5 Gyres - Understanding Plastic Pollution Through Exploration, Education, and Action

It's an amazing, if disturbing feeling to be the only human being on a stretch of beach on a small atoll in the middle of nowhere, walking a beach, and coming across a pile of plastic debris two feet tall and fifteen feet wide.

This is the most remote place I've ever been in all my life. To get to the beach, I had to swim a quarter mile over White Tip and Gray Rock Reef Sharks, find a pass in the reef, get pummeled in the surf and scrape my way up the beach only to find grocery store familiar shapes akimbo and scattered, everywhere.  In the sand down the beach, the residue of one set of footprints still remains, no doubt a person before us here, doing a beach cleanup.  But how futile it is-- what is the reason someone would even pile it up in a place where there isn't even the possible illusion of an 'away'?

 No, what lands on Hendersond stays here forever--  and there is plastic here as common as sea shells. Cleaning the uncleanable is an act of desperation, like sweeping a dirt floor.  Yes, good intentions is what inspired that person to act, but if action has no metric result, the panic is stored in the pile.  I kept saying softly to myself, 'Recycle This'. This story is played out on countless beaches everywhere, even in places where people live but lack infrastructure to deal with it.  Those places might even be worse for populations in subsistence coastal areas where people will use plastic flotsam for domestic purposes.  It's already established that plastic is full of chemicals absorbed in the ocean, and new research is demonstrating the potential danger to these populations eating or drinking from repurposed plastic found on the beach. How is beach plastic different than toxic waste at this point? Adrift synthetics reach equilibrum (the amount of chemicals they need to be chemically saturated) after only a few weeks in the ocean. And those toxins are incredibly well concentrated there.  If the world's a stage, the play is a synthetic tragic comedy and  the edges of it are plasticized. I'll be damned if I'm going to accept the first two acts of this drama without trying to be player finding resolution in the third act. But I've already become desensitized after so many trawl samples full of plastic fragments in the gyres.  But this experience is a new one for me, one that hurts like hell. I can see the concern redoubled in my crewmates faces as they approach. A solemn quiet reigns.

Just to the right of the pile, mother Boobies are guarding their eggs as fathers stand out acting sentinal protecting the eggs from the pirate frigate birds who make their living stealing from other birds. Constantly harrassed, hatching a chick is tough business here, even without the challenge of potential entanglement in nets and box fasteners. I can see a curious fledgling exploring these piles of garbage. One wrong poke of a curios beak could prove fatal. Pictures say a thousands words, but being here, in space and time, three dimensions, is so many thoughts and emotions I find myself simply stunned.

And that's just it-- what to do?  Well, I think about Lesley's commitment to using bar shampoo that requires no plastic packaging as I look at a shampoo bottle washed up.  I think about Toby's bamboo toothbrush as I look at so many toothbrushes washed up here. I think about my Zippo lighter. I thinjk about Colleen's Klean Kanteen as we look at hundreds of PET water bottles washed up.  I think about how easy it is to keep things off of these beaches if we just spend a little time looking for alternatives to the things we use most. Remember, every dollar you spend is a political statement. Exercise your power.