No Planet B

by Lucy Diavolo

  “Part of the problem is that in some instances, waste that cannot be recycled, they’re actually sent to these countries in the guise of recycling. But when they arrive here, they are either not recyclable or the infrastructure is not existing for it to be recycled,” Froilan Grate, the executive director of GAIA Philippines, tells Teen Vogue. “So in a way, what happens is it ends up being dumped in these communities.”

  Informal waste pickers then try to sort through the mixed waste for valuable or recyclable materials, he says, becoming exposed to toxins and other harmful substances along the way. Whatever can’t be recycled is left as pollution, oftentimes contaminating the bodies of water that the island communities rely on for their food. Even though Asian countries are often rated as the top polluters in the world, says Grate, these communities are trying to reduce their waste—they’re just burdened with incoming plastics from the U.S. and Europe. According to Wilson, many corporations purposely “market the convenience-industrial lifestyle” to Southeast Asian countries, knowing they lack the environmental controls and facilities to handle the waste and then blaming them for littering.

  Wilson, Bourque, and Grate all agree that there is simply too much plastic for it to be recycled away. Instead, they say, it’s necessary for us to refocus on the first two of the three R’s (reduce, reuse, and recycle): mainly reducing but also reusing. Scaling down on takeout that produces disposable waste, shopping in bulk with reusable containers at the supermarket, and carrying reusable water bottles to avoid plastic ones are all good steps we can take.

  However, Wilson says, “it’s a terrible place to stop.”

  The key is to call for collective action to hold local recycling facilities, government, and large corporations accountable for the production of single-use plastics and the way our waste is handled in the longrun. Joining the Break Free From Plastic movement, supporting organizations that fight back against plastic pollution, and contacting your local and federal government about environmental legislation are all important ways to stay engaged in the search for solutions. That’s exactly what Mishka and her peers did in their state, lobbying lawmakers for two years until Governor Gary Herbert signed a resolution acknowledging the effects of climate change in Utah.

  They went on to host a youth summit and launch their own organization, Utah Youth Environmental Solutions (UYES), in order to continue pushing for a healthier planet. “My biggest piece of advice would be to join local youth organizations who are involved in grass roots organizing. Organizations like UYES, Sunrise, Power Shift, or iMatter are all national organizations that can work on local issues in your community,” she says. “Social media is also a huge tool that I’ve used to find opportunities to network and get engaged with youth who are doing similar work.”

  I Went to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This Is What I Saw.

  ALLI MALONEY

  December 22, 2018

  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a site of marine debris considered to be twice the size of Texas, is perhaps the foremost expression of the impact of plastic waste on our world and the role of humans in environmental degradation.

  It has been popularized through media coverage as the world turns its focus to plastic pollution, but misrepresented by misattributed photos that claim to show matted, flat surface debris in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is incorrectly believed to be visible from space and described as the “world’s biggest landfill”; a so-called trash vortex where plastic is “piling up.”

  But it’s just one manifestation of the many ways man-made environmental destruction has taken phenomenal hold of our natural world. Its alleged dramatic aesthetics fail to fully address the impact of the waste and the root of the global plastics problem. So, to understand its mythology and get to the bottom of what the GPGP really means for the planet, I went to see it for myself.

  It takes over one thousand miles from shore to get there, departing from the West Coast and straight into the Pacific. Land fades from sight and the world around the ship becomes only water and sky. I set out this past September from Ensenada, Mexico, with a photographer to bear witness as a guest of Greenpeace, the decades-old nongovernmental environmental organization whose oceans campaign team conducted research from aboard their icebreaker, the Arctic Sunrise. The twenty-one-day-long expedition at sea shed light on and debunked prevalent ideas—mainly that the ocean, in any part, can be “cleaned up” from the mess humans have made.

  We traveled directly toward the gyre, stopping only once for the engineers to make midnight repairs to the ship. Upon arrival, which took days, I expected to see trash everywhere, piled high as I heard it would be. What I saw was different and certainly no island. As Green-peacers described to me, and as I witnessed, the GPGP is more of a “soupy mixture,” with its most buoyant pieces of large, tough plastic joined by fishing debris at the very top of the water’s surface and countless microplastics immediately—indefinitely—below. There was no oversized heap like I was expecting. There was no matted debris. Just vast sea, a few seabirds, and a touch of marine life amid a noticeably high concentration of waste.

  It’s home to a severe problem and is a visible manifestation of “throwaway” culture, wherein much of our economy and daily lives rely on plastics, most of which are disposed of after one use.

  The GPGP was discovered in 1997 by marine researcher Charles Moore and named by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. It became known as “Trash Isles,” thanks to a pair of advertisers who appealed to the United Nations to have the area become the world’s 196th country on World Oceans Day in 2017. The campaign was marketed well, and public understanding of the GPGP was generally founded on the notion that an “island” of trash had been discovered.

  That misconception installed the impression that the impact of plastic pollution will be visible to the eye. The area is in the North Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, twelve hundred nautical miles offshore, where very few have ventured to bear witness, so widespread misunderstanding persists.

  It is in the largest and perhaps most well known of the world’s five ocean gyres, or systems of circulating ocean currents. It is one of three major “garbage patches” found within these gyres where, over time, plastic debris has coalesced. The mass of trash hits its peak in the center of the GPGP’s most concentrated area, which fluctuates with conditions. Ships can enter easily, but even in its outermost zones, floating plastic debris appears with great frequency.

  With the ship slowed down from its usual nine knots, the Greenpeace team spent an hour each day with a special trawl net lowered into the water. We’d sift the plastic pieces that were caught and pick them out of a tray and onto a gridded sheet to be counted and examined one by one, using tweezers. (The process, which feels endless, was oddly satisfying.) Members of the oceans campaign team then documented and packaged up the day’s tiny finds to be sent to partner scientists to study and ideally trace back to a particular product or brand. On our first day of the sixty-minute practice, 1,119 pieces were captured and cataloged.

  To better visualize what that looks like below the surface, they also needed to send divers. Tavish Campbell was one of two aboard the Sunrise and tasked with filming underwater. Before the trip, he’d seen “images in the media which made [the GPGP] look like a massive island you could walk on,” he tells Teen Vogue. “I had prepared myself to see vast tidelines of plastic floating on the surface, complete with entangled sea creatures, but what we actually found was a far different story.”

  Instead, he encountered a seascape that he describes as “sinister”: a vast expanse of pristine-looking ocean found to be “awash in trillions of micro-fragments of plastic” below the water.

  “Every time I ducked under the surface into the bottomless blue, I could see tiny pieces of plastic drifting around me, some smaller than sesame seeds and hardly identifiable, but always present,” Campbell says. “I have dove along shorelines thick with plastic garbage in the western Pacific and have witnessed the
careless dumping of garbage closer to home in the eastern Pacific, but seeing the GPGP really linked it all together for me and offered a startling realization: there is no ‘away’ when something drifts away. It just heads toward the closest ocean gyre.”

  The majority of the plastic in the ocean eventually sinks. Smaller pieces float to the top, like those Campbell saw. This fragmented plastics problem is pervasive in ocean and drinking water around the world, Greenpeace senior oceans campaigner David Pinsky tells Teen Vogue. So much so, he says, that “the Environmental Protection Agency’s samples [from its] water on-site, had microplastics in it.”

  Microplastics—which, as they sound, are miniature pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long—have been found in human feces, as we eat them in fish and most table salts. While systems of measurement have not yet been established to unify the world’s research, in the GPGP, microplastics have been found to make up 94 percent of the pieces of plastic in the gyre.

  Free-roaming man-made plastic matter can devastate the earth. It can lodge itself onto or into sea life not meant to carry or eat it, and can get stuck inside their bodies and cause choking. Microplastics are consumed by wildlife at high rates, with a recorded impact on at least eight hundred species, including half of the world’s sea turtles and an estimated 60 percent of all seabird species, a figure predicted to reach 99 percent by 2050. Plastic ruins soil, leaching contaminants into the ground and waterways, and encourages pathogen growth, which can destroy reefs. When plastics large or small decompose in the sun, they release greenhouse gases that further advance climate disaster.

  When we on the ship weren’t trawling, we’d keep watch for plastic from the ship’s side during the day or hit the sea in smaller boats to pull bigger pieces that were potentially branded or stamped and could lead to corporate accountability—a major part of Greenpeace’s current mission, which asks the world to consider what “thrown away” actually looks like. Water samples were also taken in search of microfibers three to five times a day.

  Microfibers are a major part of the plastics crisis, but only recently discussed. These microscopic particles, which shed from textiles and are not visible to the human eye, pollute a majority of the world’s tap water and are commonly found in bottled water (in the U.S., 94 percent of tap water samples in one study included the fibers). They come from both natural materials (like cotton) and synthetic (like spandex) and are “smaller than a human cell,” Pinsky says. The impact of synthetic fibers on human health is still unknown but being investigated, though it’s already clear that the chemicals that make plastic are endocrine-disrupting compounds, which can mess with human hormones, manipulate the functions of organs, and are said to even contribute the presence of ADHD in children.

  While fragmented microplastics and minuscule microfibers are still being researched, we already know that the sheer volume of pollution they contribute to and represent is disrupting the planet. It’s why many reject the notion that the ocean can be “cleaned up” by simply scooping up the plastic and carrying it back to shore. (A highly publicized, extremely expensive “cleanup” effort has even been set into motion by The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch nonprofit, to little-reported success thus far.) There is simply too much plastic and most of it too small to capture.

  Not all plastic in the water is micro; there is material you can see with your eyes, which gathers in the GPGP and can’t be missed on beach shores around the world. We noted these from the side of the ship during most daylight hours. Talking at sunset one day with engagement coordinator Dan Cannon about his career with Greenpeace, which started when the young organizer was a student, conversation was frequently interrupted to keep count—“another one,” “there’s two more”—of the plastic we’d speed past.

  Life aboard a ship is equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. Living on the Sunrise gave me abs—as an icebreaker, it both pitches and rocks side to side, so much so that the crew calls it “the washing machine,” and I was constantly holding on or gripping to stay steady. Each day, we’d get a 7:30 a.m. wake-up call in our bunk beds from Myriam or Robin, two millennial Americans who worked night watch while we slept. Chores were at eight, lunch at noon, and dinner at six, with all meals prepared by Daniel, a talented chef from Mexico City, with help from Amanda, a Hawaiian punk who runs a kayak shop in Seattle, or Pablo, a deckhand from Argentina.

  The sea belongs to no country—it’s an international rule—and the Greenpeace team embodied the notion that our environmental efforts should not either. Our radio operator, Rosy, hailed from Brazil, and Cat, the Italian medic, speaks six languages. The first, second, and third mates were from Finland, South Korea, and South Africa. Other crew and campaigners onboard represented Chile, Bulgaria, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, Great Britain, and France.

  In the GPGP’s most concentrated zones, we’d venture out at least once a day in the smaller vessels that the Sunrise housed, lowered into the water by crane with a driver already inside (passengers would get into them through a door on the side of the ship, where we’d hold onto a rope ladder and jump in backward). I found myself with my hands in the sea, pulling out toilet brush handles, bleach bottles, laundry baskets, a suspension band usually found in hard hats. There was a disposable razor handle, hydrogen peroxide container, toolbox top, flower pot, water cooler lid, luggage wheel, buckets, a VHS cassette box with a fish inside of it, an unopened bottle of carbonated water, and a piece of Astroturf. White objects were the easiest to spot, but it came in all colors and shapes, fully intact, visibly torn.

  The team recovered countless buoys, some as big as a beach ball, others small and compact. These were markers of the fishing industry’s impact on the ocean, which weighs heavily. According to Ocean Cleanup, nearly 50 percent of the patch’s total plastics tonnage is largely accounted for by fishing gear like plastic-lined nets that have drifted out to sea or been dumped into it, with much floating toward the area after Japan’s 2011 tsunami. The Sunrise’s motorized crane lifted these “ghostnets” when we chose to stop and pull one from the water (an impressive, upsetting sight). Fish were to be pulled from the piles and thrown back. Crabs—of which there were varied species, riding on nearly every piece of plastic we pulled from the water—scuttled off, sealing their own fate.

  It was hard to not feel the monumental weight of human failure as I spent day after day in the GPGP. Early on in the trip, U.S. actions director for Greenpeace Katie Flynn-Jambeck warned that “we might all cry” when we got there, and she was right. I did. I felt hopeless standing starboard-side on the Sunrise, counting my ninety-seventh piece of large plastic spotted in two hours on watch. Counting and organizing hundreds upon thousands of microplastics, tiny fragments that came bleached white, hot pink, and robin’s egg blue alongside tiny bits of broken-down rope, I found myself thinking about the caps of pens, lids of yogurt, Barbie cars—plastic, everywhere, across the landscape of my life.

  This realization was painfully reinforced when I was off the ship and hyper-aware of each product I saw for sale back home in New York City, where throwaway culture is key. While there have been proposals of banning plastic bags statewide and plastic straws in the city, the continued manufacturing and mass use of these will continue to pose economic and environmental issues for this other island of trash, where nonrecycled plastic is either buried or shipped to landfills in other states.

  The solution, many experts now say, is to drastically slow down its production and consumption.

  Plastics in the form of reusables like bottles and containers came into prominence among consumer goods after World War II as industries saw dollar signs and used chemicals to introduce new, cheap alternatives to other man-made products, which took skilled labor and natural materials to create. Today, we create three hundred million tons of plastic every year, half of which is for single use. We rely on it every day, in the clothes we wear, in our classrooms and offices, when eating prepackaged food and beverages, or shipping products by mail.

  Lon
g before it makes its way into a gyre, plastic causes problems. The creation of plastic products and its chemicals relies on fossil fuels, most of which are extracted from the earth in a ruinous process known as fracking. It is transformed through refinement for use, which contributes to global warming through leaks. It travels by way of pipelines, which are implanted into predominantly poor communities that are often exposed to pollutants. Plastic production itself is carbon-heavy and releases toxins into the environment. The facilities required for its creation are often built along waterways, which can flood in extreme weather and cause additional damage.

  From start to never-end, plastic is dangerous. It demands land for resource extraction, production facilities, and waste storage, which has violent implications for Indigenous, marginalized, and impoverished communities.

  As the problem intensifies, the most commonly proposed solutions are outdated. Recycling is important, but it is not enough to negate the impact of manufactured plastics on the environment: only 9 percent of all plastic ever created has been recycled. Packaging, which makes up for about a quarter of the total volume of all plastics used, is harder to recycle, as are colored plastics. (Biodegradables often need to be processed in facilities, too.) In the extremely frequent instance that a plastic material can’t be recycled—an incineration process that requires energy and emits pollutants—it’s dumped into a landfill, where it will contaminate for more than one thousand years, or shipped from wealthy countries to others with less economic stability or political influence. People in these spaces pay the price of litter, pollution, and poisoning. Take, for example, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka: these are among the top countries considered “responsible” for marine debris, but are also some of the countries that receive much of the world’s trash (and are then blamed for “mismanagement” of the overwhelming volume).