The Price Of Plastic: It's More Than The Gulf Spill

By Stiv Wilson on May 10, 2010

About a week ago, I had the honor of interviewing Curtis Ebbesmeyer, famed oceanographer, gyre researcher and author of the great book, Flotsametrics. Curt's work on the behavior of the subtropical oceanic gyres in our world has been invaluable and much of what we know about them is because of his work.

As a side note to the interview, I mentioned the gulf catastrophe we're currently enduring and how the ocean is faced with many and sundry threats. Curt made a remark that nearly floored me. The media has been frenzied over the gulf and for good reason, but what is its true environmental impact if you scale it compared to others? As Curt said, "Oil is organic, it will go away, plastic never goes away and kills more animals every year than any oil spill." Now, understand that Curt is by no means insensitive to the horror facing the south or the economic impact on the fisherman and ocean based industries. His comment was much more academic, coming from a career oceanographer with his science hat on. But still, even after personally having been to the Atlantic Gyre, crossing some 3,000 miles of ocean, I hadn't realized the degree of scale we're talking about with plastic pollution. Truly, it's difficult to comprehend.

One of our founders at The 5 Gyre Project, Dr. Marcus Eriksen, has been defined by a life surrounded by oil-- he's been a plastic pollution activist for over a decade and saw firsthand the economy of oil as a First Gulf War Veteran.

Arguably, all our lives are defined by oil-- we litter it in the form of plastic, we burn it in the form of gasoline, and it's the base of the global economy. Maybe it's high time that the world's governments and industry start portraying plastic in our oceans in the detrimental terms they use to describe oil spills? Maybe it's time that we as a society come to fundamental grips with our consumer convenience's impact on our oceans? Everyday, every bottle cap into the ocean is like a constant disaster sized oil spill pouring out of from the ocean floor. Let's turn off the plastic spigot. In terms of the environmental impact, the product you buy isn't what's in the plastic bottle, it's the plastic bottle itself.