McElligott's Plastic

“Ask for a cone, save the environment!” proclaimed the sign at the local Creamee. The girls asked for cups anyway, to catch the drippings of the oversized soft-serve half-and-half cones they'd ordered. “Guess we’re not saving the environment today,” said one, dipping her plastic spoon into the Styrofoam cup.

Styrofoam is one incarnation of polystyrene plastic – more affectionately known as “#6” or, the plastic we can’t recycle. Polystyrene is also the black polystyrene casing of my computer, my bicycle helmet, the foamed polystyrene clamshell we were offered to carry home the remainders from a local restaurant and, the countless little white Styrofoam pellets degraded from sheets of weathered insulation I spent the weekend picking from the weeds at the local junk-yard turned conservation land along with a handful of diligent volunteers.

While collecting the little white bits from the earth, I imagine how each year some portion of those beads along with larger rafts of insulation are blown or washed into the bordering Sawmill River, some journeying only as far as the local swimming hole, while others carried by the Sawmill make their way to the Connecticut and beyond. I imagine their journey a perverse version of Dr.Seuss’s McElligot’s Pool, where you never know what exotic species might make their way from the deep ocean to a backyard pond, only these make their way to the deep ocean. This isn’t fanciful fiction. Just this year scientists confirmed the presence of a plastic “patch” of our own in the North Atlantic, the evil twin of the infamous North Pacific trash gyre – a region known for its accumulation of plastic from soccer balls to microscopic bits of Styrofoam and other assorted plastics. Looking around at all the Styrofoam I’ve missed, the scientist in me wants to radio-tag those naughty bits and send them on their way. Maybe in a few years we’d know for sure if pieces of Montague were swirling about the wide Sargasso Sea.

Captain Charles Moore, an adventurer, environmentalist and researcher, credited with discovering the North Pacific patch once commented on the return of plastic to the oceans and its consumption by marine life in an article for Natural History Magazine, “Ironically,” wrote Moore “the debris is re-entering the oceans whence it came; the ancient plankton that once floated on Earth's primordial sea gave rise to the petroleum now being transformed into plastic polymers. That exhumed life, our ‘civilized plankton,’ is, in effect, competing with its natural counterparts, as well as with those life-forms that directly or indirectly feed on them.” Research by Moore and others, now shows that plastics in the ocean can accumulate toxicants long banned like PCBs and DDTs, and there is some concern that once ingested, contaminated plastics might release these chemicals, along with others used for plastics production including colorants, fire retardants and plasticizers into their host. Someday there may be no need to shrink-wrap seafood.

Like other plastics, polystyrene – the base material for Styrofoam or foamed polystyrene clamshell food containers, microwavable cups (think cup-o-noodles), plastic plates and coffee cups – is a polymer, a chemical chain of repeating units, like beads on a string. In this case the beads or monomers are styrene. Produced naturally by plants and animals, styrene – like many chemicals - is relatively non-toxic in these small amounts. And, like many chemicals, natural production is dwarfed by human production (at least in localized concentrations,) which in the case of styrene tops 13 billion pounds a year in the US alone. The majority is used to produce polystyrene. While polystyrene might not appear on the top ten list for toxic chemicals, it is made from benzene. Over 50% of all benzene that is produced from oil is eventually turned into styrene. And sweet smelling benzene is nasty stuff. Just a whiff brings me back to organic chemistry lab in college. We used it without a care until the day it was officially deemed a carcinogen – and then we didn’t. At the risk of showing my age, that was in 1979. And in a strange case of collective heads- in-sand, benzene was known to cause cancer since the 1920s. (We can thank industry along with federal regulators to for that small lapse.) Benzene is now one of the few industrial chemicals officially listed as a known human carcinogen – causing leukemia in this case – and it is industry workers who are most at risk.

So what happens to all that polystyrene? The EPA estimated that in 2007, nearly 3 billion pounds of it was used in the production of disposable goods, including foamed polystyrene plastic plates, cups, egg cartons, and packaging peanuts. Aside from the packaging peanuts we might bring to a UPS store for reuse, with a recycling rate for all polystyrene estimated as a mere 0.8%, most will end up in a landfill. At worst it’ll end up our local streams, rivers and oceans.

And, when it does according to new research by Katsuhiko Saido and colleagues from the Nihon University, in Chiba, Japan, it will not only degrade more rapidly than it would on land (under certain marine conditions) but it will also release toxicants including a small amount of bisphenol A, notoriously linked with polycarbonate plastics, and styrene which brings us back to – d’oh!

The good news is that like most other plastics, technically, polystyrene foam is recyclable. In fact, it can be recycled back into many of the products from which it came – plates, clamshells, egg cartons and insulation, or into less desirable “dead end” products like light-weight concrete. The bad news is that the process isn’t cost effective, at least in the US – and so isn’t all that popular.

Then there are the more creative uses for this problem plastic. Some, like Cass Phillips, writer and co-owner of Kamuela Greenhouse/Specialty Orchids in Waimea, Hawaii have considered turning the environmental blight into beauty. With USDA grant funding, Phillips is currently testing the utility of various locally collected and processed recycled plastics as a growth medium additive with an eye to providing a durable low cost product for the Hawaii orchid industry. When asked about foamed polystyrene, she responded:

“I found that a certain type of orchid, miltoniopsis (aka the pansy orchid), grew fastest and largest in straight granulated polystyrene foam, in a trial that included three controls (cinder, coconut fiber and orchid bark)…... What truly stunned me is that the pansy orchids went into their bloom cycle 2-3 months before any other sample." There could be several reasons for the accelerated growth. One might suppose improved water retention could be a factor, but the ground polystyrene foam dried out almost instantly. That leaves us pondering other possibilities, including one that could be considered insidious: the release of growth-inducing chemicals. Sorting out the differences will require further analysis, but in the meantime Phillips has found herself wondering about the wisdom of schools using Styrofoam plates in their lunch programs, and the consequences of slurping down cups-o-soup from Styrofoam tubs.

Of course the best way to keep this ubiquitous plastic from polluting the oceans and clogging the landfills is to reduce use (according to the American Chemistry Council, the PS industry has been in decline for the past four years, though they give no reason), and close the recycling loop. More immediately, I’m sure there’ll be many more opportunities to pick Styrofoam from newly acquired conservation land, and for those rare occasions when I can’t clean my plate while dining at one of the local eateries, I’ve begun asking for foil or cardboard for the leftovers.

The salty dumping grounds: plasticized Part II

[Here is the second part of The Dumping Grounds, a history of ocean plastics.]

An Earlier Voyage

In 1971 over twenty years before the Alguita’s first voyage, nearly forty years before the recent Scripps voyage into the Gyre and roughly twenty years after his own voyage across the Pacific in Kon-Tiki, anthropologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl with a small international crew made his way across the Atlantic aboard the Ra I, a papyrus raft-vessel constructed as a modern day experiment using ancient technology. On that first voyage, as Ra made its way from across the Atlantic from Morocco to just east of Barbados, Heyerdahl, commenting on the preponderance of oil-clots and other flotsam wrote “pollution observations were forced upon all expedition members by its grave nature…” [1]

Encouraged by interest in their findings by members of United Nations, Heyerdahl set off in the Ra II a year later prepared to record observations, and to collect samples. With oil lumps washing aboard at one point, the Ra II’s log reported that “the pollution is terrible.” A couple of days later, after encountering a plastic bottle, some rope, a can and other items, a log entry expressed shock at the degree to which remote regions of the Atlantic had become polluted by man. From the day of departure, wrote Heyerdahl, to the day they landed in Barbados, the Ra II was accompanied not only by lumps of oil, but also by plastic containers, metal cans and glass bottles. In closing wrote Heyerdahl,

“The present report has no other object than to call attention to the alarming fact that the Atlantic Ocean is becoming seriously polluted and that a continued indiscriminate use of the world’s oceans as an international dumping ground for imperishable human refuse may have irreparable effects on the productivity and very survival of plant and animal species.”

Plastics Overboard!

Years before Heyerdahl’s journey, Stephen Rothstein, then a University of California biologist, had discovered small plastic particles in the stomachs of Leach’s Petrels and nestlings captured on Gull Island, Newfoundland in 1964. Wondering why the petrels might ingest plastics, Rothstein wrote, “Before the occurrence of plastic particles, it is probable that nearly all such objects were edible. Thus, natural selection would not have favored petrels which avoided nonedible floating objects…[2]” It seems this was the case with other marine creatures as well, as researchers throughout the early 1970’s and ‘80s cataloged the impacts of plastics on marine mammals, birds, turtles and fish. While plastic fishing nets, ropes and packing bands ensnared Neptune’s creatures, small bits substituted for food. Seabirds mistook plastic bits for prey, inadvertently feeding them to their young, as green sea turtles gobbled down plastic banana bags tossed off the side of a dock. Wrote David Laist, then senior policy and program analyst at the Marine Mammal Commission, in his testimony at the 1986 hearing on Plastic Pollution in the Marine Environment, “Animals which become entangled may exhaust themselves and drown, be slowed to the point of becoming easy prey for other predators, or unable to catch fast moving prey, or develop wounds and infections from abrasion of attached debris. Animals which ingest plastics may be poisoned or have digestive tracts blocked or damaged by plastics that are difficult or impossible to excrete, regurgitate, break down, or otherwise eliminate once ingested.[3]” As a 1970’s teenager, the “Keep America Beautiful” decade, it’s hard to forget the heart rending photos of fur seals girdled by discarded plastic strapping, or young turtles and seabirds caught up in six-pack rings. By some accounts, a 1988 cleanup along a 1.8 mile stretch of the Texas coast turned up almost 16,000 six-pack rings[4]. I have a vague recollection of pulling six-pack rings from my parent’s trash after chastising them for carelessly throwing them away without first slashing them apart. There was growing concern that endangered marine mammals and sea turtles alike were adversely impacted by their encounters with plastic waste, the likes of which the Alguita had stumbled upon in the North Pacific gyre. Only the hearing to prevent plastic pollution took place ten years earlier.

One of the first suggestions proposed by Laist to improve the situation was ratification and implementation of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships or MARPOL Annex V, introduced through the International Maritime Organization by the United States and other countries. MARPOL is the main international convention dealing with release of pollutants by ships. Before MARPOL, there was OILPOL, an international convention adopted to prevent ships from releasing waste oil, back in the 1950’s, strengthened over the years to include releases of oily bilge water and toxic chemicals. Not until 30 years later, as plastic lines and nets became integral to the fishing industry, and plastic strapping and packaging of food items and other consumables became common aboard all sea-going vessels from the merchant marines to the world’s Navy’s did the international community recognize the need to control the release of plastics from ships as well. Ratification of MARPOL Annex V would ban the dumping of plastics into the ocean from all vessels, in all locations. There is some unintended logic to the progression from the early OILPOL to MARPOL’s Annex V, for oil is the precursor to our modern day plastics.

The Marine Mammal Commission wasn’t alone in calling for the ratification of annex V. MARPOL’s annex V was supported by a rare combination of organizations and federal agencies, including those normally in opposition such as the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Society of Plastics Industry. In his testimony in favor of ratification at the Plastic Pollution hearing, C.E. O’Connell, sounded much like today’s National Rifle Association’s dictum that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” when he essentially stated that the plastics industry did not pollute the world’s oceans, plastics users, including beachgoers, municipalities and the marine, naval and fishing industry did[5]. And they did - legally. Back in 1982, when the merchant marine fleet registered around 71,000 ships, and plastics had worked their way on board in every conceivable role, from the packaging galley food to plastic strapping, it was estimated that some 639,000 plastic containers were tossed daily[6]. And that estimate didn’t even include all the plastics tossed overboard by navy ships, luxury cruise ships, like the QE2, which serve as a luxury playground for nearly 10 million Americans each year, or the tons of plastic fishing nets and gear lost to the sea.

I inadvertently contributed my share back in 1989. After collecting winter flounder from the Narrow River, a seemingly clean river that cut through Narragansett, RI on its way to the bay, and finding them distressingly contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls I was eager to collect winter flounder untainted by coastal contaminants. As it turned out, EPA’s ocean survey vessel the Anderson, a converted Vietnam era Naval Patrol gunner, had a few unscheduled days that fall. We booked four days at sea, hired Mike the Rebel fisherman (he kept a confederate flag in the rear window of his truck, had long blond hair and a good sized tattoo on his bicep) and headed 130 miles offshore to Georges Bank to trawl for flounder. When the Anderson nearly jerked to a halt mid-tow, and the winches spun a little too easily, the loss of our net, along with the heavy metal doors that dragged along the oceans bottom became all too clear. We had just made our contribution to the hundreds of miles of ghost fishing nets drifting about or laying upon the ocean floor. Though I never would have tossed my Styrofoam coffee cup overboard, the episode didn’t register as an environmental catastrophe. The ocean was big and the net was gone. “It happens,” was all Mike had to say, that was why we brought a spare.

The thousands of lost fishing nets and lines are only part of the ocean’s plastic problem. Like early twentieth century coastal cities, merchant marines, cruise ships, navy vessels and fishing boats have looked to the sea for disposal. And why not? Aircraft carriers with crews of 6,000 sailors generate over 3 million pounds of trash during their six months at sea[7]. By some estimates, plastics, before any major efforts by the navy to reduce plastic waste, accounted for over 12 % of all waste generated on board[8]. That means over 300,000 pounds of plastics dumped in a six month period by a single vessel, in just one of the world’s navies. Up until 1988, the Navy estimated it contributed more than 4.5 million pounds of plastic to the world’s oceans[9] [insert volume analogy, e.g. # of coke bottles]. For far too many years it was common practice to dump trash directly overboard.

In total, just the amount of plastics dumped at sea from say, the 1960’s when plastics entered our lives in a big way through the mid-1980s (when at least those adhering to MARPOL Annex V quit dumping) is mind boggling. Particularly because all of that plastic is still with us – somewhere – today. We’ve contaminated the largest of earth’s commons, the oceans, with our plastics.

Considering this enormous tonnage of plastic in addition to that which has floated down rivers and out with the tides or with the sewage, left on beaches, blown from the decks of hulking garbage scows on their way to mega landfills in New York and New Jersey like Fresh Kills, Meadowlands and Pelham Bay, the recent encounters with a gyre full of plastic is sadly not surprising. What is surprising is that until now, no one really knew the extent to which we’d contaminated our oceans, and how that contamination would eventually come back to haunt us.

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[1] Heyerdahl, Biological Conservation Vol 3 April 1971, 164-168

[2] Plastic Particle Pollution of the Surface of the Atlantic Ocean: Evidence from a Seabird, The Condor 75:344-366, 1973.

[3] Statement of Mr. David Laist Senior Policy and Program Analyst Marine Mammal Commission, Plastic Pollution in the Marine Environment, 1986 Hearing before the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Navigation, Washington, DC Serial No. 99-47. P. 21

[4] http://www.seaweb.org/resources/writings/writings/seatroubles.php

[5] Statement of C.E. O’Connell, President of the Society of the Plastics Industry, Plastic Pollution in the Marine Environment, 1986 Hearing before the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Navigation, Washington, DC Serial No. 99-47 p. 108.

[6] Horsman, 1982, The Amount of Garbage Pollution from Merchant Ships, Marine Pollution Bulletin, 13:167-169. Wastes in the Marine Environment, Office of Technology Assessment, Washington, DC, 1987.

[7] Navy’s Shipboard Solid Waste Management Program, Ye-Ling Wang, 1997.

[8] A Float Solid Waste Characterization Study, http://www.agraco.com/pdflinks/NimitzReportAbbrev.pdf 2008

[9] Clean Ships, Clean Ports, Clean Oceans p. 23

The salty dumping grounds: a brief history of ocean dumping

In light of all the recent activity surrounding ocean plastics including voyages by both Captain Charlie Moore and Scripps, I thought it might be relevant to consider our practice (past and present) of using the oceans as receptacles for our waste. This is a little different than the typical posts (it's from an earlier project on plastics) and will be posted in sections. Here's the first.

In with the tides, Nantasket Beach, 1988

As far as plastics in the ocean, I needed no introduction. All along the sandy beaches of Hull, a thin barrier beach reaching out into Massachusetts Bay, where my family resided each summer, plastics washed up by the incoming tide were a common sight. We knew when Boston’s sewers had overloaded by the condoms, tampon applicators and other assorted bits of plastic that washed ashore after a storm. When lobstermen switched from the picturesque wooden traps to plastic coated metal, we knew by the fragments of trap that poked up from the wet sand below the high-tide mark. So when the Coastweeks cleanup came to Hull in 1988 my father, garbage bag in hand, wearing his Sears dungarees, faded blue denim shirt, and size 12 Jack Purcells, combed the beach separating plastic, metal and cardboard from the sand. My father, along with hundreds of other volunteers that year, collected a total of 25 tons of debris from Massachusetts’s beaches.

That fall, as I attended the annual Society of Toxicology and Chemistry Halloween Dance dressed as “Beach waste,” I was naïve about the dangers of plastics. As far as I knew plastic was a nuisance and an eyesore but was essentially inert unless burned; not all that interesting to a toxicologist. But it made a good costume. A necklace of pink and white tampon applicators and milk bottle caps collected by my father was the perfect accessory to the orange fishnet cape adorned with fading coke bottles, pieces of old lobster trap and other assorted beach waste items. Problem was, only other east coast attendees got that I was beach waste.

Back then, Alice Outwater, fresh out of MIT’s graduate school worked with the floatable scum of Boston - wastewater scum - for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. She writes about the 1980s, “roughly fifty thousand tampon applicators a day were arriving at the wastewater treatment plants in Boston.”[1] Recently, I asked her about the fate of those applicators, “Most of the plastics in the wastewater,” she replied, “ended up in the scum, which, originally, was released on the outgoing tide. ” As recently as 1989, Boston’s sewage treatment plants released upwards of 10,000 gallons per day of that scum, which included grease, oil, and rosy pink tampon applicators,[2] and it was all legal.

Who would have thought that the applicators my sisters and I flushed from our Newton home might one day wash up on our beloved Nantasket beach in Hull? Did Playtex consider this when they manufactured the first silky plastic applicators back in 1962[3]? Or, did both Playtex and consumers assume, as generations before them, that flowing water combined with technology was the solution for much of our waste?

The solution to pollution

Our relationship with the world’s oceans includes worship, fear and contemplation, yet throughout history we have dumped our waste into the nearest water body. If the ocean was large enough to hide fearsome sea monsters, make ships disappear, and swallow Atlantis, surely it was large enough to absorb our waste. By one estimate, for every million molecules of the world’s waters, the ocean contains over 970,000 molecules, while glaciers and ice caps contain 21,000, rivers contain a single molecule[4], and all of life including us watery beings contains a mere half a molecule. So what could beings who represent less than one part-per-million of all the oceans water possibly do to harm the oceans? Turns out, quite a lot.

Four thousand years ago, the Sumerians not only figured out how to move water to where they wanted it, but they also managed to develop a sewer system to carry away their waste. Two thousand years ago Romans built public latrines that discharged via their central sewage system, aptly named the Cloaca Maxima, directly into the river Tiber. Despite all this historical precedent (although one might think we’d have figured this out sooner) western world city dwellers were still dumping chamber pots into the streets and ditches until well into the late nineteenth century. Fortunately for us, city engineers and health departments finally figured out what the ancients had known - that flowing water could carry away a city’s human waste. By early twentieth century, when my father’s father was setting down roots in his new country after a trip across the Atlantic, and in his new city Boston, Boston was being celebrated for having one of the best sewage treatment systems in the country thanks to a collection of pipes that sent the city’s wastewater out into Boston Harbor.

As east coast cities like Boston and New York exploded with immigrants like my grandfather and his family, so too did the amount of household waste, including ashes, garbage, night soil and cesspool cleanings (for those not hooked up to the cities sewers) which along with street sweepings and dead animals, ended up in watery graves along the eastern seaboard, out of sight. While our coastal ancestors paved the way for dumping at sea, inlanders were no different. For them, flowing water, was also the solution to growing waste problems. By the end of the nineteenth century, some Midwestern cities were dumping upwards of 270,000 tons of garbage, manure, night-soil and dead animals into the mighty Mississippi River, while others dumped into the Missouri, the Ohio[5] and the Great Lakes

Occasionally, all this dumping was problematic. Once in a while, dumping interfered with the boats and barges that worked the rivers, or the tides and winds conspired, pushing putrid waste back towards the shore. Navigation became difficult, and coastal areas became hazardous to one’s health. After this happened in Boston during the summer of 1898, ninety years before tampon applicators washed up in Hull, and almost 100 years before Alguita’s maiden voyage, the wisdom of dumping at sea was reconsidered[6]. By 1899 the country’s first law protecting our waterways was enacted.[7] Although key phrases like floatable waste and navigable waters separated the lawful from the unlawful, centuries-old habits die hard. Seven years after the new law, Bostonians were still sending literally tons of market waste, ashes and house dirt, street sweepings and cesspool and catch basin cleanings out to the coastal ocean. Dumping at sea was cheap. In 1912 for just 40 cents, Boston could unload a ton of garbage[8]. As long as the stuff didn’t reappear and as long as ships could still sail, there was no reason not to dump it.

Thankfully for us all, coastal garbage dumping eventually ceased, but our mindset, that the solution to pollution is the ocean, persists. Throughout the past century and into the next, coastal cities and towns have continued to rely upon local rivers and harbors to swallow up their citizen’s sewage. Yet the sewage and wastewater that traveled from my grandfather’s apartment out to the harbor was far different than the sewage that flowed from the subsequent generation of Bostonians who came of age living better through chemistry. Before the current age of plastics, much of what was dumped eventually degraded – even the oil. But plastics don’t break down – at least not within our lifetime. And as recently as 1987, over 1,000 major industrial facilities and nearly 600 municipal sewage treatment plants discharged directly into estuaries or coastal waters around the country[9] dispersing not only fugitive tampon applicators and other bits of plastics but industrial contaminants as well.

To find out more about plastics in our oceans today, check out websites of both the ORV Alguita (Captain Moore's vessel) and the New Horizon, (Scripps' vessel.)

The second part to this article can be found here.

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[1] Water, by Alice Outwater pg 169, and personal communication.

[2] http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/03sewer/html/sewhist.htm

[3] http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Playtex-Products-Inc-Company-History.html; "The new Gentle Glide tampon is a major breakthrough in design. Since 1962 when Playtex created the first plastic applicator tampon, we've continually improved the design of our feminine care products by listening to consumers and anticipating their feminine care needs. This exciting new product is designed to meet women's needs for ultimate comfort and protection", commented Julie Elkinton, Vice President of Feminine Care at Playtex.” From http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6908790/Playtex-Introduces-a-New-Gentle.html

[4] Gaia’s Body, Tyler Volk, p 112

[5] The Collection and Disposal of Municipal Waste, 1908, Wm F. Morse, The Municipal Waste Journal and Engineer, Ny, NY

[6] The Collection and Disposal of Municipal Waste, 1908, Wm F. Morse, The Municipal Waste Journal and Engineer, Ny, NY.

[7] http://www.eoearth.org/article/Rivers_and_Harbors_Act_of_1899,_United_States

[8] R. Hering and S. Greeley: Collection and Disposal of Municipal Refuse, 1921

[9] Wastes in Marine Environments, OTA, 1987 p.13.