Ever wonder what happened to that plastic wrapper or water bottle you accidentally dropped on the sidewalk the other day?
Alex Roslin
The Montreal Gazette
Saturday, November 15, 2008
If you think it wound up in a garbage dump or recycling
depot, think again. A lot of the plastic debris that litters Montreal streets
is flushed into the city's sewers and straight into the St. Lawrence River.
It then floats off into the Atlantic, where
circular ocean currents slowly bring it to the centre of the North Atlantic.
Scientists are growing alarmed about massive floating
garbage patches that are believed to be building up in the calm centres of the
gyres in the middle of nearly all of the world's oceans.
The best-known patch, dubbed the Great Pacific Ocean
Garbage Patch, consists of an estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic debris
that has accumulated in the North Pacific gyre. Environmentalists call it the
Pacific Trash Vortex.
It is believed to be at least half the size of Quebec and
possibly up to 10 times its size, depending on how it is measured. And it seems
to be growing. Plastic from the vortex is increasingly washing up on Hawaiian
atolls and being found in the guts of seabirds and fish.
An estimated 100,000 marine mammals die each year from
eating or being entangled in debris - mostly plastic - in the North Pacific
alone. Hence the vortex's other nickname: the Plastic Killing Fields.
Plastic in the sea doesn't biodegrade like other garbage.
Instead, it slowly breaks up into tinier and tinier pieces that float on the
ocean surface or sink to the sea bottom and can take years to finally reach the
ocean gyres.
The vortexes are increasingly seen as environmental
disaster zones. Plastic contains many toxic chemicals; it also soaks up other
dangerous substances already present in the ocean, like carcinogenic PCBs and
DDT.
While the oceans may seem far away, Montrealers are
directly contributing to the plastic vortexes, say environmentalists like
Hélène Godmaire.
Godmaire is the Montreal director
of Great Lakes United, a Canadian-U.S. environmental group. The group will
issue a report in coming weeks on how antiquated sewage systems in Montreal and
other cities in Quebec are
discharging massive volumes of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence.
The sewers lack filters and grates to prevent plastic and
other street litter from being swept into the river, Godmaire said.
Indeed, 80 per cent of the plastic in the ocean gyres is
believed to come from the land, while the remainder is litter from cargo ships,
cruise boats and other sea vessels.
"Next time there's a rainstorm, just look at what's in
the gutter," said Elaine MacDonald, a Toronto scientist
with the environmental group Ecojustice Canada.
"The sewers are directly connected to our rivers and
lakes." In a 2005 survey, Ecojustice gave Montreal's
sewage system a failing "F" grade - the second lowest grade in the
country after Victoria.
The group faulted Montreal for
having an antiquated system of sewers. Two-thirds of the island has sewers that
combine storm water and sewage in the same pipes.
In normal conditions, the city's sewage-treatment plant
filters out plastic and other debris in the rainwater.
But when there is a heavy downpour, the pipes often back
up, and raw sewage and debris are discharged directly into the St. Lawrence,
said Duong Dao Dang, an engineer at the plant.
Ironically, the situation isn't much better in more
recently developed areas of the island where storm and sewer pipes are separate
- mostly in the West
Island. Here, storm water flows directly into the river, with
little filtering of debris.
Grates over gutters catch larger litter, but smaller pieces
of floating garbage often wash into the St. Lawrence, Godmaire said.
Montreal city spokesman
Philippe Sabourin confirmed culverts that discharge rainwater into the river
don't have gratings or filters. "That could create a blockage," he
said.
sss Richard Thompson is one of the few scientists studying
plastic in the oceans. The marine biologist at England's University of Plymouth first
noticed the problem in the early 1990s while working on his PhD at a lab on the Isle of Man,
between Scotland and Ireland.
He helped organize a beach cleanup day and was stunned by
the amount of garbage - mostly plastic - that had washed up on the island's
shores. He borrowed the lab's pickup truck to carry away the debris, expecting
he'd have a single load.
"We made six or seven trips and still hadn't touched a
fraction of the quantity on the beach. It brought home for me the enormity of
it," he said.
"Look at a street after a fair or busy shopping day.
You don't have to walk long to see people dropping litter. It doesn't have to
be dropped into the sea to wind up there." In a landmark study in 2004,
Thompson looked at old samples of plankton collected in the North Atlantic starting
in the 1960s. He found microscopic pieces of plastic in the water that had been
scooped up with the plankton.
What's more, the amounts of plastic had exploded. The
latest water samples had about four times more plastic than the earliest
samples from the 1960s. That coincided with a 25-fold increase in plastic
production worldwide between 1960 and 2000.
Even more alarming, the water samples were from an area of
the Atlantic north
of Britain that
isn't even in the gyre. No one has ever studied the amount of plastic in the
Atlantic gyre itself.
Thompson's studies reported other alarming research:
Ninety-eight per cent of dead seabirds studied in northern Europe have
plastic in their stomachs.
More than 260 animal species are known to eat or get
entangled in plastic - turtles, fish, marine mammals, even small creatures like
mussels, barnacles and beach flees.
Ten per cent of all plastic debris eventually winds up in
the sea.
Ocean currents and winds are slowly bringing all that
debris to the centre of five major ocean gyres in the North and South Atlantic,
North and South Pacific and the Indian Oceans,
said Marieta Francis, executive director of the Algalita Marine Research
Foundation, based in Long
Beach, Calif.
But despite the ever-growing plastic blobs in the oceans,
the Pacific gyre is the only one that has been studied.
That research started when the Algalita foundation's
founder, an avid boater named Charles Moore, chanced upon the Pacific Garbage
Patch during a 1997 yacht race.
"There were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic
bags and fishing floats as far as I could see," he told the U.S. News
& World Report.
"Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was
nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic." The vortex was in the North
Pacific gyre, where a high-pressure zone forces debris into a central area that
has low currents and winds.
Sailors used to fear getting stuck in gyres because the
paltry wind could leave ships stranded without headway for weeks on end.
Moore returned with a
scientific vessel to study the vortex and netted everything from a cathode-ray
tube to a truck tire, a mass of fishing net and a chemical drum.
One of his most outlandish finds: a 16-kilometre-long slick
of Taco Bell plastic baggies. He estimated there were 6 million.
Moore found up to 970,000
pieces of plastic per square kilometre in some areas of the vortex.
That was triple the density found in an earlier landmark
study in the western Pacific by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
That study, done in 1988, was the first to document large
amounts of plastic in the Pacific. One area 1,000 kilometres east of Japan had
315,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre.
The density in Moore's
gyre is much higher. "You can go for days and days and see plastic
everywhere," said Francis.
Moore estimated in 2002 that
the volume of plastic in the gyre had tripled in the previous 10 years.
While much of the debris is large and conspicuous, most of
it has disintegrated after years of washing around in the ocean.
The plastic pieces are usually five millimetres across or
less and must be scooped up in nets finer than a window screen.
"It's not quite what people think. It's like a
soup," Francis said.
In the Atlantic,
the only research on plastic garbage is more than 30 years old. A survey in the
northeastern Atlantic in
the early 1970s found 160,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre in some
areas.
Back in Canada,
the growing plastic vortexes still seem far from the official radar. At the
Department of Fisheries and Oceans, oceanographer Denis Gilbert is one of Canada's
leading experts on the St. Lawrence and Atlantic environments.
Gilbert said no one in his office is studying plastic
debris entering the St.
Lawrence River. As for plastic accumulating in the Atlantic gyre,
he had never even heard of it. "We have no one working on that," he
said.
Thompson, for his part, hopes to cobble together funds for
a scientific sea voyage to the heart of the North
Atlantic gyre to confirm for the first time that a plastic
trash vortex is indeed gathering there, just as in the Pacific. He also wants
to study the impacts on the environment.
"I'd be very keen to go. This stuff is here for
generations to come. We haven't really begun to comprehend the impacts."
- - -
Our Toxic Trash Winds Up in the Sea
Plastic accounts for an estimated 70 per cent of all the
human garbage in the world's water bodies. Here are some more plastic facts:
8% of the world's oil production is used to make plastic.
40% of plastic is used for packaging material.
500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are used worldwide
every year.
5% of plastic is recycled in the U.S.;
20% in the European Union.
10% of all plastic debris is thought to wind up in the sea.
80% of plastic in the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch
comes from the land.
1.7 million pieces of plastic were found per square
kilometre of shoreline in a 2005 worldwide survey.
100 million tonnes of plastic is in the Pacific Ocean
Garbage Patch, estimates the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.
OCEAN SCOURGE: "STOP IT ON LAND"
Marieta Francis says there is a simple solution to the
growing soup of plastic trash in the world's oceans. "We need to stop it
on land," says the California environmentalist.
Marine biologist Richard Thompson agrees. The first
solution, he said, is not to litter the streets. "Any litter that is
dropped has a high potential to get into waterways," he said.
Thompson's other solutions come from the three Rs: reduce,
reuse and recycle:
Reducing plastic use. Thompson said two-fifths of plastic
is used for packaging, which is typically discarded after a single use not long
after a product is bought. Another big culprit: plastic bags. Some countries
and cities have banned them outright, while others have slapped taxes on them.
Improving recycling. Just 5 per cent of plastic waste in
the U.S. is
recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The Canadian rate
isn't known, but Toronto scientist
Elaine MacDonald said it would be quite low, too. One reason: Each municipality
has its own recycling program, while provincial guidelines are generally weak,
she said.
Designing smarter. A lot of plastic products can't be
easily recycled because they use different colours or types of plastic that
can't be combined during recycling. "We should design products with a high
potential for recycling," Thompson said. Japan is
often seen as a model for this idea. Its goal is to achieve a "closed
loop" economy in which all used products are recycled into new ones.
Developing biodegradable plastic. Scientists are experimenting
with new biodegradable plastics that slowly break down when exposed to sunlight
or water. Some of the products are made from corn or pea starch.
Canadian environmentalists Hélène Godmaire and MacDonald
say Montreal and
other older cities on the St. Lawrence Rivers and Great Lakes need
to improve antiquated sewage systems that discharge a lot of plastic and other
garbage into the water. They propose:
Filtering storm water. A lot of plastic gets into the sea
through outdated city sewers that release debris directly into rivers and
lakes. Solution: screens and grates to catch the litter. (Also important:
cleaning the screens regularly.)
Upgrading sewage systems. During heavy rain, Montreal's
sewage system often backs up, discharging untreated sewage and rainwater
carrying plastic and other garbage into the St.
Lawrence River.
Thompson said the public has a strong appetite for change.
"Already we are seeing consumers turning away from
plastic bags. I think you'd find very quickly consumers would vote with their
feet. The public is keen to do the right thing," he said.
WHERE OUR TRASH GATHERS
What are plastic garbage patches?
Scientists say they believe plastic trash blobs bigger than
most countries are forming in the middle of the world's oceans. The debris is
slowly brought there by circular ocean currents called gyres that sweep up
debris and bring it to their centres. Think water funneling down the toilet.
The Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is the only one that
scientists have studied up-close. It's estimated to contain 100 million tonnes
of garbage and its size is estimated at anywhere from 700,000 square kilometres
(half the size of Quebec)
to 15 million sq. km. (10 times Quebec's
area) and at least 60 metres deep. Some scientists say it might actually be two
trash vortexes - one between Hawaii and California, the
other between Hawaii and Japan.
Where are they?
Plastic garbage patches are believed to be accumulating in
five gyres - in the middle of the North and South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic and
the Indian Ocean.
What's in them?
All sorts of litter has been found in the gyres -
everything from a cargo spill of millions of plastic baggies to bottle caps,
Styrofoam, syringes, water bottles, traffic cones, lighters, tires and
toothbrushes, beach balls, plastic bags, shampoo bottles and plastic dinosaurs,
checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles and fishing line.
Where does the trash come from?
One-fifth of the plastic in the oceans is thought to be
litter from ships. The rest comes from land: Much of it is litter from city
streets that is swept into sewers and gets discharged into rivers and lakes,
eventually making its way into the sea. Some can also blow into the water from
poorly secured trash bins or get taken there by seagulls having a snack at a
garbage dump.
The trash can take years to bob its way to the ocean gyres,
where it slowly breaks up into ever-smaller pieces until it resembles dust.
What does it look like?
Some of the plastic debris can be seen bobbing on or near
the surface but much of it has broken down into tiny pieces after years of
floating in the sea and is barley visible, so the garbage patch is often
described as plastic "soup." Most pieces are less than five
millimetres across. About a third of the debris floats on or near the surface -
60 metres down or more - while the rest sinks to the sea bottom.
What is the impact of the plastic garbage in our oceans?
Over 260 animal species are known to eat or get caught in
the plastic debris. About 100,000 marine mammals are estimated to die from
doing so in the North Pacific alone. On Midway Island in Hawaii, 400,000
albatrosses feed their chicks nearly five tonnes of plastic a year, John
Klavitter, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Survey, has estimated. A
European study found 98 per cent of dead seabirds had plastic in their stomachs.
Scientists fear toxic chemicals in the plastic may enter
the animals' bodies. People may also ingest microscopic pieces of plastic when
they eat fish.
