsunami that ravaged northeast Japan in March 2011 created the biggest single dumping of rubbish, sweeping some five million tonnes of shattered buildings, cars, household goods and other rubble into the sea.

About three-and-a-half million tonnes, according to official Japanese  estimates, sank immediately, leaving some 1.5 million tonnes of plastic,  timber, fishing nets, shipping containers, industrial scrap and innumerable  other objects to float deeper into the ocean.

Marine experts poring over the disaster say the floating trash adds  significantly to the Pacific’s already worrying pollution problem.

For many years, and possibly decades, items will be a hazard for shipping,  a risk for sea mammals, turtles and birds, a hitchhiking invitation for  invasive species and a poorly understood threat to wildlife through plastic  micro-particles.

“In a single stroke, the tsunami dumped 3,200 times the amount of rubbish  that Japan discharges annually into the Pacific,” said Robin des Bois, a French  environmental group that is studying the problem.

“In plastic alone, the volume is the equivalent to several decades of  accumulated waste in the Atlantic and Pacific.”    Early last year, the first debris started to wash up on shores of Oregon,  Washington and southern Alaska and the Canadian province of British Columbia.

They were foam and buoys that have “high windage”, meaning objects that sit  proud of the waves and are easily pushed by the wind.

They were followed by other items that sometimes spoke poignantly of the  disaster on the other side of the ocean.

They included a Harley-Davidson motorbike in a container, a football with  the owner’s name on it, a crewless ship and two massive concrete docks on  styrofoam floats.

The docks came from the fishing port of Misawa in Aomori prefecture, yet  washed up in Oregon and Washington eight months apart. One dock was rinsed down  with bleach as a bio-precaution after it was found to be studded with dozens of  foreign species of algae and barnacles.

The docks’ odyssey may explain why, contrary to some expectations, there  has been no massive landfall of debris.

“NOAA’s data suggests that the debris is no longer in a mass or a patch,”  said Sherry Lippiatt, regional coordinator in California for the US National  Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine debris programme.

“Rather, it has spread out across the vast North Pacific Ocean since it was  introduced nearly two years ago.”    Indeed, exactly where the trash is and how much remains is unclear.

Much may have sunk or become waterlogged, and scattering means there are no  more clusters to be monitored by plane or satellite.

Sightings by passing vessels or fishermen, along with computer models,  suggest the bulk of slower-moving debris is located north and east of Hawaii.

Simon Boxall of Britain’s National Oceanographic Centre pointed to a  circular current, called a gyre, that loops slowly around the North Pacific.

“It heads across the Pacific towards North America, goes down alongside the  California coast and then comes round, taking about six or seven years to get  back to Japan,” he said.

“Most of the debris will follow the gyre,” eventually getting trapped in  the centre of the vortex in the so-called Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii  and California, he said. “Some of it could stay for the next 30, 40 years.” Debris in the gyre’s northern part tends to split off and head towards the  coastline of North America, said Boxall.

It means beach walkers are likely to encounter a disturbing but relentless  flow of flotsam for years to come.
“Most of it is pretty harmless,” reassured Boxall, adding that any  radioactive material from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant was “obviously”  an exception.

“Any oils would have been broken down in the open ocean a long time ago,  and most of the chemistry will have been dispersed. Big objects, though, may  pose a navigational hazard,” he said.

A big question mark remains over plastic items that have been degraded to  microparticles, Boxall added.
Previous studies on species of North Sea mussels and fish suggest these  particles are swallowed by some marine animals and remain in their digestive  tracts.

Francois Galgani of France’s Ifremer marine research institute said that “absolutely nothing” was known about the risk from nanoparticles, or  microparticles that degrade into yet smaller pieces just billionths of a metre  across.

“Another problem is the risk of invasive species and debris that has sunk,”  he said.

“We don’t know much about the currents in the deep ocean, but my bet is  that there are bound to be places in the depths where the trash is building up.” -- AFP

Read more: Floating tsunami trash to be a decades-long headache - Latest - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/latest/floating-tsunami-trash-to-be-a-decades-long-headache-1.230941#ixzz2NGfxqkp1

Beachcombers gather flotsam from tsunami

Currents, winds push debris to U.S. West Coast.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 2:00 pm , Wed Jan 9, 2013. 

 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Volunteers who patrol California beaches for plastic, cigarette butts and other litter will be on the lookout this winter for flotsam from last year's monstrous tsunami off Japan's coast.

Armed with index-size cards, beachcombers will log water bottles, buoys, fishing gear and other possessions that might have sailed across the Pacific to the 1,100-mile shoreline.

The March 2011 disaster washed about 5 million tons of debris into the sea. Most of that sank, leaving an estimated 1½ million tons afloat. No one knows how much debris — strewn across an area three times the size of the United States — is still adrift.

Tsunami flotsam already touched the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii in 2012. The West Coast is bracing for more sightings in the coming months as seasonal winds and coastal currents tend to drive marine wreckage ashore.

Like the past winter, scientists expect the bulk of the debris to end up in Alaska, Washington state, Oregon and British Columbia. Last week, the Coast Guard spotted a massive dock that possibly came from Japan on a wilderness beach in Washington state.

Given recent storm activity, Northern California could see "scattered and intermittent" episodes, said Peter Murphy, a marine debris expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which recently received a $5 million donation from Japan to track and remove tsunami debris.

To prepare, state coastal regulators have launched a cleanup project to document possible tsunami items that churn ashore. Working with environmental groups, volunteers will scour beaches with a checklist. It's like a typical beach cleanup, but the focus will be to locate articles from Japan.

Until now, efforts in California have been haphazard. The goal is to organize tsunami debris cleanups at least once every season stretching from the Oregon state line to the Mexican border and then posting the findings online.

Debris from Asia routinely floats to the United States. It's extremely difficult to link something back to the Japanese tsunami without a serial number, phone number or other marker.

Of the more than 1,400 tsunami debris sightings reported to NOAA, the agency only traced 17 pieces back to the event, including small fishing boats, soccer balls, a dock and a shipping container housing a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with Japanese license plates. No confirmed tsunami debris so far has reached California.

Even in the absence of a direct connection, California coastal managers said it helps to know whether a beach is being covered with more marine debris than usual.

"We want to get an idea of where to focus our efforts. We have limited resources," said Eben Schwartz, marine debris program manager at the California Coastal Commission, which heads the $50,000 NOAA-funded project. "If we see the problem is hitting the north coast and not getting as far south as San Francisco, that tells us where to focus."

In the summer, NOAA awarded $250,000 to five West Coast states to help with tsunami debris removal. Alaska spent its share to clean up a 25-mile stretch of beach before the weather turned too bitter. Hawaii and Washington state have yet to dip into their funds.

Oregon racked up $240,000 to remove debris on beaches, including a 66-foot dock that broke loose from the port of Misawa during the tsunami and splashed ashore over the summer. Part of the tab — $50,000 — was covered by NOAA.

Charlie Plybon, Oregon's regional manager at the Surfrider Foundation, said the tsunami has raised beachgoers' awareness about marine debris plaguing the world's coastlines. "There's a bit of tsunami debris fever. It's like an Easter egg hunt," said Plybon, who has been cleaning up the Oregon coast for more than a decade. "People used to walk past debris. Now they want to be engaged."

Health experts have said debris arriving on the West Coast is unlikely to be radioactive after having crossed thousands of miles of ocean. Tsunami waves swamped a nuclear power plant and swept debris into the ocean. The debris field, which once could be spotted from satellite and aerial photos, has dispersed. More than 18,000 residents were killed or went missing.

Volunteer Julie Walters has combed Mussel Rock Beach south of San Francisco for wreckage, but all that has turned up so far are wave-battered boat parts and lumber of unknown origin.

If she did find an object with a direct link, "I would find it quite intriguing that it made this incredible journey across the Pacific," said Walters, a volunteer with the Pacifica Beach Coalition. "It would also sadden me to think of the human tragedy."