5 Frequently Asked Questions about Plastic Pollution

FAQs from Recent 5 Gyres Webinar
June 15, 2016 -for better reading quality, go directly to the 5 Gyres blog.

On June 2nd 5 Gyres held our most recent Webinar. Founders Anna Cummins and Marcus Eriksen spoke about plastic pollution in our oceans and focused on the latest research and policy on the issue, the importance of having a circular economy, and how community is essential to this problem as they have the power to demand change. The Webinar ended with a 15-minute Q/A session where audience members asked some very thoughtful questions and received passionate and insightful answers.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to address all of the questions, so Marcus has answered a few below that seem to be popular questions that we hope will clarify some doubts you might have.

WHY IS PLASTIC SO CHEAP? IS IT BECAUSE OIL COMPANIES ARE SUBSIDIZED?

Plastic is coupled with the price of oil, so it fluctuates equally. Right now, recycled plastic is too expensive, so virgin plastic is what's dominating the market. So, as suggested, subsidizing oil doesn't help recycling efforts.

CALIFORNIA WAS THE FIRST STATE TO PASS A LAW THAT BANS SINGLE-USE PLASTIC BAGS…BUT THE PLASTICS INDUSTRY AND BAG MANUFACTURERS HAVE COLLECTED ENOUGH SIGNATURES TO PUT THE BAN TO A REFERENDUM IN NOVEMBER 2016. HOW CAN WE EFFECTIVELY FIGHT THIS? 

Good question. It takes constant pressure over time, and alignment of organizations toward a common goal. That's how we won on microbeads. The bag ban took 10 years to win, and industry hired outside signature gatherers to make it a referendum. You can join Californians Against Waste, Surfrider Foundation, and other NGO's to fight the referendum in CA and get the word out.

HOW MANY TIMES CAN PLASTICS BE RECYCLED AS A TECHNICAL INGREDIENT IN THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY? IS IT POSSIBLE FOR IT TO BE CONTINUALLY RECYCLED?

From what I know, the polymer gets continually degraded over time, so you don't typically see products with 100% PRC (Post-consumer recycled content). So, technically you can't reused the same plastic material perpetually, as you can with Aluminum, which is a single element (Al). Plastic is made of 100 or 1000's of molecular bonds, and they don't last forever.

WHAT IS THE ORGANIZATION'S POSITION IS ON BIOPLASTICS, ESPECIALLY WHEN CONSIDERING THEIR LIFECYCLE IMPACTS? IS THERE SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT OR CERTIFY THEM AS "MARINE DEGRADABLE?"

It depends on the polymer. Here's something I wrote recently on bioplastic:

Bioplastic has been around a while. Henry Ford produced the first soybean car in the 1930s, with bioplastic fenders and door panels made from soy-based phenolic resin. He demonstrated its resilience by bashing it with a sledgehammer without a dent. Petroleum plastics were cheaper and better performing and eventually edged bioplastic out.

But today, with the inconsistency of the fossil fuel market, companies like Proctor & Gamble, CocaCola and PepsiCo have explored plant-based plastics as a means to create a more reliable and consistently valued resource. In September 2015 the Brazilian company Braskem began production of polyethylene, the exact same chemical structure as polyethylene made from fossil fuels, but derived entirely from sugar cane fiber, called ‘bagasse’..

Poly-lactic Acid (PLA) is another common plant-based polymer, the one you see advertised as ‘corn cups’ or utensils called ‘spud ware’. Or Poly-hydroxy-alkanoate (PHA), made from the off-gassing of bacteria. Soy, bagasse, PLA or PHA, are all very different and create confusion, sometimes intentionally, over their actual biodegradability. PLA needs a large industrial composting facility that’s hot, wet, and full of compost-eating microbes. If you put a bunch of paper plates, napkins and PLA utensils in your backyard compost for a year, you’ll end up with rich soil and a bunch of forks and knives. On the JUNKraft we filled a nylon mesh laundry bag with 20 different PLA products. The result after the voyage was a laundry bag filled with unscathed products. PHA is the only marine degradable bioplastic, with ASTM standards that describe a 30% loss of material in the ocean in 6 months, but only in warm tropic waters, not higher latitudes or deeper waters.

There’s plenty of confusion and green-washing in advertising the value of bioplastic. While the label “biodegradable” has a relatively strict definition called ASTM standards, and strict guidelines for usage in advertising, the terms bioplastic, plant-based, bio-based do not. Bioplastic is the loosely-defined catch-all phrase that describes plastic from recent biological materials, which includes true biodegradable materials and non-biodegradable polymers that are plant-based. These definitions leave a lot of room for advertisers to manipulate public perception.

When CocaCola unveiled the PET PlantBottle a week before the 2009 Sustainability Summit in Copenhagen (COP15), with green leaves and circular arrows on labels, many NGOs and government agencies, like the Danish Consumer Ombudsman, took CocaCola to court for greenwashing, resulting in label modifications. Despite all of the leafy greenery, it’s the same PET bottle you’ll find floating across the ocean, despite being “plant-based”. The saving grace is the withdrawal from fossil fuels, but otherwise the same bottle.

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH PEOPLE FROM YOUR OWN SOCIAL CIRCLE WHO ARE DEEPLY INGRAINED INTO THE DISPOSABLE CULTURE, BUT ARE UNINTERESTED OR UNWILLING TO CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOR?

Keep pushing. Continuous pressure over time. We love the people in our social circle, so we keep sharing our values. I have family that still haven't kicked the plastic habit. I just keep pushing without compromising my values.

BUT, if they are jerks about it and want to criticize your choices, then you have to decide for yourself if you're compatible. It's like any other relationship, i suppose. Breaking up is hard to do.

WE HOPE THESE RESPONSES WERE HELPFUL. IF YOU HAVE ANY MORE QUESTIONS, FEEL FREE TO CONTACT US AT INFO@5GYRES.ORG. IF YOU WANT TO JOIN OUR NEXT WEBINAR, PLEASE SIGN FOR OUR UPDATES ON OUR WEBSITE.

What Happens To The Plastic You Throw Away?

Published in IFL Science April 22, 2015 | by Kristy Hamilton

Photo credit: Screenshot of TED-Ed YouTube video.

This is the haunting journey of three plastic bottles that impact the fate of the planet. The emblematic animation traces the life cycle of three different types of plastic and the consequences each have on our world.

Plastic is a synthetic material that can be molded into a variety of shapes while soft and then set into a rigid form. Its versatile nature has shaped society in ways that are both helpful and harmful for humanity.

If this is the case, is there a way to stop the negative cycle? If we can shape plastic for use, can we also mold ourselves a better future?

Watch the animation by TED-Ed below:

Plastic waste responsible for nearly 92% life-threatening cases in marine life

Published in Customs Today Report February 21, 2015

 

MEXICO: According to a new study thousands of individual animals from hundreds of marine species including every kind of sea turtle and around half of marine mammals have encountered plastic, glass, and other garbage in the ocean.

Often the encounters are fatal. In some cases they may be helping push some beleaguered species towards extinction in the wild.

Those are some of the findings in the most comprehensive look at the effects of debris on marine wildlife since 1997. Co-authors Sarah Gall and Richard Thompson, marine biologists at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, looked in 340 different publications for reports about animal encounters with marine trash.

They found that 693 species of marine animals had some sort of interaction with human-made debris, with 17 percent of them listed with some degree of vulnerability to extinction on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list.

Sometimes these encounters involved glass, metal, or paper. But plastic surged past those materials as a hazard to ocean wildlife, turning up in almost 92 percent of animal-meets-marine debris reports, according to the study published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

All together there were 44,006 incidents of individual animals, across 395 species, that had eaten plastic bits or been tangled in plastic rope or netting.

Around 80 percent of the time, these encounters injured or killed the animal.

There were reports of 138 hawksbill turtles, 73 Kemp’s Ridley turtles, and 62 leatherback sea turtles tangled in plastic. All three are listed as critically endangered—one step below extinct in the wild—on the IUCN red list.

Marine mammals as a group proved especially vulnerable to marine plastic debris, with 30,896 of the reports involving these animals tangled in ropes or netting. They included 215 Hawaiian monk seals, a critically endangered species, and 38 endangered northern right whales, as well as 3,835 northern fur seals and 3,587 California sea lions.

Among seabirds, Gall and Thompson found 174 records of individual birds from over 150 species being tangled in or eating plastic. They included 3,444 northern fulmars 1,674 Atlantic puffins, 971 Laysan albatross, and 895 greater shearwaters.

Inside The Garbage of The World

Published February 8, 2015 in The Examiner

This is exactly what you think it is. And guessed who killed this bird?

Author's collection

Paper or plastic?

Think about it . . . bring your own bags.

The truth about plastic has been revealed in an outstanding documentary produced and directed by filmmakers, Philippe and Maxine Carillo. The controversial, hard-hitting documentary, Inside the Garbage of the World, is now available via YouTube, and tells the story about plastic pollution inside the oceans rising to a frightening level to human safety.

Without urgent action the horrid momentum will worsen dramatically, and so . . . solutions are embedded in this highly environmentally conscious work.

The dynamic, which impacts on all of our oceans, affects the world economy and undermines healthcare because our food chain is being poisoned in unprecedented fashion.

“We don't have too much time to stop and handle the disaster we are creating. In about 10 years, maybe more, the fisheries are going to collapse. Maybe earlier”, says Carillo. “The curve of the percentage of fish who ingested plastic already is exponential from the research of Scientists and Oceanographers I know personally. There is no other way but stopping using single use plastic now . It may be already too late.” "We have to categorize plastic as Hazardous Material," says Philippe.

There is no way around that fact, according to the oceanographers and other scientists interviewed.
"Recycling and cleaning up beaches are necessary," Philippe emphasizes, "but much more must be done simultaneously, post haste." A deeply experienced activist worldwide, Philippe underscores that "we are moving at an arthritic snail's pace when it comes to dealing with the source of the ocean's bleeding.

All anyone is involved in at present, their good intentions notwithstanding, is the application of tourniquets. We cannot continue to apply band aids to a situation which threatens to desecrate the beauty and the sustenance provided by our oceans."

Some of the startling points revealed in Inside The Garbage of The World:

· The amount of plastic produced from 2000-2010 exceeds the amount produced during the entire last century;

· Plastic is the most common type of marine litter worldwide;

· An estimated 100,000 marine mammals and up to 1 million sea birds die every year after ingesting or being tangled in plastic marine litter;

· Up to 80% of the plastic in our oceans comes from land-based sources;

· It is estimated that Americans go through about 100 billion plastic bags a year, or 360 bags per year for every man, woman and child in the country;

· Plastics do not biodegrade, but instead break down into small particles that persist in the ocean, absorb toxins, entering our food chain through fish, sea birds and other marine life. Those particles often contain a million times more PCBs than open sea water;

· Plastic debris in the area popularly known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has increased by 100 times in the past 40 years. The five oceanic gyres are estimated to contain 100 million tons of marine litter, and approximately 20 million tons of plastic litter enters the ocean each year.

Humans are putting 8 million metric tons of plastic in the oceans — annually

Published in the Washington Post by Chris Mooney - Feb. 12, 2015

Late last  year we learned that, thanks to human beings, the oceans are carrying at least 5 trillion pieces of floating plastic — or nearly 700 pieces per human alive on the planet. In weight, that’s some 250,000 tons of the stuff.

But new research suggests that even that haul is probably a serious underestimate. In a paper published this week in the journal Science, Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia and a group of colleagues tried to estimate the total amount of plastic going into the oceans annually from 192 coastal countries, whose total population is 6.4 billion.

People in these countries within 50 kilometers of the coast, the study estimates, produced 99.5 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2010 — and 31.9 of those million tons, the study estimates, were in some way mismanaged.

Thus, the authors calculate, each year about 4.8 million to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic are entering the oceans — for a midpoint figure of around 8 million metric tons. This is vastly higher than the number cited above — and moreover, it’s an annual number.

“It’s much larger than what they’re finding in the water,” says Jambeck. “But of course, as you know, they only can count what they find, and they only can find where they look.”

Here’s an infographic, courtesy of the researchers, that takes you through the process of measuring global plastic production, refining the estimate down to plastic waste in coastal regions, and then eventually estimating how much plastic winds up in the oceans (and how much we measure at the surface):

The 192 countries with a coast bordering the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, Mediterranean and Black seas produced a total of 2.5 billion metric tons of solid waste. Of that, 275 million metric tons was plastic, and an estimated 8 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste entered the ocean in 2010. Lindsay Robinson/University of Georgia

 

So what does 8 million metric tons of plastic actually mean? And is there any way to state such a gigantic figure in human terms?

“It’s five bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world,” says Jambeck.
So, why is so much of this stuff getting into the ocean? The reason, the paper asserts, boils down to a massive global waste management problem.

 The countries estimated to have the greatest mismanagement issues for plastic waste tend to be developing nations — China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam — with large and growing coastal populations, where waste management hasn’t kept pace with the population explosion.

“Sixteen of the top 20 producers are middle-income countries, where fast economic growth is likely occurring but waste management infrastructure is lacking,” notes the paper.

In other words, this is not just a lot of plastic bags getting swept up by wind and deposited at sea. “You have, from the random plastic bag blows to … they pretty much dispose of it right there on the coastline, right there on the bank of a river,” says Jambeck. “That’s the variability that you might find.”

The United States comes in 20th on the global plastic dumping list. While this country does have advanced waste processing, it also has a very large coastal population. (The top 20 countries contribute 83 percent of the world’s total mismanaged plastic, the study estimates.)

Ocean plastic has many consequences. It can kill fish and birds through entrainment or strangulation and can also be ingested by marine creatures and enter into the food chain, where it may have many unknown effects.

This is not a new issue to the global plastics industry. A group of plastics associations from various countries recently released a declaration on the matter, outlining a number of potential solutions to the problem and noting that “plastics do not belong in the world’s oceans and should not be littered — plastics should be responsibly used, reused, recycled and finally recovered for their energy value.”

The Science paper also has a forward projection: The plastic problem is expected to get worse.  By 2025, U.S. mismanaged plastic waste is expected to grow by 22 percent, and in the five biggest countries for the problem, it’s expected to double.

“We will not reach a global ‘peak waste’ before 2100,” notes the paper.

A quarter-million tons of plastic pollution found in oceans

The 5 Gyres Institute compiles six years and 500,000 nautical miles worth of information to provide a global estimate of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.  

 

Published in PackWorld.com Jan. 2, 2015 by Anne Marie Mohan

The first global estimate of plastic pollution of both micro- and macroplastic floating in every ocean on earth has led researchers to conclude that the smallest and most insidious particles are present throughout the world’s oceans. The new report, published in the PLOS ONE scientific journal, culminates more than six years and 50,000 nautical miles of pelagic plastics research.

“When The 5 Gyres Institute formed in 2008, we set out to answer a basic question: How much plastic is out there? There was no data from the Southern Hemisphere, Western Pacific, or Eastern Atlantic. After six long years and a wide-reaching collaboration, we have completed the most comprehensive plastic pollution study to date,” says Marcus Eriksen, PhD, Director of Research for the 5 Gyres Institute. “We’ve found microplastic ocean pollution, in varying concentrations, everywhere in the world.”

The report estimates that some 5.25 trillion plastic particles weighing about 269,000 tons are floating in the world’s oceans. Previous reports only looked at one size class and thus reported much lower plastic densities in the world’s oceans.

The new research also demonstrated some unexpected findings, namely a dramatic loss of microplastic from the sea surface in the garbage patches of the five subtropical gyres—large areas of rotating currents where the fragments tend to accumulate. In addition, the survey found a wide distribution of the smallest microplastics in remote regions of the ocean. Though concentrations in the gyres are lower than previously reported, plastics occur nearly everywhere, often far outside of the garbage patches.

Eriksen led a team of nine researchers from six different countries including Capt. Charles Moore, who found the first garbage patch in the North Pacific. The researchers contributed data from 24 expeditions studying plastic floating on the sea surface. Microplastics were collected with nets, while floating macroplastics were counted by systematic observations.

These data were used to populate a model that assumes plastic enters the oceans from rivers, shipping lanes, and densely populated coastlines. The data and model show that large plastics are abundant near coastlines and degrade in the five subtropical gyres into microplastics, the smallest of which are, surprisingly, present in more remote regions such as the subpolar gyres.

The garbage patches should thus be characterized not as repositories or final resting places, but as shredders and redistributors of trash, where sunlight (UV), oxidation, embrittlement, breakage by waves, and fragmentation by grazing fish all degrade large plastic pieces to tiny fragments. These microplastics are then ejected from the garbage patches through various mechanisms such as foraging and filter-feeding by marine organisms, and subsurface currents.

“Our findings show that that the garbage patches in the middle of the five subtropical gyres are not final resting places for floating plastic trash,” Eriksen says. “Unfortunately, the endgame for microplastic is dangerous interaction with entire ocean ecosystems. We should begin to see the garbage patches as shredders, not stagnant repositories.”

The new research categorized plastic into four size classes, from roughly equivalent to a grain of sand, to a grain of rice, to a water bottle, and finally anything larger. Using conservative fragmentation rates, the researchers expected to find more small particles than larger ones.

Surprisingly, their model showed that the smallest fragments are less abundant than the next larger size, but more small particles are found outside of the garbage patches.

“One would expect an exponential increase in the number of plastic particles due to fragmentation,” says Martin Thiel, a co-author on the study. “But this was not the case. Although the two smallest sizes combined accounted for more than 90 percent of the total count, there were more than 100-times fewer of the smallest particles than expected.”

A worldwide distribution of microplastic is more problematic because smaller particles have a greater surface for the absorption of pollutants than larger pieces. Plastics act like sponges, absorbing toxins such as PCBs, DDT and other pesticides, flame retardants, and other persistent organic pollutants found in our oceans. Other research has established that some marine organisms, including seabirds and fish, ingest these toxic plastics and may de-sorb these toxicants.

“The garbage patches could be a frightfully efficient mechanism for corrupting our food chain with toxic microplastics,” says Eriksen.

The 5 Gyres Institute, which uses research to motivate change, contends that companies must take responsibility for the entire life-cycle of the products they create. Working in collaboration with multiple government agencies, NGOs and responsible corporations, the 5 Gyres Institute will continue to support campaigns such as its ongoing effort to replace plastic microbeads in cosmetics and toothpastes with biodegradable alternatives.

“Knowing that plastic pollution becomes hazardous waste in the ocean, it is essential that innovative products and packaging designed for recovery replace the single-use, throwaway culture of the past,” Eriksen says. “It’s time to focus our mitigation strategies upstream from production to disposal. The status quo is not acceptable. Our goal is to vanquish the idea that oceans can bear our waste and to usher in an age of restoration and responsibility.”

Learn more about the project in this video.

Nightly News Report: Ocean Is Filled With Trillions of Plastic Pieces

Published on NBC News December 14th 2014
Nearly 300,000 tons of plastic pieces are in the world's oceans, according to a report.

Study Gauges Plastic Levels in Oceans

Published in the NY Times By John Schwartz Dec. 10, 2014

Plastic debris washed up on a beach in Azores, Portugal. Credit Marcus Eriksen

It is no secret that the world’s oceans are swimming with plastic debris — the first floating masses of trash were discovered in the 1990s. But researchers are starting to get a better sense of the size and scope of the problem.

A study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One estimated that 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic, large and small, weighing 269,000 tons, could be found throughout the world’s oceans, even in the most remote reaches.

The ships conducting the research traveled the seas collecting small bits of plastic with nets and estimated worldwide figures from their samples using computer models. 

The largest source of plastic by weight comes from discarded fishing nets and buoys, said Marcus Eriksen, the leader of the effort and co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a nonprofit group that combines scientific research with antipollution activism.

Dr. Eriksen suggested that an international program that paid fishing vessels for reclaimed nets could help address that issue. But that would do nothing to solve the problem of bottles, toothbrushes, bags, toys and other debris that float across the seas and gather at “gyres” where currents converge. 

The pieces of garbage collide against one another because of the currents and wave action, and sunlight makes them brittle, turning these floating junkyards into “shredders,” he said, producing smaller and smaller bits of plastic that spread far and wide.

When the survey teams looked for plastics floating in the water that were the size of grains of sand, however, they were surprised to find far fewer samples than expected — one-hundredth as many particles as their models predicted. That, Dr. Eriksen said, suggests that the smaller bits may be swept deeper into the sea or consumed by marine organisms.

The result echoed that of a paper published this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found a surprisingly low amount of small plastic debris. Those researchers estimated as much as 35,000 tons of the smaller debris were spread across the world’s oceans, but they had expected to find millions of tons.

Andrés Cózar, a researcher from the University of Cadiz who headed that study, said in an email that he and Dr. Eriksen came to different conclusions about the amount of plastic afloat, but that “it is evident that there is too much plastic in the ocean,” adding, “The current model of management of plastic materials is (economically and ecologically) unsustainable.”

The fact that the small plastics are disappearing is hardly good news. In fact, it could be far more troubling than the unsightly mess the plastics cause. Plastics attract and become coated with toxic substances like PCBs and other pollutants. Researchers are concerned that fish and other organisms that consume the plastics could reabsorb the toxic substances and pass them along to other predators when they are eaten.

“Plastics are like a cocktail of contaminants floating around in the aquatic habitat,” said Chelsea M. Rochman, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Davis. “These contaminants may be magnifying up the food chain.”

The ocean studies make an important contribution to the understanding of the floating waste problem, said Nancy Wallace, director of the marine debris program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the mid 1970's I took a one year trip around the world and did a lot of scuba diving and when between dive trips, I spent my time walking...

Further research should look beyond the surface to test where the smaller plastic bits might have gone: into the deeper ocean depths, along the shoreline or settled on the seafloor. “It’s premature to say there is less plastic in the ocean than we thought,” she said. “There may just be less where we’re looking.”

Dr. Eriksen said the scope of the problem makes floating garbage collection impractical. His group has had some success with campaigns to get manufacturers of health and beauty aids to stop using small scrubbing beads of plastic in their products.

Manufacturers of other products, he said, must be urged to change their practices as well. “We’ve got to put some onus on producers,” he said. “If you make it, take it back, or make sure the ocean can deal with it in an environmentally harmless way.”

Dr. Wallace agreed. “Unless we can stop the flow — turn off the tap of these pieces of debris going into the ocean all the time — we’re not going to be able to stop the problem.”

The American Chemistry Council, which speaks for the plastics industries, issued a statement saying that its members “wholeheartedly agree that littered plastics of any kind do not belong in the marine environment,” and it cited industry efforts to combat the problem, including the 2011 Declaration of the Global Plastics Associations for Solutions on Marine Litter, which has led to 185 projects around the world.

Myths vs. Facts Regarding Single Use Bag Bans and Fees

Published by Save the Bay


Myth: Recycling plastic bags is the best solution to addressing the litter problem. 
Fact: Plastic bag recycling is costly and just doesn’t work.

Despite a 15-year statewide effort in California, recycling plastic bags has failed. The California Integrated Waste Management Board estimates that less than 5 percent of all single use plastic bags in the state are actually recycled.

Plastic bags cost municipal recycling programs millions each year, when bags jam sorting equipment at recycling facilities. In San Jose, less than four percent of plastic bags are recycled and work stoppages from jammed bags cost the City approximately $1 million per year.

 Failed recycling efforts means billions of plastic bags are thrown away, blow onto our streets and float into our waterways. Plastic bags are the quintessential litter item: there are billions of them, they are used for a few short minutes, and they are light and easily transportable.

Myth: Recycled plastic bags are a valuable commodity. 
Fact: The market for recycled plastic bags is small and unstable.

At the moment, a single manufacturer, purchases 70 percent of the plastic bags recovered nationwide, to make outdoor decking. In 2008, Newsweek reported that the company lost $75 million in the previous year, raising questions about the long-term viability of the end market. Some curbside programs will take plastic bags if they are bundled, but the commodity is low grade and brings a low price, partly because it gets dirty during handling and transportation. Even the plastic bag industry doesn't use its own post-consumer material. Recyclers are sometimes forced to stockpile bales of bags or even pay to get rid of them.

Myth: Bans or fees on plastic bags will just push people to use more paper bags.
Fact: With well-designed policies that address both plastic and paper bags, consumers will switch to reusable cloth bags.

The legislation supported by Save The Bay and other advocates covers all single-use bags, both paper and plastic. This is a proven way to decrease the use of both kinds of bags in favor of reusable bags - which are inexpensive and long-lasting - ultimately saving retailers and consumers money. Every year in the U.S, consumers and retailers spend billions of dollars on excessive quantities of single-use bags that have an average use time of 12 minutes.

Myth: A fee on plastic bags didn't work in Ireland. 
Fact: Ireland's bag fee dramatically reduced plastic bag usage and plastic bag litter.

Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency submitted a letter to the San Jose City Council rebutting the American Chemistry Council’s (ACC) false claims about Ireland's bag fee. In this letter, Ronan Mulhall of the Waste Policy division confirms that plastic bag litter dropped by 93 percent and plastic bag use decreased by approximately 90 percent in the year following the Plastic Bag Levy. Ireland later increased their fee to approximately 33 cents (US). The Irish EPA reports that these dramatically lower levels of plastic bag use and litter are being maintained.

Myth: Fees on single use bags will negatively impact low income people. 
Fact: No one has to pay the fee.

A single-use bag fee is only charged if you do not bring your own bag. Lower income communities (some of the most blighted by plastic bag litter) are already paying for plastic bags through city taxes and increased food and retail prices. Every bag fee policy currently under consideration at the local and state level would either subsidize reusable bags for low-income residents or exempt low-income residents from paying the fees.

Myth: Single-use bag bans or fees are bad policy in this time of economic crisis. 
Fact: Reducing the use of single-use plastic and paper bags will save us all money.

Retailers currently embed 2 to 5 cents per plastic bag and 5 to 23 cents per paper bag in the price of goods—adding $30 or more per person annually in hidden costs. In contrast, when consumers use reusable bags, retailers save money and can lower prices. Many grocers offer a 5-cent rebate for bringing your own bag, which can add up to about $60 in savings per year for an average family.

Bags clog storm drains and recycling equipment, costing cities millions, and bag litter lowers property values and degrades recreational areas. In addition to the out-of-pocket cost passed on from the retailer to consumers, California taxpayers spend approximately $25 million every year to collect and landfill plastic bags.6 San Jose City staff estimates that it costs at least $3 million annually to clean plastic bags from creeks and clogged storm drains.

Single-use bag production depletes resources and contributes to carbon emissions and global warming. We consume approximately 14 million trees8 and 12 million barrels of oil9 to produce the billions of plastic and paper bags we throw away in the United States every year.

Myth: Plastic bag litter isn't really a problem for the environment. 
Fact: 1.37 million plastic bags were removed from coastal areas worldwide in one day last year.

Plastic trash entangles, suffocates, and poisons at least 267 animal species worldwide. According to the California Coastal Commission, up to 80 percent of all marine debris is plastic, which never biodegrades.

Plastic bags were the second largest item of litter picked up by volunteers during the Ocean Conservancy's 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day. It is estimated that one million plastic bags pollute the Bay every year. Scientists recently measured 334,271 pieces of plastic per square mile in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Myth: Education about responsible use and disposal of plastic bags will reduce litter. 
Fact: Unfortunately, public education hasn't worked, despite massive public investment.

Huge amounts of money have been spent on public education about litter. One example is CalTrans' "Don't Trash California" campaign. Yet, we still see our highways coated in bags, cups, and cigarette butts. A fee on single use bags provides an incentive to consumers to change their behavior and switch to reusable bags.

The afterlife of plastic

With more energy than coal or wood, plastic could become a new global energy source

 

Published in Aljazeera America, November 11, 2014 by Luba Ostashevsky

Chemical engineer David Wilson holding a sample of waste plastic and oil reclaimed from plastic at BP’s feedstock recycling pilot plant in Grangemouth, Scotland.

James King-Holmes / Science Source

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — For the past few weeks, Moinuddin Sarker has been driving up and down the Connecticut coast looking for a large warehouse facility. He needs it to commercialize a chemical process he has pioneered. A material chemist who was born in Bangladesh and educated at the University of Manchester, Sarker wants to go from being a bench scientist to an entrepreneur.

In late October, he signed a lease on a 57,000-square-foot facility in Bridgeport where, with the help of $15 million from an investor, he plans to open the doors of his oil plant in January.

But he won’t be drilling in the waters of the nearby Long Island Sound. Instead, he has been negotiating with local sanitation companies to buy their plastic waste and plans to use it to produce 20 million to 30 million barrels of fuel a year, enough to heat all Connecticut households in the winter months.

Sarker’s company, Waste Technologies, seeks to convert plastic to oil through a process known as pyrolysis, which melts plastic in the absence of oxygen and turns it into petroleum. In the first week of November, Sarker received a patent for his version of the process.

There are other U.S. companies that are trying to commercialize a similar technology, including Agilyx in Beavertown, Oregon (where Richard Branson is an investor); RES Polyflow in Akron, Ohio; JBI in Niagara Falls, New York; and HighWave Energy in Summit, New Jersey, as well as Cynar in England.

By processing the plastic that cannot be recycled — flower pots, bottoms of plastic cups, plastic wrapping around jars, styrofoam containers and even fiberglass — these companies are emulating northern European countries such as Germany, Denmark and Norway that have long viewed garbage as a gold mine.

‘I grew up believing that plastic was the bane of our existence and that I had to find a solution for it.’ -Karin Kauffman founder of company that developed thermal cracking 

They are also part of an emerging industry that, according to a July study from the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University, can revolutionize the U.S. economy and energy sources. By mining the plastic currently in U.S. landfills and converting it to oil, the study projects, it would by possible to produce enough fuel to drive 9 million cars or generate enough electricity to heat 14 million homes for a whole year.

“Plastic is considerably higher in energy than coal and wood,” says Charles Mussche, one of the authors. “[But] the companies are still in their kids’ shoes,” Mussche warns, borrowing a metaphor from his native Dutch. “They are getting into their teen years, but it is not a developed industry.”

And the chemical process is not without controversy. Environmental advocates have questions about the process’s possibly toxic by-products, how much energy is needed to run the plants and whether it’s a tacit endorsement of plastic production at a time when Hawaii, California and other states have outlawed single-use plastic bags and Rhode Island, New Jersey and Massachusetts have similar legislation pending.

But plastics-to-oil producers say they share the public’s concerns. “I grew up believing that plastic was the bane of our existence and that I had to find a solution for it,” says Karin Kauffman, who in 2003 founded the research company where Sarker developed his version of pyrolysis, with $5 million of her own money. “As a practicing Buddhist, it was a religious calling for me to figure out how to ease the pollution of plastic on our planet,” she adds.

Sarker came on board in 2005, and by 2010, he had refined the pyrolysis-like process he calls “thermal cracking.” Now with the help of a new investor he is striking out on his own to put this process into action. The technology is based on a little-known fact about plastic: that it is originally made from oil. Converting it back to oil is not difficult, according to Phillip Savage, professor of chemical engineering at Penn State University.

 

Garbage as a gold mine

Plastic is usually made by heating crude oil, cooling it and adding preservatives so it is able to hold its shape. It can then be molded into light, flexible forms for use as shopping bags, takeout containers or plastic toys. The great benefit of plastic — and perhaps the reason why since its development in the mid-20th century more than 6 billion tons have been manufactured — is that it does not react with other agents. At room temperature, plastic containers can store alcohol, water and even fuel.

To turn plastic back to its original state requires subjecting it to heat of about 707 to 752 degrees Fahrenheit in an oxygen-starved environment. It is different from burning since there’s no combustion with oxygen. The plastic is literally turned to vapor, which can be captured and turned to liquid, producing kerosene, gasoline or diesel fuel, which, according to Sarker, is ready to be put straight into any machine with an engine.

‘[Oil from pyrolysis is] no different from what you buy at a gas station. It’s even a higher quality. It can power cars, generators, anything with an engine.’ -Moinuddin Sarker developer, thermal cracking

Sarker says that it costs only about $1 to produce a gallon of oil through pyrolysis, which is “no different from what you buy at a gas station — it’s even a higher quality,” he says. “It can power cars, generators, anything with an engine.” Sarker’s investor owns an oil refinery and several gas stations and plans to combine the oil from the new plant with his oil and sell it, Sarker says.

Plastic waste makes up 13 percent of all solid waste in the United States. According to figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, out of the 200 million tons of plastic produced each year, 32 million tons are thrown away after a single use. Nine percent of all plastic can be recycled, but the rest goes straight into landfills. Some of that ends up in the ocean.

While there aren’t exact figures for just how much, cases of marine animals that have died from ingesting plastic have made it into headlines. This summer and fall, two sei whales washed up on shore in Virginia and off the coast of Washington state, near Seattle. A necropsy of one of the whales, a female, revealed that a piece of plastic that looked like a DVD case was lodged in her stomach. The one in Seattle had plastic bags and golf balls in its stomach.

A technician holding a handful of shredded waste plastic at a recycling facility, BP's Feedstock Recycling Pilot Plant, Grangemouth, Scotland.

James King-Holmes / Science Source

Jay Schabel, the chief executive officer of RES Polyflow, has similar plans for processing solid waste. With a functional plant, he is further along than Sarker; Schabel is currently working out the kinks of the industrial process. RES Polyflow plans to process, on average, 5,000 pounds of waste an hour to produce 3 million gallons of fuel a year.

He has worked closely with waste companies and used to think that large chemical companies would be the first to these emerging pyrolysis technologies, but “big petrochemical companies have dabbled with it as a way to get rid of the plastic they produce,” he says, “but they couldn’t make it work financially, so it’s left to smaller start-ups to try.

Polyflow is working with the agriculture sector to collect heavy farm-related materials such as the plastic sheets used to line crop beds and the large, heavy-duty bags used to move crops, fertilizer and soil. “And if we can make plastic waste a valuable material, the benefit is that it’s less likely it’ll continue to pollute the environment,” he says.

 

Environmental benefit?

Sarker and Schabel both hope that turning plastic waste into a commodity will be good for their companies and good for the environment.

But Keith Weitz, an environmental scientist at RTI International, a nonprofit research institution that tracks waste management, says the technology is not quite there: “We’re a good few years out before we see how well the first-generation facilities work in real-world settings.”

 Plus, there are significant barriers, such as federal rules and requirements governing the quality of transportation-grade fuel. This means that “the synthetic oil produced by pyrolysis will likely require additional refining if it is to be used as a vehicle fuel. This increases the cost to facilities and consumes energy resources,” he writes in an email.

Some energy experts also worry about pollutants and that sending more carbon into the atmosphere will cause further damage to the ozone, fueling climate change.

“It all depends on the problem you want to solve,” says John DeCicco, an energy expert at the University of Michigan. “If your objective is to lower carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, pyrolysis is not necessarily a benefit. If plastic is landfilled, you’re as ahead of the game as you’re going to be by keeping the carbon out of the air.”

A worker transports discarded plastic bottles imported from Australia, at a plant in Hong Kong's rural New Territories, August 24, 2011, before a process which separates plastic waste from them.

Bobby Yip / Reuters / Landov

Environmentalists have a similarly measured response. Charles Moore, an oceanographer who in 1997 discovered a large mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean (dubbed “the great Pacific garbage patch” by the media) and who leads a foundation dedicated to keeping plastic pollution out of oceans, says that pyrolysis “doesn’t stop the generation of plastic to begin with, which should be the goal.”

His preferred solution would be finding an alternative to plastic that is biodegradable. He would, however, endorse pyrolysis as an interim solution if there were a way to stop plastic waste from washing into the ocean. “I just came back from an expedition in the Pacific and I’ve never seen so much plastic out there,” Moore says.

But environmental agencies such as National Resource Defense Council say more pragmatism is needed. “Every category of waste has its best ecological route. And converting the plastic that can’t be recycled to liquid fuel is a good path,” says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert at the NRDC.

‘Producing oil from waste at home should be considered better than using energy to bring petroleum from halfway round the world.’ -Jay Schabel, CEO, RES Polyflow, a plastics-to-oil company

 

Regarding the concerns about environmental damage from pyrolysis, Schabel argues that “producing oil from waste at home should be considered better than using energy to bring petroleum from halfway round the world.”

Yet environmental groups are also concerned about the end product of pyrolysis. When plastic is first made, preservatives such as talc, sawdust and hazardous additives such as lead and arsenic are added to help the material hold its shape. When the plastic melts, the additives end up as black char.

RTI’s Weitz says the only studies on what gets left behind after plastic is converted to oil so far have been reports from the companies themselves. Sarker and Schabel both say the char constitutes 2 percent of the weight of the original plastic waste (for every 5,000 pounds of plastic their companies process they’re left with 100 pounds of char) and that it’s nonhazardous. Both their companies are in the process of figuring out a use for it.

The two men are making plans to bring this emerging technology to market. Sarker is currently negotiating to provide oil to the company that runs the ferry from Bridgeport to Montauk, New York. And Schabel’s RES Polyflow is scheduled to be operational by early 2016.

Sarker already plans to open plants all across the northeast: New Jersey, New York and a second plant in Connecticut. Schabel says Polyflow has received a $1 million dollar grant from the Ohio state government but that he has also had to round up additional investor support of about $7 million. “We want to be seen as an alternative-energy fuel. Awareness is the biggest challenge.”

California Just Banned Free Plastic Bags, but Hold the Rejoicing

For a paper bag to be better, you have to use it three times.

Published in citylab by Katie Rose Quandt, Sept. 15, 2014

Washed-up plastic bags along the Los Angeles River. (Josh Morgan/AP)

Last month, California became the first state to pass a bill banning the ubiquitous disposable plastic bag. If signed into law, the measure will prohibit grocery and retail stores from providing single-use plastic bags and require them to charge at least 10 cents for paper bags, compostable bags, and reusable plastic bags. The bill, introduced by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Los Angeles), will also provide funding for California-based plastic bag companies to develop sturdier, reusable options.

Worldwide, consumers use an estimated 1 trillion plastic bags each year—nearly 2 million a minute—with the use time of a typical bag just 12 minutes. Californians alone throw away 14 billion a year, creating 123,000 tons of waste and untold amounts of litter.

There is evidence that bag bans and taxes can cut down on some of this waste: Ireland's 2002 tax cut bag usage between 75 and 90 percent. An analysis ofbag use in Australia found that 72 percent of customers accepted single-use bags that were offered for free. When a nominal fee was charged, usage dropped to 27 percent (33 percent switched to reusable bags and 40 percent made do without).
In fact, Californians faced with municipal bag fees often opt to skip the bag altogether. In an analysis of three major California municipalities with bag bans, 39 percent of customers left the store without a bag (opposed to 17 percent pre-ban).*

Although customers avoiding bags is an obvious environmental win, the same study found that paper bag use increased from 3 to 16 percent. While disposable plastic bags' manufacture is relatively energy intensive—according to the Australian government, a car could drive 36 feet with the amount of petroleum used to make a single plastic bag—paper bags aren't any better. In fact, a paper bag (which will still be available for ten cents) must be used three times before its global warming impact is lower than continuing to use single-use plastic bags, according to a study by the UK Environment Agency.

What about the customers who switch to reusable bags? The California study found that, faced with bag bans, customers increased reusable bag use from 5 to 45 percent. It is unclear which varieties of reusable bags are the most popular, but one common type, the non-woven polypropylene bag (the kind you might buy in the Whole Foods checkout line), must be used 11 times before its global warming impact is less than disposable bags.

A standard cotton tote requires 131 uses. Although the study does not factor in other benefits of reusable bags, such as reduced litter, it underscores the fact that reusable bags are only beneficial if they're actually used. Freebie branded totes gathering dust in closets are not worth the energy they took to produce.

Still, despite the higher production toll, the environmental think tank Earth Policy Institute (EPI), which has studied plastic bag bans, is "definitely in favor of reusable bags," Director of Research Janet Larsen tells Mother Jones. "Overall, we're advocating for a movement away from the disposable society and use-and-toss mentality."

One-third of Californians already live in municipalities with plastic bag bans, including those in San Francisco and Los Angeles. EPI tracks all known bag restrictions, 133 of which are in the United States:

No one is sure how long a plastic bag takes to decompose, but estimates range from 500 to 1,000 years. Even then, they never fully biodegrade; they just break down into ever-tinier plastic pellets. Each year, tens of thousands of whales, birds, seals, and turtles die after getting entangled with bags or mistaking them for food. In 2010, a gray whale that was beached and died in Seattle was found to have more than 20 plastic bags in its stomach.

Designated plastic bag recycling facilities exist, but the EPA estimates only 12 percent of bags make it there. CalRecycle puts the statewide number even lower at 3 percent. Even when bags are returned to the proper bin, they aren't truly recycled, but downcycled. "Because plastic bags have a variety of dyes and other additives, it's hard to know exactly what you're getting if you melt down a bunch of bags that consumers have used," explains Larsen. Instead, used bags "generally get turned into something else, such as park benches or flooring material.

"Improperly recycled bags also cause problems for recycling centers like San Francisco's Recology. "When people put them in the recycling bin—and they should not do that—they wind up down at the recycling plant and they wrap around a lot of the recycling equipment," public relations manager Robert Reed tells Mother Jones. About twice a day, "you have to turn your equipment off and send mechanics in with box knives to cut them out."

Proposed plastic bag restrictions almost always meet opposition. In 2007, a Safeway lobbyist in Annapolis, Maryland, called a proposed bag tax "un-American." Padilla's last attempt, a similar bill introduced last year, was defeated by three votes. This time around, his bill includes a grant program to help bag factories transition from single-use to reusable bags. Even with this provision, many manufacturers like California-based Crown Poly oppose the bill, saying it will force industry layoffs.
The plastic bag industry's American Progressive Bag Alliance funded attack ads calling the bill a dirty deal between politicians and grocers, who will now be able to charge for bags:

In Hong Kong, a plastics industry-funded study claims that overall plastic bag use increased after the city implemented a bag tax, since consumers who had previously reused grocery bags began purchasing reusable bags and heavy garbage bags. Some Californians have complained that they already reuse plastic bags to clean up after pets and line wastebaskets, although it seems unlikely that the average family finds uses for the 1,500 bags brought home each year.

Another plastics-industry-backed study at the University of Arizona prompted fears after finding E. coli in 12 percent of tested reusable canvas grocery bags—though the lead author of the report told NPR that the bacteria found would not make the average healthy person sick. The report also found that more than 99.9 percent of bag bacteria can be killed by machine or hand washing, something only 3 percent of bag users actually do.

Marine researcher Charles J. Moore writes in a recent New York Times op-ed that plastic pollution in the ocean may be killing more animals than climate change. "Hundreds of species mistake plastics for their natural food," he writes, not only sickening wildlife but also "adding to the increasing amount of synthetic chemicals unknown before 1950 that we now carry in our bodies."

In a press release, Nathan Weaver of Environment California says the ban is an "important step forward" that "shows that we can achieve lasting victories for ocean and environmental health. Nothing we use for a few minutes should pollute our ocean for hundreds of years."

*This post has been updated to address the various alternatives to single-use bags.

Has A 20-Year-Old Found A Cheap Way To Clean The Planet's Oceans?

Dutch aerospace student Boyan Slat, 20, has an idea that could conceivably remove millions of tons of toxic trash from the world's waters. It even has a revenue model. But will it work?

 

Published in WorldCrunch.com by Josephine Pabst Sept. 4, 2014

  

 Boyan Slat next to a drawing of his Ocean Cleanup project 

 

BERLIN — Twenty-year-old Boyan Slat studies aerospace engineering in the Netherlands, enjoys diving, doesn't bother much with haircuts, and prefers to spend his vacations in Greece. A fairly normal profile for a European student.

But in one crucial respect, Slat differs from thousands of his peers: He has an idea that 100 scientists worldwide find convincing — indeed some of them regard it as groundbreaking — and that could save billions, if it works.

Slat's brainchild aims to rid millions of tons of plastic garbage from the world's oceans. Exactly how much of it there is can only be estimated, and experts have differing views. The figures vary from 100 to 142 million tons. And the amount is constantly growing.

According to the United Nations, some 225 million tons of plastic is produced annually. Of that, 6.4 million tons wind up in the oceans and tend to stay there for decades without decomposing. Instead, they disintegrate into smaller and smaller particles.

Studies have shown that it takes less than a year for ultraviolet light, salt water and mechanical forces to jump-start the disintegration process. The problem is that this process releases toxic chemicals that even in modest quantities can cause severe damage to both ocean life and human beings. And they can end up in humans with astonishing ease — via fish, mussels and other seafood that take in the bits of plastic because they confuse them with plankton or other food.

Birds and garbage on Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean — Forest & Kim Starr

And that's not all: The plastic garbage itself leads to the mass deaths of sea birds, fish and sea mammals. A two-year study conducted by Dutch research group Alterra had researchers performing autopsies on 600 fulmars — gull-like birds — that had washed up on the North Sea coast. They concluded that 90% of them had consumed indigestible trash, on average 44 plastic bits per bird.

The silver bullet?
Of course, Boyan Slat is not the first person to try to solve the problem. But unlike most concepts suggested so far, his has significant advantages. It is far less costly and holds the promise of markedly higher efficiency than the usual methods — for example, sending fishermen out with nets to trawl for trash.

Measures taken up to now in the Asia-Pacific region have cost some 967 million euros annually. "The Ocean Cleanup," as Slat's model is called, would require only two million and would be a good deal more effective.

"The amount of garbage retrieved by such projects is extremely slight compared to the entire amount in the oceans," says marine biologist Lars Gutow, who works for the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. You only have to look at overfished regions in comparison to total ocean size to see that, he adds.

To deal with the problem more efficiently, the oceans' natural dumping grounds need to be researched. These are trash vortexes called ocean gyres in which plastic garbage amass naturally.

Charles Moore, an American marine researcher, was the first person to see the gigantic rotating currents when his ship ended up in the middle of one in 1997 on the way back to California from Hawaii. In the meantime, researchers say there are a total of five such massive vortexes. The largest one runs clockwise between Asia and North America.

Photo: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The phenomenon is called the "North Pacific Gyre," and the area is more informally known as the Great Pacific garbage patch. This, the largest, is the subject of Slat's focus. Within five years, if his ambitious plan works, it should be history.

The model itself looks like a bird's-eye view of a gigantic V. Its two hose-like arms, each 50 kilometers (31 miles), would lie on the ocean's surface. Every 4 kilometers (2.5 miles), they would be weighted and attached to the ocean floor. Filters would be attached to the hoses that would catch garbage but pose no danger to marine creatures.

There's even a revenue model
The debris would be housed in tower-like containers that would be emptied by ship every 45 days. Then the garbage would be recycled. If the system works, it would be worth good money: A ton of plastic debris sells on average for 50 euros. Recycled, according to estimates from the German Council for Sustainable Development, it would be worth more like 300 to 400 euros. That would mean that cleaning plastic debris from the ocean could create 56.8 billion euros in revenue.

While most of the plastic garbage lies on the top three meters of the ocean, the concept would allow for most of the existing garbage to be collected. The model stocks energy in solar panels. Because no nets would be used, no harm would come to marine wildlife, according to documentation of the project, on which 100 researchers, scientists and engineers have worked.

Photo: Facebook page

The ambitious plan is due to be financed through crowdfunding. Slat raised $800,000 for a trial run. He and fellow researchers have already established that the idea works, at least on a small scale.

Overall, marine biologist Lars Gutow sees the project critically. "I’m no engineer," he stresses. "But I believe that a vehicle as big as this one, that spans several hundred meters, is unworkable."

There has never been a project this large that works reliably under conditions that can include storms, meter-high waves and inconceivable forces. If there should be damage, what then? Who would be in a position so far away from land to responsibly manage the system and repair it if necessary?

Gutow also sees other problems. "If half the world now thinks that a construction like this makes it possible to fish all the plastic garbage out of the world's oceans, then there is hardly any incentive for researchers to keep working on making sure no further plastic is produced, and if so, that it doesn't end up in the oceans," he says. "And that would be disastrous."

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.