Tales have abounded throughout history of fearsome creatures lurking in the depths of the seas, but none of those creatures, mythical or otherwise, is as frightening as the plastic monster that humans have created by dumping trash in the ocean.
It’s disturbing to see photos of marine animals tangled in abandoned fishing nets, birds choked by the plastic yokes from beverage six-packs or turtles that have died because their guts are full of non-digestible debris. It’s dismaying to see ocean beaches covered with tonnes of debris brought ashore by tides and currents.
Far to the west of us lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a country-sized area where the circulating currents have trapped plastics, chemicals and other debris generated by human activity. While floating garbage can be seen by those traversing the area, the bigger problem is the debris that is not immediately visible.
Nature has a way of handling debris that finds its way into the ocean. Plant materials and dead animals break down into components beneficial to the ocean environment. But plastics, while they break down into increasingly smaller particles, remain plastics. As small as grains of salt, they create an ecosystem scientists have dubbed the plastisphere.
These tiny bits are ingested by barnacles, small fish and other animals, which are in turn eaten by larger creatures. Thus, plastics and their toxic compounds enter the food chain. That salmon filet you just ate might contain microscopic traces of someone’s flip-flop tossed into the ocean years ago.
The particles also disrupt development and breeding of marine life, and are colonized by microbes that then release human-made toxins into the water. Scientists are working to understand the range of effects better, but no matter how you look at the problem, it looks grim.
In the past, people thought the ocean’s capacity to absorb trash was infinite, if they even gave it much thought. From 1908 to 1958, Victoria disposed of its garbage by dumping at sea, and not very far out to sea at that. Much of the material floated, and sometimes, depending on the winds, the trash would beat the garbage scow back to shore. It was not uncommon to see city beaches covered in debris.
For nearly 80 years, a coal-gasification plant operated on the edge of Rock Bay, dumping its waste, including coal tar, into the water. The plant closed in 1949. Years of work and tens of millions of dollars have been spent trying to clean up the mess, and the cleanup is far from over.
We’re smarter and wiser now, right?
Perhaps not.
People who wouldn’t think of dumping household garbage or coal tar into the ocean give little thought to what they flush down their sink drains and toilets. A growing concern is microbeads, smooth plastic particles used in facial cleansers and other cosmetics. Municipal treatment plants are not equipped to remove these particles from sewage, and researchers have found that the Great Lakes are polluted with high volumes of microbeads.
Cleaning nasty coal tar from the bottom of Rock Bay is difficult; removing huge quantities of microscopic plastic particles from oceans and lakes is impossible.
The best way to handle garbage is not to create it in the first place. The next-best approach is recycling materials so they don’t end up in our food chain and our waterways.
Some recycling programs are profitable — it costs less to recycle aluminum, for example, than it does to refine it from ore — and some have a net cost. But we can’t afford to keep dumping wastes, even microscopic particles, into our waterways.
We need to stop feeding the plastic monster beneath the waves.
