Trash Killing Whales in The Med?

Odd bad news from out of Foggia, Italy on the Adriatic Sea - a number of Sperm whales beached themselves and died, a result of complications of eating pelagic (ocean-going) plastics and other trash, according to local researchers.

Should it be a surprise? Not really - sadly, it makes sense, with the oceans now becoming the go-to end-point for all of the stuff that we don't want...that doesn't make it to the landfill, or recycler.

The source article is scant on information, and mass beachings are always a surprising, perplexing occurrence, but a quick web search of "foggia whales" turns up more details. This article features a photo of one of the whales on a...scenic, trash-strewn beach - making a good case for the trash-ingesting diagnosis.

The Mediterranean is a legendary, wonderful region, though while living there in the late '80s, one of my most vivid memories of the place was stepping on a submerged plastic soap bottle while swimming along a Mid-Eastern coast - shocking for someone used to the relative trash-less-ness of Southern California beaches of that time! That was ~20 years ago, but I bet that bottle is still out there, swirling around... :(

Keep an eye on your plastics and bin your butts!

Earthrace Visits the "California Rubbish Dump"

Earthrace, the effort to circumnavigate the world in a 100% biodiesel powerboat and educate on renewable fuels, recently visited what they called the "California Rubbish Dump," in the Pacific. This from the Captain's log, Day 23,

" 'There’s a lot of crap in the water here', Adam says, as we dodge around another plastic bottle in the water. Our course is more like a drunken student weaving his way home after a bender, rather than a race boat in a straight line. It seems every hundred metres or so there’s another bit of crap in the water, and anything resembling a buoy (like a plastic bottle), we need to skirt around.

Prof Sharma in Scotland had warned us about this area. Actually so had Bob McDavitt, our forecaster back in New Zealand. It is a giant rubbish dump of plastic and polystyrene, that unbelievably, is the size of Texas, and we’re currently on the southern tip of it.

What actually happens is the current that passes down the West Coast of America picks up rubbish and debris along the Californian coast, and then drags them all the way out here, some thousand odd nautical miles away. The current here then drops under the surface, leaving behind all the rubbish. It joins the giant Californian rubbish dump that remains here year after year, and gradually increases in density as more crap drifts in."

As we have learned recently, the garbage patch (or both of them) is much larger than originally thought. As a Californian who's trying to make a difference and reduce our plastics use, I'm not sure how great I feel about the name "California Rubbish Dump," however it's a shoe that fits squarely on all of our feet as the majority polluters on this side of the Pacific.

The Enormity of the Garbage Patches

At tonight's meeting of Surfrider Foundation San Diego County Chapter, I showed a copy of the graphic from the Toronto Globe and Mail depicting the garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean. At least one person asked "Isn't there some way we can clean this up?" And, later during our break and discussion period, I was asked why I thought it the trash could not be picked up. I replied "Because of the enormity of it all," explaining that these patches were so large and plastics of varying sizes are spread throughout the patches at depths up to 10 meters. Anna Cummins, Eduction Advisor of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, had a guest blog post in the LA Times just the other day and wrote,

" • The garbage does indeed exist. HOWEVER it is not a "patch" of garbage, nor a trash island. It's more like a huge bowl of dilute plastic soup, from California to Japan.

• We can't clean it up, net it away, or sieve it out. It's an area twice the size of the United States, and the debris is too spread out. Imagine a handful of plastic cornflakes sprinkled over a football field. Now imagine 9 million football fields in the Pacific Ocean."

Possible the devastation to the marine environment has gotten even worse than before, Cummins writes, "What we found this year: the problem has gotten much, much worse. Though our samples are still being processed, Captain Moore guesstimates a fivefold increase in 10 years, bumping plastic to plankton ratios up to 30:1."

In order to raise awareness, Cummins and two others are sailing Junkraft, a raft made out of 15,000 plastic bottles, an old airplane and other junk materials from Long Beach to Hawaii. One June 1, they set sail from Long Beach Aquarium and will be carrying hundreds of messages about plastics debris to be delivered to Congress in Washington DC. You can write your own message here.

A Sea of Synthetic Trash

The Toronto Globe and Mail's Unnati Gandhi wrote an excellent piece about plastics in the oceans and essentially a long awaited updated to some of the groundbreaking work done by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation on the North Central Pacific Gyre, also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch. One of the best graphic representations I've ever seen is below. Read the entire piece here and click "Yes" to recommend the article so more folks are educated about this problem.