Roamin' RAPster

5Gyres employee and Surfrider Rise Above Plastics volunteer-activist (and I emphasize "active") Stiv Wilson was written-up in an Oregon weekly recently. In this blog we've given you updates on his work with 5Gyres founders and anti-plastic-pollution superstars Marcus Eriksen and (wife) Anna Cummins, as they sail the globe exploring the world's ocean gyres to pull eyes toward and raise awareness of the extent of plastic pollution littering our seas.

Sailing the globe! Outing the bad guys (us)! Check out the in-depth Willamette Weekly article about Stiv and Oregon's Ban The Bag effort here, check out 5gyres & plan your ride-along on one of their expeditions here and HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND with dreams of sailing the bounding mane!

Hooey, Hokum & Hogwash

Oregon State U published an article about 10 days ago detailing their study on plastics in the ocean had determined that the North Pacific Garbage Patch (NPGP) ain't "nearly as big as portrayed in the media". Apparently forgotten at OSU is the Nike shoe incident that 1) besmirched Oregon beaches in 1990 and 2) gave us an early indication that the Pacific Ocean had a growing problem trying to accommodate our land-based infusion of garbage...? Who knew? ;)

One person that can speak with authority in rebuttal is a man that has traveled (and is currently traveling) through all of the world's ocean gyres to survey the extent of plastic pollution worldwide (while academics debate garbage patch sizes back home...?). Marcus Eriksen, PhD, co-founded (with his wife, activist & Stanford graduate, Anna Cummins) the 5Gyres Institute to go beyond the research in this field that they were doing while working with Algalita Marine Research Foundation. You may know Algalita as the group that "discovered" and initially drew our attention to the NPGP, and you may know Marcus from his adventure "sailing" to Hawaii from the US mainland in a "JunkRaft" made of trash, again bringing attention to the problem of the NPGP. Here is his word on the matter of debating the NPGP's size/existence, the media AND how we can help fight the plastic pollution problem:

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Beyond the absurdity of a “Texas-sized Garbage Patch” lies a larger menace of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans

Media is sometimes the tail that wags the dog of science. One oceanographer described finding plastic in his relatively tiny Texas-size study area of the North Pacific Ocean, while another began describing these areas of concentration as “garbage patches”. A mis-information frenzie birthed a mis-conception of an island of trash. Hurry, someone plant a flag - sell real estate! Disappointing to the entrepreneurial spirit that aimed to fix it for a fee, there are no such islands. They do not exist. Having traveled 20,000 miles across 4 of the 5 subtropical gyres, returning from crossing the South Atlantic Gyre in December 2010, I assure you that reality is much worse.

It’s a patchy patch. In 1999 Captain Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation based in Long Beach, CA, published an observed 6:1 weight ratio of plastic to plankton in the swirling center of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. I joined him in 2005 and 2008 to the same region. In this decade of research, the foundation was heavily criticized by other oceanographers for quantifying plastic this way. What was hidden in this criticism was the fact that the science of Oceanography was caught off guard. No one knew of this plastic plague on the world’s oceans, until a Long Beach surfer/sailor turned scientist made it known. It is true that plankton is extremely variable, and can bloom and dissipate with the season, temperature, moonlight, and a dozen other variables, therefore the margin of error is huge. But the plastic/plankton ratio serves a good anecdote for relative abundance of plastic to available food for scavenging fish and filter feeders, like from jellies to baleen whales. So, it’s important to describe plastic to plankton ratios as an anecdote, but not worth quantifying.

1999 was not the first time scientist studied plastic pollution in the ocean. Thor Heyerdal observed plastic in 1969 crossing the North Atlantic on Ra I. Two years later Edward Carpenter, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, netted pellets and fragments of plastic pollution between the east coast and Bermuda. Plastic pollution in the North Pacific Gyre was first described by Robert Day in 1989 near the coast of Japan, and in the South Atlantic Gyre near Cape Town, South Africa in 1980 by Robert Morris of the Institute of Oceanographic Science in the UK. It was a quiet, poorly-understood menace that palled in significance and interest to oceanographers. Then the story broke about an island of plastic, with sensationalized accounts beyond science, mythological masses of synthetic detritus, an illusive terra aqua.

“Somebody do something,” cried the ocean advocates, artists, celebrities and politicians. And the scientists followed. Media called them to action. But not before the industrialists. A problem precedes a solution ready to sell. Groups with little or no experience at sea rose to the occasion with fanciful technofixes, contraptions of grandeur, robotic vagabonds to sieve the sea in solitude and bring the trash back to land, or parachutes that spin sickle-shaped islands that net plastic pollution in their path. All have failed, realizing that going to the ocean to remove floating plastic particles is like standing on the top of a skyscraper with a vacuum cleaner to remove air pollution. It’s not impossible, just impractical. There is no island to retrieve. We have run expeditions across the North Pacific Gyre, North Atlantic Gyre, Indian Ocean Gyre, and in December 2010 we crossed the South Atlantic Gyre. We found plastic in every surface trawl, in varying concentrations. Imagine a handful of degraded plastic confetti spread across a football field of the ocean surface. That’s as thick as it gets, but it’s everywhere. It’s a think plastic soup over 2/3rds of the earth’s surface. So far the 5 Gyres Institute has traveled to 4 of the 5 subtropical gyres in the world, conducting over 400 surface trawls, with plastic in every one. That is the menace of plastic pollution. It’s everywhere, thinly distributed, and extremely impractical to clean up at sea.

But if no one cleans it up, will the garbage patches keep growing? No. Studies in the North Atlantic Gyre and North Pacific Gyre have been repeated with interesting results. There’s no massive trend in plastic accumulation over time. Kara Lavender Law, of Sea Education, compiled data from 22 years of data from the North Atlantic Gyre, the same area that Carpenter studied 3 ½ decades earlier. “We observed no strong temporal trends in plastic concentration…” Last week we returned from 31 days crossing the South Atlantic Gyre. As we sailed into Cape Town we revisited half of the locations that Morris studied 3 decades ago and repeated his exact methods. Though our samples have not been analyzed yet, I can anecdotally report that the samples do not appear to show a tremendous trend in plastic accumulation over this time. Sure, there’s more, but the increase does not parallel the rapid increase in plastic production and consumption on land. So where does it go? We believe some sinks as absorbed chemicals, like PCBs, PAHs and other persistent pollutants, and biofouling make smaller and smaller particles more dense than seawater. Much of it washes ashore on islands in the gyres, like Hawaii and Bermuda, or is kicked out of the gyres onto mainland beaches as the gyre’s center wobbles east and west. Then there’s still room for unknown answers. 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.

We want to know a few things. How much plastic is out there, what is the fate of plastic in the ocean, what is the impact of plastic pollution on fish, including fisheries we harvest to feed the world, and how do we end the plague of plastic in the ocean? The 5 Gyres Institute will sail across the South Pacific Gyre in the Spring of 2011 from Valdivia, Chile to Easter Island. You can follow this expedition on 5gyres.org. In January and February 2011, at the moment I’m writing this paper, we are crossing the South Atlantic Gyre again. The South Pacific will be our 5th gyre, and provide a snapshot of the global distribution of plastic pollution. We will also be freezing fish to look for toxins in tissues, which we are currently doing with fish collected from South Atlantic Expedition. Other expeditions conducted by SCRIPPS, NOAA and Sea Education, are contributing answers to these questions with rigorous science. All of this will be shared by colleagues in March 2011 in Hawaii during the 5th International Marine Debris Conference.

In the recent decade of rogue-science, media spun mis-information, a new revitalized science of synthetic pollution at sea has emerged, replacing confusion with clarity and commitment by many to solve the problem. The idea of cleanup at sea is no longer a sensible option, knowing that an island twice the size of Texas is actually a thin soup 2/3rds the surface of the planet. Sensible solutions now focus on preventing the flow of waste to waves in the first place.
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Oh yessss - one other item of interest: an article from French and Belgian scientists about the growing problem of plastic "micro-debris" in the Mediterranean. Synopsis: "The only solution is to stop micro-debris at the sources," said Expedition MED's Bruno Dumontet.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!!

Plastics Are Forever <------------ YOUTH SUMMIT!

The sleepless souls over at Algalita (and 5Gyres) are finding ways to engage the energy and creativity of the world's youth to help combat the plastic pollution problem that our oceans are facing.

This effort, called the Plastics Are Forever Youth Summit, encourages you to "Find a couple friends and come up with a solution for plastic pollution. Enter the contest, you and your friends could win a trip to come to the Plastics Are Forever Summit taking place on March 11-13, 2011 in Long Beach, CA. If you are one of the 100 students selected, you will join us for the Summit, where we will train you to become a "Plastics Are Forever" expert and join us in find the solutions to plastic pollution!". GREAT STUFF - makes some of us at the RAP Blog desk wish we weren't so creepy and old! ;)

Watch videos by MTV's The Buried Life and others, get into the nitty-gritty of the problem (and your yet-to-be-devised solution!), read the FAQ and other pertinent info at the PAF website. It's a killer website, with lotsa media, maps as well as ideas - AND the opportunity to plug into a solution to one of the oceans' most dire threats - plastics from you and me.

The odds look pretty good: they are choosing 100 students to attend the Summit in California and participate in expert training to become Plastics Are Forever ambassadors...NICE!

Git right on it!

5Gyers Call To Action!

While we wait (after directly contacting our local politicians, of course) on the hanging-in-the-balance California Bag Ban legislation's (AB 1998) peristaltic movement through the Cali-legislature, some of us are busy back at the ranch-gyre...

Look at this: the "JunkRide" and "JunkRaft" team, 5Gyres, is building two new vessels to grab needed attention to the persistent pelagic plastic pollution problem (5Ps?). Read below and do what you can! (click to enlarge)

Friday Video Roundup!

Time to slide into a relaxing weekend with some visuals from the boob tube – all three dealing with the presence and increasing levels of plastic trash on the beach [do you see a theme at this website? :) ]. Three shorties to get you through your Friday morning:

==> One from the BBC, visiting a Hawaii’s Kamilo plastic beach (have patience, it takes a minute to load) – the same beach that Charles Moore has made us aware of.

==> One from the Kaisei Pacific garbage patch trolling project of last summer. In it they talk briefly about the lab activities that follow any scientific field collection trip:



==> Last, but most, is a vid featuring Surfrider CEO Jim Moriarty – as shot by Surfrider Portland and 5Gyres activist Stiv Wilson.

ALSO - Bonus Yahoo article about the Atlantic Garbage Patch as recently discovered (uncovered?) by 5Gyres - the photo below is from a shoreline on one the Azores islands, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean...yuk.


The weather is shaping up well for some outdoor activities here in lower-upper California – beach cleanup anyone??? Sounds like Hawaii, the Azores and San Onofre are good places to start.

Have a g000d weekend!

Brits Bash Bottles!

...well, and all oceanic plastics, for that matter. And rightly so, as oceanic trash does not respect international boundaries! Two gob-smacking articles from UK periodicals this week detail 1) a Telegraph piece detailing the Pacific Gyre trash problem, and 2) a BBC item describing the rising level of plastic detritus washing up on the shores of the British Isles.

The Telegraph article is kind of old news about the gyre overall, but worth the read and associated Euro-perspective, for sure. And frankly, all continued drumbeats on the garbage patch problem help dispel the "urban legend" that still hangs above this phenom in some quarters. ...and just so ya know, the Atlantic Gyre is growing just as rapidly...check this slide show out, and see image #7 for Algalita/5Gyres' Marcus and Anna sporting Portland, Oregon Surfrider shirts, while showing off Atlantic Ocean plastic trash.

As for UK beach trash, the BBC article details stats from Marine Conservation Society's ("MCS" - send one of their beach trash e-cards) shore cleanups that boast 63% plastics (lucky them, we are finding 74% plastics here in So Cal beach cleans). In addition to listing a "joke severed finger and a set of vampire teeth" (I thought they spelt it "vampyre" there, oh well) - the article repeats the assertion that "Ultimately, plastic litter may be providing a new method for these chemicals [persistent organic pollutants absorbed by oceanic plastics] to be passed up the food chain to human consumers." Sushi is so...nineties.

Good news that this info is still getting out there via major outlets, bad news that it still has to get out there...absobloodylutely!

Upward & Onward...and of course, Cheerio!

Breaking News: Plasticized Oceans!

A report presented by oceanographer Giora Proskurowski of the Sea Education Association (of Woods Hole, Mass.) at American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences meeting this week in Portland, OR declares that the oceans are totally trashed with plastics. Not exactly surprising news, considering all of the similar reports over recent years by groups like Algalita, 5 Gyres, Kaisei, etc, etc, etc – and even including the “lowly” Surfrider beach clean-up efforts (where 70-80% of garbage that is picked up on local beaches is of the plastic variety according to our records).

The best, most “revelatory”, point of this report is that it’s another “official” declaration that the majority of the ocean’s plastic trash is in the form of tiny particles that accumulate at equal densities throughout the water column to an approximate depth of 40 ft or more…or as they put it, “the waters between one and 10 meters deep hold as much plastic as the top meter of ocean does.” You can further imagine that the ocean’s fab ability to mix and circulate that those particles take them even deeper. Remove the cap from a clear plastic drinking bottle fill it with water…and watch it sink – that PET (PETE) plastic is more dense than water…glug, glug, glug and down it goes.

As Capt Charles Moore has been telling us, “We are changing the composition of the oceans.” – and knowing the inability of our natural world in breaking down these basic long-chain plastic polymers, we are changing this composition down to the molecular level…throughout the earth’s ocean’s average depth of two miles. That’s a lot of plastic soup – that eventually ends up on our dinner plates.

Therein lies the folly, or “fantasy” as Capt Moore puts it, in cleaning up the oceans (think about it) – we have to stop the assault at the source. In order for us to get a start on solving the problem, SINGLE-USE PLASTICS MUST END. Our phenomenal human ingenuity has allowed us to create synthetics that can literally last forever – WHY employ those technologies for something that is designed to simply throw away? Well, MONEY is the answer to that…no surprise there. And last-resort recycling can take the edge off a bit, but Patagonia ain’t selling enough $150 former-plastic-bottle jackets to use up the 60 million plastic water bottles used each day in the US, especially in this economy.

The solution is: blanket bans of SUPs, development of replacement technologies (or 100% acceptance of reusables), and associated education of SUP users about the problem of Plasticized Oceans and garbaged-up neighborhoods and what it takes to address the problem(s) as a ‘team’ - the 'team' being the human race, that is.



Anything else is an endorsement of pollution of both our neighborhoods and our overall environment. When the plastics industry sues a municipality for attempting an SUP ban, they are in effect shouting, “WE LOVE LITTER, POLLUTION AND FILTHY LUCRE! – AND FURTHER MORE, TAKE YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD AND SHOVE IT!”

Well, that ain’t very neighborly at all, is it? :(

Stiv & 5Gyres Update: 22Feb2010 - Sargasso Sea & the Azores!

The latest from Stiv Wilson & 5 Gyres' trip to the Atlantic Ocean, to see if the "garbage patch" phenom is only specific to the Pacific Ocean. The early diagnosis: not only "NO!", but "H-E-[double-hockey sticks] NO, it's NOT just in the Pacific!!" - the stuff is everywhere.

The team has come up from the Bahamas, crossed the Sargasso sea, and is now visiting the central Atlantic's Azores Islands ('Açores' if you are conversant in Portuguese)... Here is Stiv's latest posting to us:

"Hey Oceansavas:

Lots more to come from my journey to the North Atlantic Gyre. Absolutely mindblowing experience. Seeing this stuff firsthand, in a liquid wilderness, and finding that it's ubiquitous is a tough pill to swallow. We did 37 trawls for plastic fragments. Each positive. BLECK. Then the patches of crap....fish living in buckets...living in pipes...transparent jellyfish with plastic flecs inside...lighters, shotgun shells...bleach bottles with fish teeth marks...milk crates.......it's all there."

Links:

Reports/videos published in Wend magazine.

5Gyres stories, photos and other pithy info.

Stay tuned for more!

Stiv & 5Gyres Update: 8Feb2010

Wend magazine Editor-in-Chief and Surfrider Foundation Ambassador Stiv Wilson is on a sailboat with Dr. Marcus Eriksen of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation on an environmental research mission to explore plastic in the Sargasso Sea.

Here is his latest update, sent to Wend HQ via satellite:

29°41.70N

56°25.84W

After enduring a solid 36 hours of being hove to wait out a storm, the crew has come back to life. A low pressure system hit us early Sunday morning and the seas picked up quite a bit causing the boat to toss violently. Normally when faced with this situation you’d sail hard through it, getting away from the storm as soon as possible. But since our mission is to trawl for plastic every 100 miles to get a transect of our passage, we couldn’t run on full sail otherwise we would risk quickly eating up those 100 miles. Also, when the sea state is chaotic, the plastic debris stratifies deeper in the water column making the plastic trawls less to ineffective. Thus, we heaved to.

The 'heave to' is a technique sailors use to slow the boat down to near drift by backing the sails against each other and tying the wheel off, which makes the ship continually right itself back into the waves. Essentially, it’s like parking at sea as best as one can. Heaving to, though effective for waiting out storms, makes for an extremely difficult life aboard ship - especially in big seas. Thirty-six hours of rain, wind and tossing from rail to rail sometimes to 50° makes for bruises and sore muscles. This experience was quite a juxtaposition to the sail we had the second night when we were in T-shirts clipping along peacefully at 10 knots under a cloudless sky with a full moon.

Around noon local time (-4 GMT) Marjolijn yelled from above deck that dolphins had gained our bow, so the crew ran up to photograph them. But as they darted to and fro, we came across our second major windrow (an area that collects debris by ocean currents both organic and inorganic) on the trip and the first one on the leg from Bermuda to the Azores. We dropped sail and navigated by motor to large patches of Sargassum (a plant that grows on the surface of this area of the Atlantic known as the Sargasso Sea). At once, my seafaring romantic notions of dolphins being good omens were dashed by the insipid reminder of the human stain.

For nearly 45 minutes, the whole crew of the Sea Dragon documented and scooped up bucket lids, lighters, dental floss holders, toothbrushes, antifreeze jugs, mop squeegies, bottle caps, mouth guards (for boxing), Spanish nail polisher remover bottles, crates, and lots more. For the new crew members, including Maarten, the sculptor, this was a watershed moment. What was once a story heard on CNN and the BBC about the North Pacific became eyewitness reality in yet another ocean, 5,000 miles away.

Now, we’re steaming towards what we believe to be the epicenter of the gyre - still some 400 miles away.

Big thanks to Aquapac, Keen, Patagonia, Blue Turtle, EcoUsable, The Surfrider Foundation, Ron and Portia at Pangaea Explorations (owners of the Sea Dragon and directors of the Pan Explore Project) and the VERY AWESOME FOLKS at Clifbar who sent us a 35-pound care package of pure energy to Bermuda.

Focusing Attention on the Other Gyres

The 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' has slowly gained much needed recognition, and that's a good thing, but what about the swirling garbage in the other 4 major Gyres? An energetic group of marine scientists are about to start investigating them with the 5 Gyres Project, the first global study of plastic marine pollution. A collaboration between three groups; The Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), Livable Legacy, and Pangaea Explorations; 5 Gyres will expand upon AMRF’s groundbreaking research on plastic pollution in the North Pacific Gyre, where wind and current patterns circulate untold billions of plastic particles. The 5 Gyres Project will begin to sail January 7th across the North Atlantic, and again in August across the South Atlantic Gyre, researching plastic. Surfrider’s Stiv Wilson, Chair of the Portland, Oregon Chapter and editor-in-chief of Wend Magazine will be on board of the first sail as part of the research team.

"Our plastic pollution is literally entering the food chain, getting into the food we eat and potentially exposing us to toxic chemicals” said actor/activist Ed Begley Jr., “we need to change our disposable habits now - we simply can’t afford to keep trashing our oceans.”

Through two research expeditions across the North and South Atlantic Gyres, 5 Gyres will gather international data on plastic pollution, collecting surface samples and foraging fish for evidence of plastic ingestion. Directing the research, funding, and communications for the project, husband-wife team Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins will manage both expeditions. Dr. Eriksen, AMRF’s Director of Project Development, and Cummins, co-founder of Livable Legacy, Inc., have traveled previously with Captain Moore across the North Pacific Gyre.

“We’ve now seen how bad things are in the North Pacific gyre, as plastic trash continues to wash off our coasts and out to sea,” stated Cummins. “We know very little however about plastic pollution in the four other large oceanic gyres. This is a chance to go global with the research and with our public communication campaigns.”

The crew will maintain a blog documenting the voyage at www.5gyres.org including videos and photographs of the research. Also on the 5gyres.org site is an overview of plastic marine pollution – ecosystem impacts, scientific literature, and land-based solutions

The first leg of the North Atlantic expedition will set sail on January 7th from the US Virgin Islands and will cross the Sargasso Sea, an area of relative calm between the West Indies and the Azores. The crew will stop in Bermuda, giving a series of public lectures with local NGOs, meeting with the American Ambassador to Bermuda, and picking up new crewmembers before sailing on to the Azores. The second expedition in August, 2010 will cross the South Atlantic Gyre, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Cape Town, South Africa. To date, little research on plastic pollution has been conducted in the Southern Hemisphere.

“Our research goals are to understand the endgame for plastic pollution at sea by sampling the ocean surface, seafloor, and the contents of fish stomachs.” Said Dr. Marcus Eriksen.

San Francisco based Blue Turtle is the project’s title sponsor, with key additional sponsorship provided by Ecousable, Quiksilver Foundation, Patagonia, Keen Footwear, Surfrider Foundation, and Aquapac.

The crew will follow the two Atlantic gyre voyages with a yearlong public communications project titled “The Last Straw”. Eriksen and Cummins will embark on a 2000-mile North America East Coast cycling/speaking tour to lecture about the Atlantic plastic soup, and will build a boat from a quarter-million plastic straws in Paris, France. The boat, to be called “STRA,” will sail the Seine River and cross the English Channel. “Like the JUNKraft that sailed across the Pacific Ocean on 15,000 plastic bottles,” explained Eriksen, “STRA will also bring attention to the environmental hazards of plastic pollution and begin the important conversation about solutions.”

Check back regularly for their reports here.....
Go crew!!