COP21 and the absence of oceanic pollution

Though representatives from 195 countries came together to share knowledge, exchange ideas and seek a commitment from world leaders to mitigate the environmental emergencies that the world is now facing, oceanic plastic pollution didn't rear its ugly head at the COP21 climate talks in late 2015 (COP21, 2015).

Plastic pollution and climate change are synonymously linked, if you drew a venn diagram with plastic pollution in one circle and climate change in the other, the link would be fossil fuel combustion. So why wasn't the issue of oceanic plastic pollution on the cards of the program?

As the Environmental Protection Agenecy dictate on their website: ''Most direct emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels for energy. A smaller amount, roughly a third, come from the use of fuels in production (e.g., petroleum products used to make plastics).'' (EPA, 2015)


And as Anna Cummins from the 5 Gyres institute stated: "What does plastic pollution have to do with climate change? They both have their root in fossil fuels." 

With economies developing across the world and the subsequent rise in industrial plastic production to facilitate consumer lifestyles, never before has it been more necessary to create a global program regarding the reduction in plastic pollution.

With current estimates of 8 million tonnes of plastic entering our oceans every year, this figure will surely increase as world economies develop.

Who will clean up the oceans now? And how?

The UK and the Plastics 2020 Challenge

This is just a short blog giving an overview of a national UK policy. The plastics 2020 challenge is an approach to reduce the quantity of plastic sent to landfill, initiated in 2009 this scheme is an industry lead initiative to increase resource efficiency. The initiative was set up to work across the plastic supply chain and with the government.

The aim of the initiative is to 'reduce, reuse, recycle and recover', through the use of greener waste management schemes and plastic use reduction.

Recycle the possibilities are endless

The current global emphasis on disposable goods means that currently around 30% of plastics are reused and recycled, with the majority of the rest ending up in landfill and marine ecosystems several innovative approaches have been designed to tackle the problem.

Adidas have just announced the first pair of sports shoes with an upper made entirely from recycled oceanic waste. British designer Alexander Taylor's running shoe was unveiled during an event for Parley for the Oceans, an initiative that encourages the repurpose of waste.

Let me tell you, as a lover of turquoise and the ocean. They're pretty (Christmas present please mum).

This beautiful shoe is symbolic of the potential for things as ugly as waste, signifying a potential turning point in the plastic production industry:

''There is no reason why materials with similar characteristics to those that we use every day with conventional production processes cannot be simply replaced by ocean plastic materials," Taylor told dezeen magazine. 

During the production process, the original ADIDAS manufacturing process was used, but the upper material was replaced with plastic fibre sourced from pellets and nets. The innovative material use has inspired other companies to follow suite. G-Star RAW in collaboration with Pharrell Williams have released a denim clothing collection with items made from recycled oceanic plastic waste. 

One such company making a product ENTIRELY from oceanic plastic right now is Method, a small soap company. The company teamed up with beach clean up groups in Hawaii to use litter as their primary material to make the world's first bottles from plastic waste. This smart, environmentally conscious method of production demonstrates how simple design and innovation can tackle environmental problems.

David de Rothschild sailed 8000 nautical miles of the Pacific Ocean on The Plastiki Boat which was  made out of 12,500 recycled water bottles. Through the showcasing of smarter design features his aim was to raise awareness and prompt consumers to view ''waste as a resource''.

Realistically, these companies are merely making symbolic gestures to sustainable production with the release of a few products which include small sections of garment made from recycled waste. But perhaps the real point here is the public traction that such well known companies are bringing and the huge spotlight with which they're highlighting the severity of plastic waste within the oceans. 

Oceanic Environmental Legislation

Reducing marine pollution has been a topic in environmental debates since the 1970s, with the first international legislation passed in 1972 at the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and other Matter (The London Convention or LC for short) and others passed in the years since have had a hugely positive impact on the marine pollution from ships and other vessels. Another international law designated in 1977 by the UN banned dumping at sea, since 1988 this has been in effect so ships arnt allowed to pollute, only 79 countries ratified.
When it comes to oceanic pollution from ocean vessels a major problem is enforcement of regulation, particularly on open waters. An estimated 6.5 million tonnes plastic are thrown overboard each year, representing 20% of the global rate of plastic pollution dumped in the worlds oceans. When it comes to international environment doctrines, major problem in their effectiveness is enforcement of law.

The success of this legislation is deemed minimal given that 80% of marine pollution originates from land based sources and so further legislation is required to mitigate pollution.

In terms of national laws regarding oceanic pollution there area several categories which can be introduced: enforced biodegradability standards, banned chemicals, banned single use products, enforced recycling, required pollution controls and production responsibility clear up schemes.

G C Ray and J F Grassle in their seminal 1991 paper Marine Biological Diversity state that ''no effort to conserve biological diversity is realistic outside the economics and policies that drive the modern world'' (Ray & Grassle, 1991, page 456). The union of science, economics and public policy may therefore be fundamentally important in the maintenance of marine biodiversity. The use of a financial incentive to prompt conservation efforts and decrease plastic oceanic pollution is apparent when considering the recent tax applied to one use plastic bags. From October 2015 Britain imposed a 5p tax on single use plastic bags, joining the 25% of the globe enforcing the bans.
















The WWFN has estimated that over 100,000 whales, seals and turtles die every year as a result of eating or being trapped in plastic bags. But with the ever increasing global ban on plastic bags these numbers shall decrease and marine ecosystems recover.

Beauty and the biodiversity: what are you washing down the drain?

Today I decided to do a little detective work into cleaning products found around my flat. As a student finding environmentally responsible products is pretty much impossible. From toothpastes to facial cleansers you might be surprised to find out that the sparkly glitters and 'microbeads' in many of the everyday products we use are in fact microplastic and, I'm afraid to say, end up in our beautiful oceans. 

You may think, nay its not too bad, there are sewage treatment facilities that clean our dirty water and the ocean is indeed a pretty huge place. 

Think again....

Recent scientific papers have shown that an increasing amount of marine organisms, such as crustaceans, plankton, filter-feeding molluscs to fish and even seabirds! 

This is because the micro plastics found within beauty products, less than 1mm in diameter, cannot be filtered out during water treatment processes. And with over 300,000 microbeads found in your average tube of facial wash you can imagine the environmental damage that cumulative consumer use could cause. 

These particles can affect a greater number of organisms than larger pieces of plastic, making them even more dangerous. They can block the digestion tract of fish species,

But they can also absorb harmful chemicals effectively turning them into toxic pills 

They can also stay within the marine environment for over 50 years before plastic degradation can occur. 

Initiatives such as the 5gyres and campaign are currently trying to raise public awareness of the issue by sending around a petition to put pressure on the beauty industry into becoming more environmentally responsible (get !INVOLVED! by clicking the link):

 “…I support the elimination of plastic polyethylene micro-beads in all personal care products and urge Procter & Gamble to take the environmentally responsible action of removing them from their products by no later than January 1st, 2015.”

If you don't want to ditch that face scrub just yet, heres a link to a range of totally natural products that will do an even better job than chemical and plastic based exfoliants. Environmental goddesses/ gods rejoice!

Gyres and garbage

As explained in the previous blog within oceanography a gyre is a system of converging ocean currents, caused by the coriolis effect of wind patterns.

Where ocean currents converge the accumulation of plastic has lead to several marine scientists describing the area as ‘garbage patches’, due to the huge amounts of debris trapped on decadal to millenial timescales. Within the worlds oceans 6 major garbage patches can be found globally, one per subtropical basin and one in the Barents Sea. Surface currents converge and subduct in locations, loosing energy, hence the ability to transport debris is reduced and so it accumulates in oscillatory patterns. The Hjulstrom Diagram is useful in this sense in understanding the relation between velocity and accumulation. Debris is generally less dense than sea water and so accumulates on the surface in ‘garbage patches’ in areas of convergence.

The Northern Atlantic Subtropical gyre (NASG) is the most popularly investigated within academia, with an estimated 2500 particles per square kilometre (Law et al, 2010). In their 2010 report Law et al used a time series of various data sources between 1986- 2008 along with the primary collection of 6136 surface plankton net tows to collect buoyant plastic pieces (99% plastic samples collected were less dense than sea water). 62% of the tows collected plastic particles, with the highest concentration of samples in the immediate vicinity of the NASG (83% particles collected) and the largest sample containing 1069 plastic pieces. The NASG subtropical convergence lead to the highest concentration of plastics as velocities were measured at a very low 2 cms-1. Law concluded that between 1990 and 2000 that the average concentration of plastic pollution with the NASG showed statistically significant temporal increases.

One issue to note with Laws methodology is that it is estimated that only 50% plastic pollution produced is buoyant, therefore any results produced maybe inaccurate or underestimated by a factor of 2 (Cozar et al, 2013). Another is the fact that plastic pollution is measured via abundance rather than mass, as the size distribution of particles should be taken into account when investigating pollution levels.

When comparing the NASG to other gyre systems around the world the NASG is often discussed as being the most polluted. The following bar chart shows the concentrations of plastic pollution within oceanic gyres as compilated from a variety of data sources by Cozar et al (2013). The dataset is compiled from 3070 samples, which had a frequency occurrence of plastic debris in 88% of the samples.  The chart confirms the accumulation zones of plastic pollution within each of the subtropical gyres.


The chart shows nonaccumulation zones as blue boxes, outer accumulation zones as green boxes and inner zones as red boxes (representing the inner of the gyres) whilst the black lines represent the mean. 

Van Sebille et al in their paper describe fluctuations in ocean garbage patches on an interrannual basis. The seasonal fluctuations in plastic pollution levels are apparent and labelled as ‘leaky’ garbage patches, due to the migration of pollution within the gyres. These fluctuations could be due to a variety of causes, such as seasonal fluctuations in gyre positions, wind patterns or due to the removal of pollution by oceanic sinks such as marine organisms. The vast inaccuracies associated marine data collection could also be the cause of the variation. 

Ocean circulation

Within the ocean the source of pollution does not always determine where the plastics end up. The target pathways of marine pollutants are determined by a combination of the circulatory patterns of the world’s oceans and the pollutant source, as shown in the above video. 

The oceans circulate due to the Earths rotation and winds (Easterlies and Westerlies) moving surface water. The convergence of currents leads to the formation of gyres, where velocity decreases and suspended debris such as pollutants accumulate.

Several attempts have been made within science to map the spatial distribution of plastic pollution in the worlds oceans.

One initial attempt to map the spatial distribution of plastics was computed using the trajectories of surface buoys of the Global Drifter Program by Van Sebille et al (2012). The source distribution and variation of plastic was simulated via this method, utillizing the produced matrix of ocean circulation patterns the evolution of plastic from any point within the oceans can be modelled.

As shown in the model there are high concentrations of plastic in areas where ocean currents converge such as the northern Atlantic and Pacific gyres. High concentrations are also evident in coastal areas due to their proximity to source and the deposition of material on beaches by the oceans. Within coastal industrial areas there is variation in plastic accumulation as a result of the areas relative proximity to industrial areas (Browne, 2011).

Cozar et al present a map of plastic debris on the open ocean (Cozar et al, 2013), the map shows the ships route whilst the coloured circles indicate volume of plastics at sample sites. They grey zones indicate the presence of gyres and correlate with high plastic concentrations as shown by the large red circles.

(Above map is sourced in Cozar et al, 2013)