Waves of junk are flowing into the food chain

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Waves of junk are flowing into the food chain

 

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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw04232006/coverstory.html

 

MELANIE PERRY

 

Normally, northern fulmars spend their whole lives way

out in the ocean, touching land only during breeding

season. Wildlife experts believe this one weakened

after feasting on floating plastic, and died when a

storm blew it onto an Ocean Park beach. Of the 59

pieces found in and around the bird's belly, all but

one were plastic.

 

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STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

 

" Every sphere of human activity has some plastic

residue in the ocean, " says retired oceanographer and

flotsam expert Curt Ebbesmeyer, here sorting trash

collected from the beach at the Ocean Shores

Beachcombers Fair.

 

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STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

 

All her life, June Condon, right, has walked

Washington's beaches, hoping to discover a glass

fishing float washed in from Asia. Instead, she and

her mom, Dolly Schenk, find lots of trash, which they

clean up and dispose of in the plastic bags they

always carry.

 

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STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

 

Yes, it floats! This bowling ball, encrusted with

barnacles and bryozoa, may have drifted on ocean

currents for decades before eventually landing in the

basement collection of Curt Ebbesmeyer.

 

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STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

 

In two hours this spring, 19 people collected 1,500

pounds of litter during a Dash for Trash in Ocean

Shores. Ebbesmeyer identified trash that likely

circulated the globe on ocean currents, perhaps

getting trapped for decades in the Pacific Ocean's

Great Garbage Patch. Ebbesmeyer edits a flotsam

newsletter called Beachcomber's Alert and is starting

a Web site, www.beachcombers.org.

 

Enlarge this photo

 

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

 

Ellen Anderson felt sick when she found a bird carcass

— its gut filled with plastic — on an Ocean Park beach

path. She vowed to use the bird's death to educate

people about plastic litter.

 

Enlarge this photo

 

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

 

On the sand at Ocean Shores, beachcombers learn how to

" read " the beach by looking at the tide line, beach

grass, plastic trash. Their teacher is beachcombing

expert Alan Rammer, marine-education specialist with

the Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife.

 

SOMETHING RED CAUGHT Ellen Anderson's eye. Something

sharp and bright, out of place amidst the muted colors

and gentle rhythms of the dunes.

 

Anderson stepped off the little path that wound from

her Ocean Park weekend house to a sandy stretch along

the Washington coast. She parted the long beach

grasses. She stared, shocked: A dead bird, its exposed

belly filled with shiny bits of plastic. Chunks

yellowed like old teeth, a perforated pink rectangle,

hairy tan slivers. A red shard had first captured her

attention.

 

" My gut hurt. It was a glorious day, sunny, a treasure

in May. Everything was great. And then I saw that bird

and I was sick to my stomach, " Anderson recently

recalled. " You jump to conclusions. Like, did the bird

eat all that plastic? I was hoping it hadn't been

consumed by the bird, that somebody planted it there

as a joke or something. "

 

But it was no joke. Back in Seattle, where she's a

computer analyst for Group Health, Anderson e-mailed

photographs of the bird's carcass to experts at the

University of Washington, Department of Fish and

Wildlife, State Parks, Ocean Conservancy and Willapa

National Wildlife Refuge.

 

" Yes — Ellen — it is just as you suspected, " wrote the

Conservancy's Charles Barr, in a reply echoed by the

others. " Seabirds are eating plastics that become

lodged in their stomachs, causing death. I have seen

dozens of photos such as this one — most of . . . dead

albatross on the Pacific Islands of Midway and the

Northwest Hawaiian Islands. . . . Many of the

albatross will even return to their nests to feed, by

regurgitation, plastics to their chicks. "

 

To fully understand the big deal over Anderson's dead

bird, you need to know it was not a seagull. It was a

Northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), identified by a

tube atop its beak that spurts out excess salt. Like

albatross and other pelagic seabirds, fulmars spend

their whole lives way, way out in the ocean, coming to

shore only during summer breeding, when females lay a

single white egg on cliffs.

 

The rest of the time, the fulmars skim the waves,

flying thousands of miles a year, feeding on small

fish and jellyfish, crustaceans and larvae. " They're

out on the open ocean where there's tremendous

competition for scarce food, so they don't stop to

look before grabbing whatever it is on the surface, "

says Alan Rammer, marine-education specialist with

Fish and Wildlife. " Down the craw! Eat and go. As much

and as fast as they can. Gorge and get back to the

nest to feed the babies. "

 

Fulmars have been around for millennia, and live as

long as 40 years. Yet in the span of a generation,

their diet has drastically changed. Now they feast on

plastic.

 

Their taste for plastic makes them like canaries in a

coal mine, or rather, fulmars floating in flotsam. The

dead seabirds tell us about the ocean's health.

 

Dutch researchers have used the fulmars to monitor

litter in the North Sea, analyzing the stomach

contents of hundreds of birds over two decades. In the

early 1980s, 92 percent of the fulmars had ingested

plastic; on average, 12 pieces. By the late 1990s, 98

percent of bird stomachs contained plastic, an average

31 pieces.

 

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The fulmar Anderson found along the path at Ocean Park

held 59 plastic bits. This spring, Rammer displayed

them in a glass bottle at the annual Beachcombers Fun

Fair in Ocean Shores, along with a picture of the dead

bird.

 

He hypothesized that the fulmar, while foraging at

sea, got blown in with a storm and collapsed in the

tall grass, starved and weak because it didn't have

enough real nutrients in its belly.

 

" You look at the jagged edges of those pieces, " Rammer

says. They got stuck. " It couldn't process and

assimilate food in its digestive tract. Nothing goes

in, nothing comes out. I don't have any doubt in my

mind. It died as a result of plastic poisoning. And I

have no doubt there are millions of others like it. "

 

WITH DEFT FINGERS, Curt Ebbesmeyer sorted the 59

pieces: A broken toy hockey stick, turquoise chips, a

red screw-on cap crammed with granules — nurdles — raw

industrial pellets the size of an " o " from which all

other plastic things are made. One piece of birch

bark.

 

" What's this bird been doing? Where's it been? "

Ebbesmeyer frowned. " Out of 59 pieces: one natural,

the rest plastic. " He pointed to a curved red disc

encrusted with white bryozoa, a slow-growing

moss-animal. " That's been around a long time, " he

said, guessing the worn plastic had drifted in the

ocean for decades before the fulmar snatched it up.

" Some of what we're looking at here could be up to a

half-century old. "

 

Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, is considered a

world expert on flotsam, the miscellaneous stuff that

floats the seas and circulates the globe on strong

currents — sometimes for decades. What's trash to

other people is evidence to Ebbesmeyer, who, like a

forensic beachcomber, uses telltale clues, the

Internet, the phone and mapping software of ocean

currents to trace what it is, where it came from and

what story it's telling.

 

" Everything has a meaning, " he says. " Everything has a

deeper significance. "

 

Take a piece of plastic marked " VP-101 " found in the

stomach of a dead Laysan albatross chick along with

cigarette lighters, bottle caps and hundreds of other

pieces of plastic (all pictured in National

Geographic, October 2005). Ebbesmeyer helped confirm

that " VP-101 " was likely a Bakelite tag for a U.S.

Navy patrol squadron during World War II, and could,

indeed, have floated in the ocean for 60 years before

the albatross swallowed it.

 

Here's the back story: While grazing for food to feed

its baby, Ebbesmeyer says, the albatross parent may

have picked the war relic out of the Pacific Ocean's

Great Garbage Patch.

 

The Garbage Patch is at least twice the size of Texas,

hovers midway between Hawaii and San Francisco, and is

filled with, you guessed it, trash.

 

Huge, rotating currents of air and water created the

Garbage Patch. At the Equator, air gets hot, rises and

drifts toward the cooler North Pole. Earth's rotation

moves the heated air westward; in the north, the

cooled air descends and moves eastward, creating a

massive clockwise rotation above the Pacific. The

swirling air drives an oceanic current below called

the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

 

If, starting at the Washington coast, you waded into

this humongous oval current, you'd float about 14,000

miles — down the California coast, then southwest past

Hawaii, toward Vietnam and the Philippines, then up to

Japan and back across the ocean to where you started.

It would take about six years. If you happened to

reach the Pacific Northwest coast during winter, the

Davidson current might carry you north to Alaska,

where the Alaska Stream would push you into the Bering

Sea and through the Bering Strait into the Arctic

Ocean. With any luck, you'd surf the waves past

Iceland and wind up bobbing in the North Atlantic. A

more likely scenario is that you'd continue riding the

gyre, slipping south toward California for another

go-round.

 

Unless, that is, you escaped the gyre and washed

ashore. Or got trapped in the Garbage Patch: trash

purgatory.

 

Old as the wind and ocean, the Garbage Patch is a

natural phenomenon. For eons, long-lived sea beans,

driftwood and other stuff has accumulated there.

What's new is that it's now home to plastic debris

that doesn't biodegrade.

 

That's the " deeper significance " of " VP-101, " the

60-year-old relic eaten by the albatross chick. It's

the " meaning " behind the 59 plastic bits in the fulmar

Ellen Anderson discovered at Ocean Park.

 

Think of all the plastic that winds up in the ocean —

from every country on the Pacific Rim, every river

flowing into the ocean, any fishing vessel out at sea,

any freight container fallen overboard, any factory

intentionally or accidentally dumping, any vacationer

careless with a pop bottle, sandwich baggie or plastic

doll. " Every sphere of human activity has some plastic

residue in the ocean, " Ebbesmeyer says. Some of it may

sink. Some of it may be ground into plastic dust; no

comfort, since it's ingested by filter feeders such as

clams, believed to be portals to the food chain.

 

We love plastic because it's cheap, light and durable.

The problem is that it doesn't go away.

 

" People think something put in the ocean is out of

sight, out of mind, " Ebbesmeyer says. " But the ocean

moves it all around the planet. It's like one big

nest. "

 

THE NORTHWEST coast is one of the world's top

beachcombing areas because the North Pacific

Subtropical Gyre turns here, dumping lots of debris.

 

Much of it seems to fill the basement of Ebbesmeyer's

tidy Ravenna bungalow: A barnacle-encrusted bowling

ball (yes, David Letterman, bowling balls up to 12

pounds will float); Japanese survey stakes; messages

in bottles, hockey gloves from a container that

spilled 34,000 of them; Nike tennis shoes and cross

trainers from container spills between 1990 and 2003

(currents carried the lefts to certain beaches, the

rights to other shores); 29,000 First Years bathtub

toys (yellow ducks, blue turtles, green frogs, red

beavers) that have traveled the world's seas on paths

predicted, with eerie accuracy, by Ebbesmeyer and

oceanographer Jim Ingraham using sophisticated

computer simulations.

 

" Everything on the beach has a cool story, " Ebbesmeyer

says. " You just have to wring its little neck to

figure it out. "

 

Ebbesmeyer is a tall, gentle guy who frequently

lectures to school groups and beachcombers. His face

lights up while talking about the sea's trashy

treasures, but sooner or later come the inevitable

questions about what he calls " the dark side. "

 

How many container spills annually? Several thousand.

Nike is one of the few companies to help Ebbesmeyer

trace the origin of spills. Other companies claim no

knowledge of lost merchandise. Since containers create

but a fraction of the litter in the sea, Ebbesmeyer

says, cleanup isn't even on regulatory radar. Yet

consider that one container can hold hundreds of

thousands of plastic bags, he says, each with the

potential to choke a sea turtle. And don't forget the

million weather balloons dropping thousands of

electronic boxes into the waves . . . the abandoned

fishing gear . . . the plastic residue from fireworks

.. . .

 

Where does this stuff, including drums filled with

toxic chemicals, come from? Hard to tell.

 

How long does plastic last in the ocean? Nobody knows.

 

Plastic was invented in the 1860s and first used as an

alternative material for billiard balls carved from

ivory elephant tusks. Soon, plastic spun through early

celluloid movie reels. Then came Bakelite, cellophane,

nylons, vinyl couches, Teflon, Silly Putty, Velcro . .

..

 

Remember the 1967 film " The Graduate''? In it, Mr.

Robinson offered only one word of advice to Dustin

Hoffman: Plastics. Then came throwaway TV dinner

trays, plastic pop bottles, shrink-wrapped packaging.

These days, the world annually produces 250 billion

pounds of plastic pellets to be made into cars,

computers, medical equipment, gallon jugs for milk.

 

What's being done? Along our country's coasts for the

past decade, " citizen pollution patrols " in the

National Marine Debris Monitoring Program (sponsored

by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Ocean

Conservancy) have swept and sorted, determining 42

percent of beach litter comes from land, 20 percent

from water and 38 percent, either water or land. In

Congress, Senators Ted Stevens, Daniel Inouye and

Maria Cantwell, among others, have introduced a bill

calling for a federal program to assess, reduce and

prevent marine debris. It passed the House; the Senate

is expected to vote on it this spring.

 

The United Nations Environmental Program, Australia

and the United Kingdom are working on fishing-waste

management. Grassroots groups, including Green Peace,

are starting to trawl for plastics. But so far,

there's no coordinated international effort similar in

scale, say, to the Kyoto Protocol.

 

" It's not as sexy as global warming, but it's

definitely pervasive, " says debris expert Seba

Sheavly. " Marine debris affects every major body of

water on the planet. "

 

Everyone agrees you cannot clean up the ocean. The

focus, Sheavly says, should be on prevention and waste

management. Optimists say the throwaway lifestyle will

be over by 2050, that people will demand each product

have a path back into production.

 

Ebbesmeyer is not an optimist. He's seen too many

studies that never went anywhere.

 

" If you could fast forward 10,000 years and do an

archeological dig, a core sample down through the

beach, you'd find a little line of plastic, " he says.

" What happened to those people? Well, they ate their

own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and

weren't able to reproduce. They didn't last very long

because they killed themselves. . .

 

" Mother Nature is writing to us, and she writes to us

on the beach, " he says. " The ocean is warning us, and

if we don't listen, it's very easy for her to get rid

of us. "

 

CAPTAIN CHARLES Moore has been there. Sailed right

through the Garbage Patch, about 1,000 nautical miles,

on his research catamaran Alguita.

 

Seeing the Garbage Patch from a plane doesn't do the

flotsam justice; the trash is too dispersed, some of

it suspended below the surface or hidden by waves.

Sailing, it's in your face.

 

" I often struggle to find words that will communicate

the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have

never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only

vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching

from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck

at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine

ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see,

with the sight of plastic, " Moore wrote in Natural

History in 2003.

 

In August 1998, Moore and his crew extensively sampled

the surface waters of the North Pacific Subtropical

Gyre with a fine-mesh net resembling a manta ray.

" What we saw amazed us, " Moore said in an analysis for

the 2001 Marine Pollution Bulletin. " We were looking

at a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with

hundreds of colored plastic fragments — a

plastic-plankton soup. " The team collected six times

more plastic particles (by weight) than zooplankton.

 

Moore calls the plastic particles " poison pills "

because they absorb and concentrate toxic chemicals,

acting like sponges for DDT, PCBs and other oily

pollutants. " It's a serious situation, " he says, " when

you've got a material that comes in all shapes and

sizes, can mimic every type of food in the sea, and is

capable of absorbing persistent pollutants that are

endocrine disruptors. . . . One hundred thousand

marine mammals a year are killed by entanglement (with

plastic six-pack rings, fishing lines and nets); I'm

not minimizing that. But the actual ability to wipe

out the entire vertebrate kingdom in the ocean is with

the plastic particles. "

 

THE DASH for trash at the beachcombers fair this year

yielded 1,500 pounds of litter collected in driving

rain by 19 people in two hours.

 

Ebbesmeyer sorted through it with his bare hands:

Thousands of plastic parts from spent fireworks,

screw-cap rings, beer bottles, single-cigarette cases,

plastic oyster spacers, styrofoam buoys, fishing gear,

fluorescent tube lights, toy trucks, plastic kite

winder, hagfish traps, shotgun shell casings, the

plastic ball from a Ban deodorant stick, soap-bubble

wands, tires, combs, motor oil and antifreeze bottles,

tampon applicators, tobacco tins, a walkie talkie, a

cellphone, an inhaler, snow scrapers, several flip

flops, none matching.

 

An old glass bottle was awarded a prize. A Trash

Family sculpture created by Erma Stevenson also took

several awards, including People's Choice.

 

But the prize beachcombers craved most was a

traditional Japanese fishing float. These glass

bubbles ride the gyre from Asia, sometimes washing

ashore and hiding in nooks at high-tide line. The

rarest are worth thousands of dollars, but it's not

just about money. Fragile and elusive, the baubles

hold a certain romance.

 

" If only my daughter could find one, I'd be so happy, "

says Dolly Schenk, her head protected from the rain by

a plastic IGA grocery sack. Her grown daughter, June

Condon of Graham, has been searching for glass balls

most of her life, more intensely since her mother

moved to Ocean Shores 15 years ago. So far, no luck.

Instead, while walking the beach together, the mother

and daughter find trash. They always bring along

plastic bags to collect it.

 

Finding glass balls takes strategy, explains Rammer,

the marine-education specialist, during an

early-morning beach walk.

 

You must understand the sea's choreography. Wait for

high winds from the west. First will come the little

hydra jellyfish that look like tiny blue boats with

white sails. Next come Dixie cups, light bulbs,

plastic bottles with high surface area and low drag.

Big glass floats riding high in the water wash in 24

to 36 hours later, then the smaller glass bubbles, and

finally, the crème de la crème — glass rolling pins.

When waterlogged driftwood washes up, the show is

over.

 

Look here, at the high-tide line, Rammer urges. We

peer under logs and into European beach grass, not

really expecting to find anything.

 

But we do.

 

Another dead fulmar.

 

It's nestled in the sand, flesh still intact and

covered by soft, grey tufts of feathers. Part of me

wants to dissect it, to check if its belly is crammed

with plastic. Instead, we decide to leave the poor

bird in peace.

 

Enough evidence is already all around.

 

A few steps away from the bird: a crumbling styrofoam

Cup-of-Noodles.

 

Way out in the ocean: 29,000 plastic bathtub toys. Six

times more plastic than plankton. A Garbage Patch

continually swallowing trash it can't digest.

 

Around noon, the rain finally stops.

 

Out to sea, the horizon still looks grim.

 

Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff

writer. Email: pbock. Steve Ringman

is a Seattle Times staff photographer.