The Rise of Plastic Pollution, the Rise of Our Risks

By Selene Yi

As Covid-19 spread across the world, the use of plastic increased quickly. In South Korea, many people started to order take-out food or even order food online. These both use a lot of plastic. The question is, “Where do these plastics go?”. The answer is the ocean. “There were about a few hundred tons of plastics at the surface of the ocean, which is a huge number,” Laurent Lebreton said, the Head of Research who works at the Ocean Cleanup. However, it turned out that these hundreds of tons of plastic only covered one percent of the whole garbage patch.

Between Hawaii and California, there is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. These patches are mostly made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. They make the patch look like a cloudy soup, which is mixed with larger items like fishing gear and shoes. For decades, tons of our plastic has accumulated there and they are still floating on the ocean surface. Recently, scientists brought large nets to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and had a closer look at the plastic objects. They found water bottles, hats, bottle caps, and more. Plastic was even found in tiny ocean creatures, such as plankton.

The problem with marine debris is that it affects marine life. According to National Geographic, sea turtles often mistake plastic bags for jellies, their favorite food. Plus, Albatrosses mistake plastic pellets as fish eggs and feed them to chicks, which die of starvation. It is also said that plastic can disturb marine food webs in the North Pacific. As microplastics and other trash gather to the surface of the ocean, they block sunlight from reaching plankton and algae, the most common producers in the marine food web. In addition, if these creatures are threatened, the entire web may change, which will lead to seafood becoming less available and more expensive.

While some of our plastic floats around as patches, some are hidden, meaning they are in the seafloor, too. These plastics are called “Seafloor Microplastics” or “Seafloor Sediments”. The picture of a plastic bag below is one of over 2100 photographs taken by a deep sea camera. “We use towed camera surveys to look at the impact on large animals, like starfish and snails, sponges.And while I was doing these surveys, I saw that more and more plastic debris was on the seafloor,” Melanie Bergmann, a researcher of Alfred Wegener Institute said. Her research shows that some of the plastic sink without breaking down instead of floating on the surface or breaking into microplastic. “Debris which is floating on the ocean’s surface becomes colonized with barnacles, mussels, all sorts of different organisms. And then, it becomes heavier and heavier, and at a certain point then it starts to sink,” Bergmann said. This kind of plastic is called, “Sinking macroplastics”.

This is a plastic crate, found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that is from Taiwan. What gathered researchers’ attention was its production date: 1971. The production date of other plastic objects, they found that a lot of them were old. This was something new because if most of the plastic trash broke down into microplastic or sank to the seafloor, then what we would see in garbage patches would be new trash. “And that changed the story because the plastic that is accumulated at the surface of the ocean is actually very persistent,” Lebreton said. “the plastic we find in subtropical oceans may actually be there for decades, if not centuries.”

Lebreton’s research found that plastic objects on coastlines have more recent production dates than the ones found in deep seas. This led to a thought that a lot of our plastic stays close to the shore, which are “Plastic close to shore”. Erik van Sebille, an Oceanographer, said “Some of that will end up in the middle of the ocean and garbage patch, but actually a lot of it stays fairly near shore, and hops from beach to beach.” He is building an ocean model that predicts where our plastic goes. “We use simulations of the ocean currents and they’re a bit like weather models for the ocean. And then we put in virtual plastic. We move that plastic with the ocean flow. At the same time the plastic can degrade, organisms start growing on it that weighs down the plastic so that it slowly starts to sink into the deeper ocean,” he said. “So in that way, we’re doing this gigantic simulation of all of the ocean, of all the plastic moving around.”

Sebille thinks most of our plastic is at shorelines, repeating the process of getting on beaches, coastlines, or into the seafloor. He said that if this cycle continues, it causes a lot of rubbing, fragmenting and scraping over the sand. This idea helps to explain microplastics in animals, too.

Although plastic pollution was a problem for decades, so little has been done despite its size and risks. This photograph was taken by volunteers of an annual and international coastal clean-up event, held by the Ocean Conservancy. They find food wrappers, bottle caps, plastic cups and plates. Joining these types of events can be a way of reducing plastic from flowing to the ocean. Why don’t you take a step out to prevent plastic pollution?