Tsunami debris highlights growth of Pacific trash vortex

Published August 8th, 2012 By Kate Webb in the metronews Vancouver

Metro/Courtesy The Ocean Voyages Institute The crew of the Keisei hauled every type of plastic bottle, container, and net out of the ocean during a recent cleanup and research expedition.

The crew of a ship running expeditions to catalogue and clean up a massive patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean was sailing off the Oregon coast last month when it found a huge piece of a dock believed to be wreckage from the Japanese tsunami.

They are hoping public interest in the tsunami debris that has been washing up all along the West Coast of North America will spark a movement to fund a large-scale cleanup of the world’s oceans.

Mary Crowley, founder of The Ocean Voyages Institute, said no one really knows how much plastic is in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” despite reports that it is fast approaching an area twice the size of Texas.

“They’re doing that to try to give people a sense of it, but the fact is, the gyre [vortex] covers a huge area,” she said. “The gyre starts 500, 600 miles off our West Coast and goes 500, 600 miles off the coast of Asia. It’s about the size of the continental U.S. So when they talk about the size of Texas, they’re talking about if it were all together.”

No one knows the full extent of its impact on wildlife, but it is estimated hundreds of thousands of birds and marine mammals die each year from ingesting pieces of plastic and getting tangled in free-floating fishing nets.

Speaking at the Britannia Heritage Shipyard in Richmond Wednesday, Crowley called on the U.N. to create an emergency task force of ships ready to respond in natural disasters such as floods and tsunamis, to stem the growth of the already vast chemical soup.

“It would have been much easier to clean it up when it was all sitting together off of Japan,” she explained.

See what they found inside jellyfish in 2009:



She said much of the garbage is carried out to sea from coastal cities around the world when it rains. Other expeditions have turned up jagged pieces of plastic that have been through a crusher, she added, suggesting some places are simply using rivers and oceans as their dumping grounds.

The results, in hard-hit places such as Hawaii, she said, are beaches strewn with litter, and toxins making their way up the foodchain and onto dinner plates everywhere.

The Institute’s 46-metre tall ship, the Kaisei, which means Ocean Planet in Japanese, will be on display this weekend as part of the Richmond Maritime Festival, before it departs early next week on another tsunami debris cleanup expedition.

Metro/Courtesy The Ocean Voyages Institute

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Plastic problem plagues Pacific, researchers say

Published: August 08, 2012 By Martin van den Hemel - Richmond Review

"Everybody is part of the problem and everybody can be part of the solution." said Project Kaisei co-founder Mary Crowley, who spoke at a press conference Wednesday about the research efforts aboard the Japanese brigantine research vessel Kaisei. It's currently docked at Britannia Heritage Shipyard and will remain here for this weekend's Richmond Maritime Festival before departing next week.

Crowley, in town with the visiting Kaisei to raise awareness about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, said that although scientists don't know for sure, the plastic vortex is thought to be the size of the state of Texas, perhaps twice as large.

It consists of discarded plastic detergent bottles, water bottles, and other everyday plastic objects.

"It's like looking at your own garbage, spread out through the ocean," she told reporters.

"You can see a lot of sea life is ingesting the plastic," Crowley said, explaining a video she presented which shows that plastic containers slowly break up into smaller pieces, and some are eventually ingested by sea life, such as jelly fish.

Aside from killing marine life, researchers fear the plastic is entering the human food chain, something researchers hope to verify and demonstrate.

Crowley said the floating garbage patch continues  to grow "due to poor waste management practices on land and sea."

Rather than one solid floating mass, she described the oceanic debris field as "like an archipelago of little islands."

Coun. Harold Steves urged consumers to do their part and stop drinking bottled water, and said hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on infrastructure to make Lower Mainland tap water clean and safe.
He wondered why thermoses and paper grocery bags are less trendy today.

"The insidious thing about plastics is that it lasts for hundreds of years," he said. "We need to make using thermoses cool again."

According to the Ocean Voyages Institute, only about five per cent of the world's plastics are recycled.

With 260 million tons of plastic produced globally each year, Crowley fears the garbage patch could double in size in the next decade.

The Kaisei departed San Francisco on July 4 and about 300 miles off the coast of Washington and Oregon made a shocking discovery: a massive amount of debris thought to have originated from the tsunami in Japan and that's been heading towards North America's west coast since March 11, 2011.

Crowley hoped that media coverage about the advancing debris field from Japan's tsunami would raise awareness about the problem of garbage congesting the Pacific Ocean.

















Mary Crowley, Executive Director and founder of the Ocean Voyages Institute, steers the tall ship Kaisei, which has just returned from the North Pacific where crew members tracked and salvaged manmade debris found floating in the area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. (CARMINE MARINELLI/ 24 HOURS)There's a massive vortex of plastic debris growing daily in the Pacific Ocean, a mountainous problem that will require an equally immense global effort to find the solution.

Ship Tracking Tsunami Debris, Ocean Trash Makes Stop in BC

Marine litter a growing problem, but cleanup plans are in the works

published in TheEpochTimes August 7, 2012 by Joan Delaney

The tall ship Kaisei, seen here docked in Richmond after several weeks of tracking debris and gathering research on the Great Pacific Patch and the Japanese tsunami. The findings will be presented at the Richmond Maritime Festival Aug. 10-12. (Courtesy of City of Richmond)

After several weeks of tracking floating debris from last year’s Japanese tsunami as well as debris from the North Pacific Gyre, the tall ship Kaisei has arrived in Richmond, B.C.

The Kaisei is the primary research vessel for San Francisco-based Project Kaisei, an international program dedicated to raising awareness and implementing solutions to the growing problem of marine debris.

The research gleaned during the Kaisei’s latest voyage will be presented at the Richmond Maritime Festival from August 10 to 12, where the public will be able to board the 46-metre brigantine and learn firsthand about her environmental mission.

We see [marine debris] as a major global epidemic that is affecting the health of the ocean.

— Project Kaisei co-founder Mary Crowley

There will also be a series of question-and-answer talks led by Project Kaisei staff and scientists, including co-founder Mary Crowley, as well as video screenings highlighting the project’s latest research.

Crowley, executive director of the Ocean Voyages Institute, the non-profit that operates the Kaisei, says the problem of marine debris is worrisome, given its detrimental effect on marine life and the overall health of the world’s oceans.

“I personally, and our organization, have been extremely concerned with the global issue of ocean trash, because in all of the world’s oceans we are getting more and more proliferation of mainly plastic—just all this plastic that never goes away and is really bad for sea life,” Crowley told The Epoch Times.

According to UN estimates, at least 80 percent of litter in the sea comes from land-based sources.

“I mean, there’s 330,000—at least—marine mammals being killed every year by either ingesting plastics or getting entangled in them. So whales and dolphins and seals and all sorts of things are getting killed.”

According to UN estimates, at least 80 percent of litter in the sea comes from land-based sources.

Much of this waste ends up in the North Pacific Gyre, more infamously known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a large expanse of remote open ocean where four currents converge, acting as a catalyst in collecting floating materials.

The gyre has become home to huge fields of plastic and other debris from both North America and Asia, and represents one of the world’s great environmental challenges in terms of the scope and scale of the debris.

“We see [marine debris] as a major global epidemic that is affecting the health of the ocean,” says Fowler.

Tsunami Debris

The hundreds of tons of debris swept into the sea by the Japanese tsunami, which is currently floating across the Pacific and beginning to wash up on shores along the west coast of North America, “just adds another layer of bad things happening for the ocean,” Fowler notes.

“I think the issue of the tsunami debris is a very serious one for the ocean and a very serious one for shipping. And in our studying of it, we would like to be proponents of going out there and doing clean-up—getting as much of it out of the ocean as possible.”

Kaisei crew members cut through ocean debris before hauling it aboard. (Ocean Voyages Institute/Project Kaisei)

As well as tracking the debris, the Kaisei is taking large water samples that will be tested at the University of Hawaii to discover the degree of radioactivity being spread throughout the Pacific.

While the tsunami debris itself hasn’t been shown to have significant levels of radiation, Crowley says radioactivity continues to be dumped into the ocean from the Fukishima nuclear plant.

“After the tsunami a great deal of radioactivity was dumped into the ocean, but the fact is it’s continued to be dumped into the ocean—it’s being dumped into the ocean today,” she says.

“It’s a general belief that the ocean is so large that the radioactivity spreads out and becomes insignificant, but I think there’s a limit.”

On its return trip to San Francisco, the Kaisei will conduct further research on large fields of tsunami debris it encountered off the west coast of the U.S. on its voyage north to Richmond.

“When we do our return voyage, we’ve allowed quite a lot of time to survey off the coast of Washington and Oregon to follow up on some of the sightings we took coming north, and spending more time doing a pattern through the area recording the debris and picking up debris as is appropriate, etc.,” Fowler says.

The Kaisei team is also studying the effects of Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POPs, from collected samples. Land activities and leachates from marine debris are sources of pollutants that can negatively affect marine life and human health.

Cleaning Up

This was Kaisei’s third voyage to the garbage patch, and on each trip the crew salvaged a good deal of ocean trash, but much more needs to be done, says Fowler.

To that end, Project Kaisei has partnered with Covanta Energy, an international waste-to-energy company that can convert ocean waste into fuel or energy.

A plastic container and other ocean garbage picked up by the Kaisei. (Ocean Voyages Institute/Project Kaisei)

“I think from the point of view of being responsible and caring about the health of the ocean and the health of the planet that clean-up is imperative, and it also is necessary to be sure that everything that’s cleaned up is being recycled and repurposed. And we definitely are able to accomplish that,” Fowler says.

Project Kaisei is also working with researchers from the University of Hawaii—experts in ocean current patterns who can direct the ship to areas containing debris.

In addition, Fowler has assembled a think-tank consisting of naval architects, marine engineers, fishermen, sailors, and ocean industry representatives to help come up with a plan for the most effective ways to do a major clean-up.

“We’ve actually come a long way in a couple of years, putting all the pieces in place,” she says, adding that the project is currently looking for funding to do a series of clean-up expeditions.

“We have people from Europe, people from India, people from South America all coming to us and asking for the most effective ways to do clean-up,” she says.

“My think-tank really feels that we have to do a couple of big expeditions and then we will happily release all the information and consult with and help people around the world, because that’s what we want to do is inspire people in all different parts of the world to do clean-up.”

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Our Oceans: A Plastic Soup

by Renee Cho | 1.26.2011 posted in Earth's Institute at Columbia University

Photo credit: cesarharada.com

“Humanity’s plastic footprint is probably more dangerous than its carbon footprint,” said Captain Charles Moore, who, in 1997, discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Its name is misleading because the huge expanse of floating marine debris is actually more like a soup of confetti-sized plastic bits, produced by the runoff of our throwaway lifestyle that has made its way into our oceans.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the most notorious stretch of plastic debris, is located northeast of Hawaii, about 1000 miles from Hawaii and California. It’s an enormous and immeasurable area of marine debris, trapped by one of the five major subtropical gyres (systems of ocean currents) that corrals and carries marine garbage into its vortex. 5 Gyres, an organization that partners with Moore’s Algalita Marine Research Foundation to study plastic pollution in the ocean, has sent expeditions across the North Pacific Gyre, the North and South Atlantic Gyres, and the Indian Ocean Gyre, and found plastic in every one of them, though concentrations vary.  Some reports have estimated the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to be twice the size of the continental United States, but no one can accurately measure the boundaries of the trash gyres because they are vast, remote and always shifting with ocean conditions. In any case, plastic marine debris is now found on the surface of every ocean on Earth.

Ocean gyres. Photo credit: NOAA

Some plastic and marine debris comes from fishing gear, offshore oil and gas platforms, and ships.  But 80 percent of it comes from the land—litter that gets stuck in storm drains and is washed into rivers and out to sea, the legal and illegal dumping of garbage and appliances, and plastic resin pellets inadvertently spilled and unloaded by plastic manufacturers. Trash Travels, Ocean Conservancy’s 2010 report, states that 60 percent of all marine debris in 2009 consisted of “disposable” items, with the most common being cigarettes, plastic bags, food containers, bottle caps and plastic bottles. And no matter where the litter originates, once it reaches the ocean, it becomes a planetary problem as garbage travels thousands of miles carried by the gyres.

The lightness and durability that make plastic such a useful and versatile material for manufacturers also make it a long-term problem for the environment. Trash Travels estimates that plastic bags can take 20 years to decompose, plastic bottles up to 450 years, and fishing line, 600 years; but in fact, no one really knows how long plastics will remain in the ocean. With exposure to UV rays and the ocean environment, plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller fragments. The majority of the plastic found in the ocean are tiny pieces less than 1 cm. in size, with the mass of 1/10 of a paper clip.

Photo credit: Chris Jordan

The Sea Education Association’s (SEA) expedition to the western North Atlantic Ocean found bits of HDPE (high density polyethylene), LDPE (low density polyethylene), and PP (polypropylene) from items such as milk containers, plastic bags, and straws, which float on the surface because they are less dense than seawater. It did not find PET (polyethylene terephthalate), PVC (polyvinyl chloride), and PS (polystyrene solid), which sink because they are denser than seawater. Algalita, which sampled down to depths of 100 hundred meters throughout the eastern side of the North Pacific Gyre, found LDPE, styrene, PP and PET.

Last year, SEA released the results of its 22-year study of plastic pollution in the western North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea. The greatest amount of plastic was found in the North Atlantic Gyre, which contains the Sargasso Sea. The most plastic collected during a 30-minute tow was 1069 pieces, which, if scaled up, would be equal to about 580,000 pieces per square kilometer. The average concentration of samples would roughly equal 20,300 pieces per square kilometer. While discarded plastic in the U.S. quadrupled between 1980 and 2008, however, the concentration of debris in the Atlantic did not appear to increase. Where has it all gone? Lead scientist Kara Lavender Law speculated that some is being eaten by marine animals, some has broken down into bits too small to be captured by tow nets, some gets washed up onto beaches, and some is sinking to the ocean floor. According to Project Kaisei, a non-profit also studying marine debris, 70 percent of the man-made waste that enters the ocean sinks to the bottom. That means that the plastic soup is only the 30 percent of the debris that floats. No one knows what lies deep down because so far, there have been no studies of the plastic on the ocean floor.

But we know the plastic debris on the surface of the ocean is taking its toll on marine life. Animals get strangled in fishing lines, nets, and plastic litter. Fish and seabirds ingest bits of plastic they mistake for food that can block their intestinal tracts and kill them, or make them feel full so that they do not eat real food.One of Moore’s expeditions collected hundreds of samples of fish, and conducted necropsies on them: over 1/3 had ingested polluted plastic fragments, including one 2.5 inch fish that had 84 pieces of plastic in its tiny gut. In 1999, Moore’s research in the Central Pacific found six times more plastic than zooplankton in the water. In 2002, off the coast of Southern California, he discovered the ratio of plastic to plankton was 2.5. Preliminary results on samples Algalita took in 2008 already show that there is a significant increase in the ratio of plastic to plankton in the water. Plastic bits also create habitats for microorganisms and other species, allowing would-be invasive species to hitch rides to new areas of the ocean.

A recent study found that plastics take up and accumulate persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and organochlorine pesticides such as DDD, a derivative of DDT. Over 50 percent of the plastic samples studied contained PCBs, and over 75 percent contained PAHs. According to Moore, plastic debris can attract and concentrate POPs up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater, and when consumed by marine animals, the POPs endanger both the creatures that ingest them and humans higher up on the food chain, especially infants. Moore has said, “No fish monger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish.”

Despite all these environmental and potential human health impacts, most scientists agree that it is not feasible to clean up the plastic soup in our oceans. The areas are huge, and the debris is unevenly distributed and always shifting. A cleanup would entail filtering enormous amounts of water, and the by-catch of plankton and other marine organisms would be harmful to ocean ecosystems. Moreover, the fact that the trash gyres are in the open ocean, in international waters, makes it difficult to get governments to invest in research or cleanup efforts.

Undaunted, Project Kaisei, on its two expeditions to the North Pacific Gyre, has been working to develop and test new methods for removal of some of the plastic waste. Its goal is to learn more about how to efficiently remove the floating plastic, and to use new techniques to recycle the material into fuel or other products. Project Kaisei plans to test new, and scaled-up catch methods on future expeditions, as well as passive netting and catch methods that require little fuel and have low impacts on marine life.

Moore and Algalita believe that the best way to deal with the plastic debris is to stop the waste from entering the ocean in the first place: to replace, reduce, reuse and recycle our plastics. Marcus Eriksen, one of the founders of 5 Gyres, also promotes beach cleanup because “What we now know is that if we stop adding more plastic to the ocean, in time the gyres will kick out the plastic pollution they currently hold.  If you want to clean the gyre, clean your beach.”  In 2010, approximately 500,000 volunteers did just that, taking part in the 25th Annual International Coastal Cleanup and removing millions of pounds of marine debris from 6,000 sites around the world, including all 50 U.S. states.

Photo credit: Ocean Conservancy

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation has launched a three-year scientific study expedition to the Antarctic Ocean, and is planning a voyage to the North Pacific gyre in July. This spring, 5 Gyres is preparing to sail across the South Pacific Gyre from Chile to Easter Island. Findings from these expeditions and others will be shared at the 5th International Marine Debris Conference in March, 2011.
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