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

From Westminster Hall we walked along the bank of the Thames River in low-tide to look for artifacts from centuries ago. This is a side-adventure from our real purpose: to meet with Greener Upon Thames to discuss how to keep plastic bags from tarnishing the Olympics.  London want’s to put it’s best foot forward, but single-use plastic bags are a step back.   5 Gyres staff, joined Greener Upon Thames, and our dear friend Roz Savage, to meet MP Zac Goldsmith in Westminster Hall to discuss the reality of plastic pollution in the North Atlantic Gyre and beyond.  Zac is a hero for sustainability in England and was eager to know more about the science of the issue. 

 

Once it was over we walked under Big Ben, over the bridge and along the Thames toward the Tate Modern.  We’ve been here before, invited by the Society of Thames Mudlarks to walk the muddy bank to find and keep broken artifacts.  This time we were on our own.

 

We found glass, bricks, piece from a slate roof, a brass nail from a boot heel, and long ceramic tubes buried in the hard sediment.  What a different assortment of refuse from the years before plastic.  The nail and other scraps of metal are relics slowly oxidizing into oblivion.  Anything organic from the past, like potato peels, paper books and anything wooden is long gone, reabsorbed into other life.  And the bits of glass and ceramic tubes are inert, that is they are as harmless as the sand and silica that created them. 

 

High on the bank of the river today, below the streets and walkways, we see petroleum-based plastic.  Bags, bottles, spoons and straws, a large assortment of typical single-use throw away plastic products litter the landscape.  Plastic is neither inert, biodegradable, or will oxidize away.  We know the river will take it to the North Atlantic Ocean where we’ve found it swirling in the Sargasso Sea, absorbing persistent organic toxins, and breaking down to the size of fish food.  Greener Upon Thames has a great solution, and it starts with the Olympics rejecting plastic bags.  It's simply the right thing to do, like not putting lead in paint, or putting seatbelts in cars.  You just don't make things designed to be thrown away out of materials that last forever. 

 

And those little ceramic tubes, they are the long slender pipes used for smoking tobacco centuries ago.