Plastic Invades Ocean
KGO-TV 12nov02

Nov. 12 - Every year some 63 pounds of plastic are manufactured for every
man, woman, and child in the United States. Much of that ends up in
landfills and is dumped in the ocean. In this Assignment 7 report, Lyanne
Melendez tells us about the sea of plastic in the Pacific.
The Pacific is an ocean teaming with life. But it's being invaded - by
waste.

Charles Moore: "Every time I came on deck I saw something floating by and I
began to do a little calculation, thinking well, how much is really out
here."

How much is out there?

A swirling pool of plastic in the pacific roughly the size of Africa, about
10 million square miles.
There are six pounds of plastic there for every one pound of naturally
occurring organism.
Plastic is washing up on the shores of beaches like on the big island of
Hawaii, turning the beach into a junkyard.
Charles Moore captains the Alguita. He first came across plastic waste off
the Hawaiian Islands.
Moore created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, leaving behind a
successful business and his home in Long Beach.
He set off on a 7,500 mile voyage.
What he found was plastic everywhere.
The Algalita skimmed the surface of the ocean with a special designed net,
to grab pieces of plastic that are floating on the surface.
Charles Moore: "After one hour of sampling that way, just about anywhere in
the North Pacific, you can come back with a net that's completely full of
plastic fragments."
Scientists have found that this plastic waste is wreaking havoc on the
marine life.
Charles Moore: "When birds are forging in the ocean now, they have the
option of eating plastic along with their natural prey. ... they look like
their natural prey which is squid."
You can see albatross dying from eating plastics, its carcass now revealing
the contents of it's stomach.
Charles Moore: "Ninety percent of the dead chicks on Midway Island contain
this kind of material."
And it's coming from around the world.
Charles Moore: "This dead bird had all these reds in it. ... you've got
cigarette lighters from Japan, mayonnaise jar lids from Japan all kinds of
red debris."
Captain Moore would like to see a ban on red colored plastic as a first step
in cleaning our oceans.
Charles Moore: "This chick died with a full stomach, stopped begging its
mother for food. And even though its stomach was full, there was such a
small percentage of the stomach filled by nutritive food, it died from
starvation with a full stomach."
The biggest problem is nurdles - the raw material used to make everything
from CDs to plastic pipe. It's waste from production plants.
Captain Moore has just received a grant from the state to figure out how
nurdles are getting into the pacific.
Charles Moore: "They are becoming the most common pollutant on our beaches.
A three month study of Orange County beaches found three and a half million
of these little plastic pellets."
The fishing industry is also creating an ecological nightmare. Albatross
also die from digesting fishing line - mistaking it for food. A jellyfish
has grown around plastic debris. And much of it may have been swirling
around the pacific for years.
Take drift nets - sometimes miles wide - they were banned by the United
Nations in 1992. They were widely used in Southeast Asia.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Oceanographer: "When the net got away and the drift nets
broke away the floats keep washing up, well 1992 theoretically they were all
gone, so why are we getting drift net floats now? "
The floaters that hold the net up were retrieved from beaches in Hawaii.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer: "It shows you how long debris has been floating around in
the ocean ... if you turn on off the plastic switch by magic, you'd have
plastic washing up for the next 30, 40 years."
The problem is, it's no man's sea. No one regulates it and the dumping of
plastic at sea generally goes unnoticed or unpunished.
Charles Moore: "We can't regulate it any of us on our own. The center of the
oceans, no one owns it and it's very difficult to get the nations of the
world to agree on a protocol for rehabilitating a place where theirs no
fishery."
So Moore charts on, looking for an end by documenting piece by piece the
ocean he calls "the plastic soup."
The American Plastics Council says the problem is not with the people who
manufacture the material, but rather the people who use it.
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