WILD SYSTEMS 173
Plastic Planet We tend to think of plastic as a cheap, inferior and ugly material used to make children’s toys, garden furniture and throwaway bottles. But as an experiment, imagine for a moment a world in which plastic was extremely rare, like gold or platinum, and plastic objects were devastatingly expensive to produce. One would encounter plastic objects only at special occasions; one would see and touch very few plastic objects throughout one’s lifetime. I know it’s a challenge, but try to imagine, for the sake of our experiment, that plastic was scarce, available only to the happy few, and the masses lived in a world of wood, pottery and metals. Ready? Now look around you and grab the first plastic object you see. Look at the object. Study it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a coffee cup, a cigarette lighter, a pen or a plastic bag. This is a special moment. You are now holding one of the few, delicate pieces of plastic you will ever get to touch. Feel how durable it is. Feel how light it is considering its volume. Feel how strong and rigid it is, or how very flexible. Get a sense of how easy it must have been to mold. Understand that it could be molded into something else again. If plastic weren’t such an omnipresent material, we would realize that it is beautiful. And that it is a disgrace that we throw so much of it away. The word plastic stems from the Greek word plastikos, meaning capable of being shaped or molded. It refers to the malleability, or plasticity during manufacture, that allows it to be cast, pressed or extruded into almost any shape. Before the first synthetic plastics were produced, substances occurring in old nature – gutta-percha, shellac and the horns of animals – were used as plastic material. Bakelite, the first plastic based on a synthetic polymer, was invented in 1907. It was molded into thousands of forms, such as cases for radios, telephones and clocks, and billiard balls. After the Second World War, improvements in chemical technology led to an explosion in new plastics – among them polypropylene and polyethylene – which rapidly found commercial application in a wide spectrum of
products, from coffee cups, to shampoo bottles, to bags, eyeglass frames, medical instruments and, well, almost everything and anything that surrounds us.
Oceans of Plastic In 1997, a Californian sailor named Charles Moore came across an enormous stretch of floating debris while traveling across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (a region often avoided by seafarers). Throughout the week it took him to traverse the area, there was always some piece of plastic bobbing by: a bottle cap, a toothbrush, a cup, a bag, and a torrent of unidentifiable pieces of plastic bits. Moore sensed there was something wrong. He had identified what is now called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the central North Pacific Ocean larger than France or Texas, which contains exceptionally high concentrations of marine trash. The fact that plastic hardly breaks down is well known, but rarely talked about. Plastic does not biodegrade, as microbes haven’t evolved to feed on it. It can photodegrade however, meaning that sunlight causes its polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process catalyzed by friction, as when pieces are blown across a beach or rolled by waves. The same process is in play when pieces of rock are rounded by ocean waves. It is this type of frictional erosion that accounts for the majority of unidentifiable flecks and fragments making up the massive plastic soup at the heart of the Pacific. Captain Moore’s research revealed six times more plastic in the area than plankton. Further, it was discovered that 80% of the debris had initially been discarded on land – a finding later confirmed by the United Nations Environmental Program. Wind blows the plastic through streets and from landfills. It makes its way into rivers, streams and storm drains, then rides the tides and currents out to sea, finally ending up in an ocean gyre. And the trash-vortex Moore discovered isn’t the only one – the planet has six additional major tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with debris.