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

 

We’ve been keeping a low profile for the last week and a half. Our Atlantic gyre samples – the lifeblood of our entire expedition, went missing at the airport in Paris, in transit back to LA. To say that we are dumbfounded and devastated is an understatement. We are praying that they turn up, losing them is simply not an option.

Meanwhile, our crew has returned home - to Los Angeles, Portland, Rotterdam, Hawaii, and San Francisco. And the team is growing - Stiv Wilson, Leslie Moyer, and Brennan Novak have officially joined 5 Gyres, bringing much needed skills and direction to the project. Though the tranquil memories of the Azores are blurred by urban traffic and gyre sample woes, a few highlights still stand out:

*Giving a talk at the University of the Azores to a group of marine biology/ESL students. Later that night, we ran into a few students at a local bar, who told us how moved and shocked they were. Though they see plastic covering their beaches, most hadn’t heard about plastic in the food chain.

 
On our way to the talk, we saw this crew in their full aquatic armor. Leslie and I couldn’t resist a photo opp. We call this “5 GUYRES”

*Meeting with Marco Santos, a charismatic, knowledgeable PhD candidate at the University of the Azores. Marco studies threats to sea turtles posed by long lining, and plastic. Sadly, most of our video with him disappeared, but here is a fragment, featuring this juvenile brought to his office – a victim of bycatch.

*Our field trip to the local landfill. Yes, we spend our leisure time visiting dumps.... This garbage graveyard, an open pit filled with trash, stands right on coast, overlooking the Azorian blue.

Plastic bags, toys, shoes, and other detritus spill out over the top, where winds will easily tumble them towards the surf below. We’re now moving full speed ahead, planning upcoming expeditions to the South Atlantic and South Pacific Gyres, including a possible 6-month global plastic expedition. More about this to come soon – meantime, we’re calling on the Gyre gods to return our missing samples immediately....

We’ve found a beach in the Azores that receives the southern swell and wind from hurricanes that dominate the North Atlantic in winter, above the Sargasso Sea.  We caught the edge of one a couple of weeks ago, with gusts up to 50 knots and waves three stories tall.  But what else do these waves carry?  The Sargasso Sea is a sea without borders, gently spun by the clockwise currents of the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Current, Canary Current and the Equatorial Current.  These currents brush by Europe and North America, and receive water from

rivers that flow into them.  They also carry plastic pollution.  

We’ve seen so much of it in the North Atlantic Gyre, but there’s more ashore. After three thousand miles and three islands, we’ve seen that one place where plastic pollution goes is on the beaches of island in the gyre.  This beach was littered with the usual suspects; light sticks, toothbrushes, buckets and crates, bottles, bottle caps, cigarette lighters, clothspins, and tattered fragments of plastic film.  Once again I’m struck with the fascination that this beach was

cleaned recently before the storm.  

What will they do with this plastic pollution?  The community of Horta will bury it on the island.  It’s a short term solution to a long term problem.  But what if this stuff had value?  What if individual products were worth something?  What if all of it were worth something by it’s weight, like we do for all metals?  Systems of recovery must be improved, and it can happen with legislation.  Currently, some states are proposing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which creates a post-consumer economic incentive to bring back products for money.  It works whenever the strategy is used.  For great information about EPR visit http://cleanproduction.org/Producer.Introduction.php.