Plastic packaging is often designed to be used once and then thrown out - but the environmental impact can be forgotten.
Plastic debris lines the coast in Haiti. Photo: Timothy Townsend
Every year 8 million metric tonnes of plastic - 16 grocery bags’ worth for every metre of coastline around the world - ends up in our oceans. By 2025, the figure is set to increase to nearly 33 bags, unless plastic consumption is curbed and waste management issues are addressed. What’s even more concerning is that only around five per cent of this is found on the surface of the ocean – some 5.25 trillion pieces, according to the scientific journal PLOS 1.
Camden Howitt, from environmental charity Sustainable Coastlines says the plastic never goes away. It sinks, it breaks up into tiny pieces, it gets eaten by sea creatures, it persists. “The reality is that every piece of plastic on earth that has ever been produced is somewhere on earth still.”
The crux of the issue is the torrent of single-use plastic - plastic that is designed to be used once, but, because of the nature of the material, lasts forever. In New Zealand, 62 per cent of all new plastic is turned into packaging, inherently single-use in its nature.
It’s single-use plastics that consistently show up at Sustainable Coastlines’ clean ups, accounting for 72 per cent of collected rubbish. Howitt calls the most common plastic found the “filthy five”: bottle caps, plastic bags, plastic food wrappers, polystyrene and foam and the insidious “plastics of unknown origin”: tiny, sun-bleached pieces of plastic that are brittle and break into hundreds of tinier pieces, wreaking havoc on the marine ecosystem.
Plastic of varying size has been found in the stomachs of microscopic zooplankton, where it affects the ability to feed, gooseneck barnacles, fish, seabirds and turtles.
Kelly Tarlton’s aquarium senior aquarist Joe Woolcott says that it’s normal to find plastic remnants in fecal samples from turtles brought into the national rehabilitation centre. One sample he had contained a 3 centimetre segment of a black straw and two 6 cm long sections of plastic bags. “One effect of [eating plastic] can be that it blocks up their digestive track and forms gas bubbles, which leads to the turtle being buoyant. If the turtle is buoyant it finds it very hard to swim down to the sea floor where they often do their feeding. As a result they’re expending a lot of energy, they’re not getting enough food and they just start wasting away.”
Woolcott says that some of the aquarium's turtles have been brought there after many weeks, or even months, stuck on the surface.
The other problems that animals like seals and turtles face, says Woolcott, is entanglement with plastic debris. “Sea turtles need to be able to breathe air. They need to get to the water’s surface. If they’re entangled in something large like a fishing net or a large piece of plastic, that’s going to restrict their ability to actually swim to the surface, so they can drown.”
A turtle being cared for at Kelly Tarlton's aquarium. Photo: Benjamin Hoeksen/The Wireless
Plastic is also teeming with chemicals. These include bisphenol A, styrene, vinyl chloride and phthalates, all flagged as carcinogens by the Breast Cancer Fund. As it breaks into smaller pieces, each piece maintains its molecular structure as a piece of plastic. Plastic is lipophilic, which means it attracts toxic chemicals floating around in the sea that have been washed down cities’ drains or leached into rivers. These chemicals can leach into the stomach of ocean feeders. Seabirds, for example, and fish.
“The bigger the fish get, the more smaller fish that it has eaten and all of those chemicals are accumulated as it goes up the food chain,” says Sustainable Coastlines’ Howitt. “We as humans like to eat the big fish so we end up getting those toxins into our flesh.”
As awareness grows about plastic pollution, it is getting blacklisted around the globe. In 2002, Ireland got the ball rolling by introducing a fee for plastic bags. Consumption reduced by a whopping 93 per cent. In 2008, Rwanda became the first country to ban the plastic bag and San Francisco recently banned the sale of plastic water bottles on city-owned properties; law-breakers will be slapped up a fine of up to $1000 US. And just this week, EU members were told that they must reduce plastic bags by 80 per cent by 20205.
In New Zealand, we have yet to follow suit. Groups like BYO Bag Waiheke, who is trying to ban the bag, and events like Plastic Free July, where participants refuse single-use plastic for a whole month, are helping to keep the issue on the radar. As do high profile, sustainably focused festivals like Splore, where food and beverage vendors had to use compostable packing.
Education is also a huge part of it. Sustainable Coastlines, for example, has trained 660 ambassadors in New Zealand and the Pacific to deliver messages around waste. It is currently running a huge project in Papua New Guinea in conjunction with the National Olympic Committee, as the country gears up for June’s Pacific Games. The charity will work with 12,000 Pacific athletes, educating them on waste issues and training them up to spread the message in their own communities. “These athletes are really passionate, respected people in their various communities around the Pacific. If we train them up to come home with those strong sustainability messages and knowledge about the environment it will make a huge difference,” says Howitt.
Auckland’s Plastic Diet is also helping educate the masses about the impact of single-use plastic on the ocean.
“Really the issue behind single-use plastic is it’s designed to be used once, but it’s made out of material that’s going to last forever. That’s the core of the issue,” says Florence Reynolds, who undertook a year-long-plastic-abstinence last year.
Really the issue behind single-use plastic is it’s designed to be used once, but it’s made out of material that’s going to last forever.
“What we’re working towards is… producers being more responsible for their packaging in the long term,” she says.
“To get there we know we need the public to be on board so we’re currently involved in awareness-raising, and education to build that awareness, so that demand does actually come. If there’s not that demand, the producers aren’t going to change.”
Part of that education is Plastic Diet’s Waste Washers initiative. Students at Auckland University can pick up a glass plate, take it to a food vendor, receive a discount, eat their food and then return the plate to be washed. “It just cuts out the need of a plastic container,” says Reynolds.
Plastic Diet are also constructing on a fleet of canoes, made out of recycled bottles, which they will be paddling around the Abel Tasman with selected applicants later this month. As part of the project, the group is visiting schools and kindergartens spreading the word about the impacts of plastic and getting children to write messages for each of the bottles.
Reynolds says part of the problem is that we live in an age of convenience. We need to slow down and be aware. “We’ve kind of lost touch with taking time to enjoy things, like enjoying a coffee in the coffee shop. Instead we just grab it and we run and that’s plastic made out of oil that’s been in the ground hundred of thousands of years. We don’t even think about it, we just use it once and then chuck it out.”
LISTEN to Sophie Barclay's story on plastic pollution in our oceans on our podcast On The Dial. We also talk employment and privacy, swiping right on everyone and the Cricket World Cup.
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