Saving Seafood

The Ocean’s Biggest Garbage Pile Is Full of Floating Life

May 9, 2022 — In 2019, the French swimmer Benoit Lecomte swam over 300 nautical miles through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to raise awareness about marine plastic pollution.

As he swam, he was often surprised to find that he wasn’t alone.

“Every time I saw plastic debris floating, there was life all around it,” Mr. Lecomte said.

The patch was less a garbage island than a garbage soup of plastic bottles, fishing nets, tires and toothbrushes. And floating at its surface were blue dragon nudibranchs, Portuguese man-o-wars, and other small surface-dwelling animals, which are collectively known as neuston.

Scientists aboard the ship supporting Mr. Lecomte’s swim systematically sampled the patch’s surface waters. The team found that there were much higher concentrations of neuston within the patch than outside it. In some parts of the patch, there were nearly as many neuston as pieces of plastic.

“I had this hypothesis that gyres concentrate life and plastic in similar ways, but it was still really surprising to see just how much we found out there,” said Rebecca Helm, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and co-author of the study. “The density was really staggering. To see them in that concentration was like, wow.”

The findings were posted last month on bioRxiv and have not yet been subjected to peer review. But if they hold up, Dr. Helm and other scientists say, it may complicate efforts by conservationists to remove the immense and ever-growing amount of plastic in the patch.

Read the full story at the New York Times

UN Plastic Pledge Is Bright Spot for Global Climate Diplomacy

March 8, 2022 — As countries buffeted by high energy prices and political infighting at home backslide on climate promises made at the COP26 summit in November, a glimmer of hope for green progress came out of Kenya last week.

At the fifth biennial session of the United Nations Environment Assembly, which met in Nairobi, 175 countries agreed to establish an intergovernmental committee to negotiate a legally binding treaty to tackle the proliferation of plastics.

Plastic is, of course, a global scourge. About 11 million metric tons of plastic waste end up in bodies of water each year, and the UN expects that volume to nearly triple by 2040. Not only do plastics clog oceans with waste, they break down into tiny pieces — microplastics — that threaten human and animal health.

Delegates in Nairobi resolved to cut plastic waste through recycling, sustainable package design, and limiting production of virgin plastics in the first place. Further, they pledged to have a treaty in place by the end of 2024. That’s an extremely fast timeline: Most global treaties take five to 10 years.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

The U.S. Has a Leading Role to Play in Reducing Ocean Plastic

December 6, 2021 — Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans. It shows up on beaches, in fish and even in Arctic sea ice. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine makes clear that the U.S. is a big part of the problem.

As the report shows, the U.S. produces a large share of the global supply of plastic resin – the precursor material to all plastic industrial and consumer products. It also imports and exports billions of dollars’ worth of plastic products every year.

On a per capita basis, the U.S. produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste than China – a nation often vilified over pollution-related issues. These findings build off a study published in 2020 that concluded that the U.S. is the largest global source of plastic waste, including plastics shipped to other countries that later are mismanaged.

And only a small fraction of plastic in U.S. household waste streams is recycled. The study calls current U.S. recycling systems “grossly insufficient to manage the diversity, complexity and quantity of plastic waste.”

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive

U.S. is top contributor to plastic waste, report shows

December 2, 2021 — The United States ranks as the world’s leading contributor of plastic waste and needs a national strategy to combat the issue, according to a congressionally mandated report released Tuesday.

“The developing plastic waste crisis has been building for decades,” the National Academy of Sciences study said, noting the world’s current predicament stems from years of technological advances. “The success of the 20th century miracle invention of plastics has also produced a global scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look.”

The United States contributes more to this deluge than any other nation, according to the analysis, generating about 287 pounds of plastics per person. Overall, the United States produced 42 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2016 — almost twice as much as China, and more than the entire European Union combined.

“The volume is astounding,” said Monterey Bay Aquarium’s chief conservation and science officer, Margaret Spring, who chaired the NAS committee, in an interview.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

The Dream of Scooping Plastic From the Ocean Is Still Alive—and Problematic

October 20, 2021 — This week, one of the world’s most-watched plastic clean-up projects will announce victory. The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that has set out to solve the huge problem of plastics in the ocean, will hold a press event Wednesday where it will review the success of its latest system. The group has already said the contraption cleaned 20,000 pounds (9,070 kilograms) of trash out of the ocean on its latest mission and released dramatic footage of mounds of trash being pulled out of the ocean in a huge net.

“The day has come to celebrate the beginning of the end of the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” the organization wrote on its website announcing Wednesday’s event.

But with all that amazing capacity to scoop trash comes a whole lot of baggage: questions about the system’s impact on ecosystems, a history of aggressive fundraising for expensive failures, and bigger conversations about what kinds of solutions we should be funding to fix the world’s plastic crisis in the first place.

The Ocean Cleanup founder Boyan Slat made headlines in 2012 when, at age 18, he gave a TEDx Talk where he told a rapt audience that he’d figured out how to use technology to help passively clean the oceans of plastic. The revelation, he said, came after a scuba diving trip where he was shocked at the amount of plastic in the oceans. The video went viral, and soon the Dutch teenager had funding offers pouring in, aided by a barrage of high-profile media and celebrity support. The United Nations even awarded Slat with its Champion of the Earth award, what the organization calls its “highest environmental honour.” 

Read the full story at Gizmodo

 

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford’s trash skimmer ‘Walley’ picked up about 500 pieces of this type of litter in one week

May 25, 2021 — Greg Pimentel and Shay Ribeiro bent over a folding table set on the dock at Pier 3. Covering it was a brown pile of organic matter speckled with the bright, artificial colors of plastic.

For more than one hour, they sorted with gloved hands through multiple piles  counting cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic fragments and other pieces of human waste. When they were done, they dumped everything into a barrel.

“If more people took care or properly disposed of trash, we would only have organic material here,” Pimentel, director of community outreach at the Community Boating Center, said.

The material they pulled came from the trash skimmer first installed in 2019. For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the floating box gobbles up harbor water and all its detritus.

The skimmer is named Walley and much like the Pixar robot, Wall-E, that cleans Earth one piece of trash at a time, the water skimmer sucks up human waste to make the New Bedford Harbor a bit cleaner.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Expedition hauls tons of plastic out of remote Hawaii atolls

April 23, 2021 — A crew returned from the northernmost islands in the Hawaiian archipelago this week with a boatload of marine plastic and abandoned fishing nets that threaten to entangle endangered Hawaiian monk seals and other animals on the uninhabited beaches stretching more than 1,300 miles north of Honolulu.

The cleanup effort in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument lasted three weeks and the crew picked up more than 47 tons (43 metric tons) of “ghost nets” and other marine plastics such as buoys, crates, bottle caps and cigarette lighters from the shores of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The monument, the largest protected marine reserve in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world, is in the northern Pacific Ocean and surrounded by what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a huge gyre of floating plastic and other debris that circulates in ocean currents. The islands act like a comb that gather debris on its otherwise pristine beaches.

The ecosystem in the monument is diverse, unique and one of the most intact marine habitats on Earth. But the beaches are littered with plastic and nets that ensnare endangered Hawaiian monk seals — of which there are only about 1,400 left in the world — and green turtles, among other wildlife.

The crew removed line from a monk seal on the expedition’s first day.

With virtually no predators, the islands are a haven for many species of seabirds, and Midway Atoll is home to the largest colony of albatross in the world. There, the land is littered with carcasses of birds that have ingested plastics and died.

The cleanup was organized by the nonprofit Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project, which partners with the state of Hawaii and federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Post

Safe Catch charts rapid growth, earns plastic neutral certification

April 21, 2021 — Safe Catch, which tests its tuna and salmon for mercury, is seeing high demand for its products in the U.S. and has plans to expand throughout the country and abroad.

The San Francisco, California-based supplier recently became the first rePurpose Certified Plastic Neutral seafood company via a partnership with rePurpose Global. The organization funds the collection, processing, and reuse of as much plastic waste as it uses across its packaging and operations, Safe Catch said in a press release.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Four nations make global call for action to curb marine plastics pollution

April 12, 2021 — Four countries are upping their engagement in the fight against marine litter and plastic pollution by teaming with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to organize a ministerial conference on preserving the oceans through the sustainable production and consumption of plastics.

Germany, Vietnam, Ecuador, and Ghana are organizing the ministerial conference, to be held in September 2021, in line with a decision made during the first session of the fifth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) – held virtually between 22 and 23 February – as the push for a common position on marine litter and plastic pollution intensifies among global community members.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Study finds California salmon face deadly threat from car tires

December 4, 2020 — A highly toxic chemical used in the production of millions of tires every year is killing salmon in the Pacific Northwest, and it is being detected in streams across Northern California, a new study finds.

Scientists have known for decades that stormwater runoff from roads, highways and other urban areas has been linked to high rates of coho salmon deaths in Washington state, where as many as 90% of salmon in the Puget Sound area have died before they could spawn.

The new study published in the research journal Science on Thursday has identified a culprit chemical for the first time — a commonly used preservative called 6PPD used to give tires longer life.

“I think the broader impact is as we have already found this in San Francisco (Bay) creek water as well as the road runoff,” said the study’s lead author, Zhenyu Tian, a researcher at the University of Washington Tacoma. “We believe this thing is a prevalent contaminant. Wherever you have a busy highway, you have runoff from there and you probably will detect it. Our detection rate for this chemical in runoff is almost always 100%. For coho salmon, it’s definitely a threat.”

Read the full story at The Mercury News