EIGHT MILLION

EPISODE 1: CHINA AND THE GLOBAL PLASTIC CHALLENGE

5 MARCH 2018

Everywhere you look, on beaches and in seas around the world, there’s plastic, and this is changing the fabric of our oceans. Why is plastic ocean pollution such a problem globally, and in Asia in particular?

We speak with experts from the academic, government and advocacy world, to learn about the impact of ocean plastic on seafood and our health. We will discuss how microplastics differ across the world and the source of the estimated 8,000,000 metric tonnes of plastic entering the oceans every year: uncollected waste from land.

GUEST
CRAIG LEESON, A PLASTIC OCEAN
NICHOLAS MALLOS, OCEAN CONSERVANCY
MARCUS ERIKSEN, 5GYRES INSTITUTE
WILLIAM ROBBERSON, USEPA REGIONAL RESPONSE TEAM
CHELSEA ROCHMAN, ROCHMAN LAB
JENNA JAMBECK, JAMBECK RESEARCH GROUP

Highlights

4:53 The Current State of Plastic Pollution

7:58 The Dangers of Microplastics

13:30 The Scale of Ocean Plastics

Further Reading & Listening

• Webinar: A Plastic Ocean
• Website: Marine Plastics, Sea of Troubles, Stemming the Tide

ITUNES |SOUNDCLOUD| SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

NOTES

Litter on a Singapore beach | ©CC BY 2.0 vaidehi shah

Hi. My name is Sam Colombie. Marcy and I spent many, many hours making this documentary series possible. And now that the series is out, I realise there is just so much info that never made it to the final cut! So if you’d like to find out more about this issue, the people we interviewed, or the details they mention; this is the place. I’ll try my best to add all the links and info you might be looking for, but you can always reach out to us on our contact page if there’s more we can help you with.

The picture above is one of many examples of the Southeast Asian beaches – littered with plastic – Marcy mentioned at the start of our first episode. But as Nicholas Mallos later says, these plastic beaches are literally all over the world.

Marcy: I soon learned that China is making a lot of progress right now.

To hear more about the progress China is making right now, you should definitely listen to our prologue, where Isabel Hilton talks about some of the steps China is taking to improve the environment. And as Liu Qin of chinadialogue writes: “China’s highest planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), announced on January 5 that it is looking at further measures to reduce plastic waste pollution.”

But we need to be cautious in our optimism, as Liu further writes: China attended a December ’17 UN Environment assembly that passed a draft resolution on marine litter and microplastics, but it “has not yet signed up to the UN Environment Programme’s #CleanSeas campaign.”

PART I: THE PROBLEM WITH PLASTIC

On to the first interview!

We kicked off our investigation into this topic by speaking with the man who inspired us to take action: Craig Leeson, director of A Plastic Ocean. If you haven’t seen this film, you can get it on their website, and it is absolutely worth it. 

Craig: For me, that moment when I got a punch in the gut, was when we were filming the shearwater birds.

Shearwater or petrel chick | ©CC BY 2.0 Forest and Kim Starr

Craig noticed that the plastic objects killing these birds are the objects he, you, and I throw away every day.

Craig: That word away – that I thought and had been told of was relevant to so-called disposable plastic. Because it goes “away”. Of course the truth now as we know it is that it doesn’t go away.

Here’s a look at what volunteers and government staff collected while cleaning a beach on Midway Atoll, Hawaii.

Plastic found on Midway Atoll | ©CC BY 2.0 USFWS

Beachcombers all around the world are finding our most common disposable items in their catch. This was confirmed by Nicholas Mallos, who runs the Trash Free Seas Program at Ocean Conservancy . 

Nick: Cigarette butts have always been the number one. After that it’s largely things like food wrappers, or plastic bags, or beverage bottles, or bottle caps.

Ocean Conservancy has been cleaning up beaches for 30 years, and Nick was there to pick up the pieces when the 2011 tsunami in Japan carried 5 million tonnes of trash into the Pacific

Some of the trash found on US beaches after the tsunami, and suggested routes | NOAA/BBC

See that dark spot on the tsunami map? That’s roughly where scientists have located the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. If you have the time, the book ‘Plastic Ocean‘ is a great read by the man who first discovered this concentration of marine debris. Far from being trash island some have pictured it, the Patch is the vast, moving, speckled heart of a large swirling current called the North Pacific Gyre. 

Marcus, Joel Paschal and Anna Cummins sailing the Junk Raft | ©Argonaut

Marcus: There are five big subtropical gyres: the North Pacific, North Atlantic, South Pacific, South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. Trash that enters the oceans will migrate toward these gyres.

Below is an illustration of the approximate location of the five gyres, from the incredibly interesting report ‘Ocean Atlas 2017‘. 

The five gyres and estimated concentrations of debris | ©Ocean Atlas 2017

Next we looked at the problem of microplastics. This is plastic smaller than 5 millimeters, though particles smaller than 100 nanometer are now sometimes referred to as nanoplastics. Depending on their origin, microplastics are divided into two groups: those that started off small, and those that degraded down from larger pieces.

Nurdles | ©CC BY-NC 2.0 SunJTF

Microbeads ©CC BY-NC 2.0 MPCA

Sources of microplastic in the ocean | ©Waterkeeper

We are only just beginning to understand the effects of microplastics and nanoplastics, but studies indicate this may be a much bigger problem than we thought. 

POPs found on plastic pellets | ©Pellet Watch

Like Marcus said, these POPs often include DDTs and PCBs: compound molecules of the halogen group. Now, this is not becoming a lesson in chemistry, but I found this interesting enough to highlight.

The halogen group, as some of you may remember, includes Fluorine, Bromine, and Chlorine. These harmful elements are often used in the flame retardants mixed into plastic products, or form an integral part of some common plastics like PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride). 

These plastics, themselves made up of halogen compounds, enter the ocean, break down into particles, pick up POPs floating in the ocean, and are then eaten by sea animals. 

Craig: When fish consume them, it bioaccumulates. The toxins that are attached to the plastic release from the plastic and attach to the fatty tissue of the fish. And they bioaccumulate as that small fish is eaten by a bigger fish – is eaten by a bigger fish – is eaten by a bigger fish, all the way up the food chain till it hits us. We’re finding through studies that the Center for Disease Control did as far back as 2003 that 92.6% of all American persons have chemicals associated with plastic in their bodies.

The effect of these chemicals are not confirmed, but there are plenty of studies classifying chemicals found in (micro)plastic as endocrine disruptors, meaning they influence our hormone system. The question now is whether the doses we take in through consumption of seafood and drinking polluted water are enough to have an effect on our health. As this 2015 study by a body of global experts states:

Although it is evident that humans are exposed to microplastics through their diet and the presence of microplastics in seafood could pose a threat to food safety (Van Cauwenberghe and Janssen 2014), our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap that deserves special attention. Therefore, an analysis and assessment of the potential health risk of microplastics for humans should comprise dietary exposure from a range of foods across the total diet in order to assess the contributing risk of contaminated marine food items.

PART II: THE SOURCE OF MARINE PLASTIC 

Chelsea Rochman | ©Stiv Wilson/LOE

Chelsea: In California, they were microfibres coming off our clothes in the wash, but in Indonesia we found more fragments – little particles of plastic that were broken down pieces and bigger plastic products.

Jenna’s paper also concluded that 40% of all plastic waste in the ocean originated in just five countries, all located in Asia.

This doesn’t mean these countries are to blame. Many of these nations are experiencing rapid economic growth, and an increasing number of people can finally afford the disposable lifestyle. 

So how can we improve this situation? Chelsea’s research showed us that the source of marine plastics is very different for different parts of the world. And this is reflected in a paper by the Ocean Conservancy, called Stemming the Tide. Working off of Jenna Jambeck’s paper, their research shows that in China, the majority of waste is not collected, so a lot gets carried into the ocean over time. But in an archipelago like the Philippines, waste dump sites are often located near waterways, so a lot of waste that is collected still ends up in the ocean. 

Improving this infrastructure will take massive investment. In recent years, China has shown a readiness to take on this challenge. What they’re planning and how they hope to achieve this, is something to discuss in the following episodes of EIGHT MILLION. Stay tuned!