The World Without Us

One study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in the fat tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada and his colleagues found that plastic pellets that the birds ate concentrate poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal occurrence in seawater.

By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles—nearly the size of Africa. It wasn’t the only one: the planet has six other major tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with ugly debris. It was as if plastic exploded upon the world from a tiny seed after World War II and, like the Big Bang, was still expanding. Even if all production suddenly ceased, an astounding amount of the astoundingly durable stuff was already out there. Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization could convert to, lest the world be plastic-wrapped evermore?

That fall, Moore, Thompson, and Takada convened at a marine plastic summit in Los Angeles with Dr. Anthony Andrady. A senior research scientist at North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Andrady is from Sri Lanka, one of South Asia’s rubber-producing powers. While studying polymer science in graduate school, he was distracted from a career in rubber by the surging plastics industry. An 800-page tome he eventually compiled, Plastics in the Environment, won him acclaim from the industry and environmentalists alike as the oracle on its subject.

The long-term prognosis for plastic, Andrady told assembled marine scientists, is exactly that: long-term. It’s no surprise that plastics have made an enduring mess in the oceans, he explained. Their elasticity, versatility (they can either sink or float), near invisibility in water, durability, and superior strength were exactly why net and fishing line manufacturers had abandoned natural fibers for synthetics such as nylon and polyethylene. In time, the former disintegrate; the latter, even when torn and lost, continue “ghost fishing.” As a result, virtually every marine species, including whales, is in danger of being snared by great tangles of nylon loose in the oceans.

Like any hydrocarbon, Andrady said, even plastics “inevitably must biodegrade, but at such a slow rate that it is of little practical consequence. They can, however, photodegrade in a meaningful time frame.”

He explained: When hydrocarbons biodegrade, their polymer molecules are disassembled into the parts that originally combined to create them: carbon dioxide and water. When they photodegrade, ultraviolet solar radiation weakens plastic’s tensile strength by breaking its long, chain-like polymer molecules into shorter segments. Since the strength of plastics depends on the length of their intertwined polymer chains, as the UV rays snap them, the plastic starts to decompose.

Everyone has seen polyethylene and other plastics turn yellow and brittle and start to flake in sunlight. Often, plastics are treated with additives to make them more UV-resistant; other additives can make them more UV-sensitive. Using the latter for six-pack rings, Andrady suggested, might save the lives of many sea creatures.

However, there are two problems. For one, plastic takes much longer to photodegrade in water. On land, plastic left in the sun absorbs infrared heat, and is soon much hotter than the surrounding air. In the ocean, not only does it stay cooled by water, but fouling algae shield it from sunlight.

The other hitch is that even though a ghost fishnet made from photodegradable plastic might disintegrate before it drowns any dolphins, its chemical nature will not change for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

“Plastic is still plastic. The material still remains a polymer. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule.” Even if photodegradable nets helped marine mammals live, he concluded, their powdery residue remains in the sea, where the filter feeders will find it.

“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

That half-century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers, strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared. Researchers have attempted to find out how long it will take polyethylene to biodegrade by incubating a sample in a live bacteria culture. A year later, less than 1 percent was gone.