Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic

GlobalPost
December 13, 2016 11:30 AM EST
By Patrick Winn

A small island formed by trash in Tanjung Burung, on the coast of Indonesia's

Banten province, is pictured on June 5, 2013. According to a local resident, the trash
originated from Jakarta and surrounding cities, accumulating in this area after flowing
through rivers.
Here in this fishing village, on the island of Java, the surf teems with kaleidoscopic
color. Each wave is littered with garish bibs and bobs.

The water is speckled with synthetic hues: Coca-Cola red, day-glo green and every
other color in the crayon box. There are monochromes as well: buoyant white blobs
that, at a distance, look like 1,000 invading jellyfish.

Its all plastic trash, of course.

Here floats the detritus of 21st-century consumption: soda bottles, Pampers and,
since this is Indonesia, lots of instant noodle wrappers.

Those jellyfish? Plastic shopping bags. You can go five kilometers into the sea, the
village fishermen say, and never stop seeing those lousy plastic bags.

Its infuriating, says Alec, a 39-year-old mussel catcher. Hes hunched over his
boats outboard motor with a wrench, face streaked with motor oil. The engine is all
gunked up with plastic.

This happens almost every day, he says. We can barely work. No matter where
you go, the sea is covered in plastic.
Like so many other coastal villages around the world, plastic junk has brought ruin to
this place. Called Muara Angke, its a settlement in the shadow of Jakarta, a
megacity generating mountains of trash each day.

These shores were once among the worlds most coveted. For more than a
millennium, waves of outsiders from Hindu conquerors to rapacious Dutch
colonists lusted after the paradisiacal beauty of Java. But today, any seafarer
arriving on this beach will find a saltwater garbage dump.

How terrifying. Not just for this village but for every human on the planet.

Westerners too often regard pollution in Asia as a far-flung curiosity a tragedy to

be pitied from a safe distance.

But when someone throws a dirty plastic spoon into the Java Sea, it doesnt just float
in place. Currents can carry it around the world and back in just 25 years.

All the while, its disintegrating into toxic crumbs. The ocean and its creatures are
now awash in chemicals oozed by plastic and its seeping into human bodies from
Bali to Boston.

So ignore the floating spoon at your own peril. Its molecules, hiding in a bite of
salmon, may someday swim through your bloodstream.

Were all infected with plastic, says Seattle-based oceanographer Curtis

Ebbesmeyer. Molecules from some kids plastic bottle, dropped into the ocean in
Asia, are winding up in the food Americans eat.
Ebbesmeyer is best known for coining the phrase gyres those massive
whirlpools of trash swirling in the ocean. Five vortexes of filth now cover a
whopping one-quarter of the planets surface. They get bigger every year.

As our disposable culture roars along, humans are transforming the ocean into a
trash-strewn, cancerous stew. At this rate, by 2050, the seas will actually contain
more plastic than fish.

This is not just gross. Its an existential threat. All that seaborne plastic leaks
chemicals that, when ingested, can weaken human sperm, potentially threatening
our ability to reproduce.

This is death by a million cuts, Ebbesmeyer says. It makes global warming look
like childs play.

No country is immune. But the island of Java a place with too many people and
too few garbage trucks just happens to be an excellent place to watch this crisis in
motion.

Because if countries like Indonesia cant turn off the spigot of plastic trash then, well,
were all screwed.

One of the countless luxuries Westerners enjoy is the illusion that plastic just
vanishes.

It doesnt. The lid to the Starbucks cappuccino you bought in 2007 is out there
somewhere. So is every toothbrush you used in high school. So is every plastic
water bottle you finished off in 45 seconds and then tossed into a black bag that
was also made from plastic.

Do you recycle? Great. So perhaps your sophomore-year toothbrush was

transformed into a toy in Taiwan or a Turkish kids sippy cup.

But this probably didnt happen. Less than 10 percent of Americas plastic is recycled
and much of the plastic placed in recycling bins actually ends up in a landfill.

But well stay optimistic. Assume your toothbrush evaded the local dump. Odds are
very high that it wound up in China, the primary recycler of Americas plastic waste.
There, it may have been reincarnated as a drinking straw in Shanghai.
Piles of plastic bottles are seen at Asia's largest PET plastic recycling factory,
INCOM Resources Recovery in Beijing, on May 7, 2013. According to government
figures, reported in local media, about 4.67 million tons of recyclable waste was
collected in Beijing in 2010. In the same year, 6.35 million tons of trash ended up in
landfill in the city.

Still, at some point, that straw was thrown away and less than half of Chinas
trash ends up in landfills.

A lot of it actually ends up in the ocean.

Imagine a globe with a circle drawn around China and Southeast Asia. More than
half of the plastic pouring into the ocean comes from within this circle, according to
extensive research published in the journal Science.

Herein lie five big offenders: Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Thailand and
Vietnam. Add Sri Lanka, to the west, and youve got the top six plastic polluters on
Earth.

What do all of these places have in common? Long shorelines. Populations that
have boomed, and economies that have boomed, too. At least enough to turn
millions of farmers, once nurtured solely from the land, into folks who can afford
Pepsi and mobile phones.
When it comes to plastic consumption, people living in Asia are nowhere near as
gluttonous as Americans, who throw out more than 45,000 plastic bottles per minute.

But in America (as in much of the West) waste chucked into a bin tends to end up in
a mountainous dump, not the sea. Of all the plastic spewed into the ocean, the US
contributes 1 percent. China is responsible for one-third.

So that Shanghai drinking straw, created from the polypropylene essence of your old
toothbrush, is quite possibly bobbing in the Pacific.

Lets hope its not gagging some poor tuna.

A child examines dead farmed fish floating in Lake Maninjau, West Sumatra
province, Indonesia, on Feb. 20, 2016. Fishery officials said up to 30 tons of farmed
fish died due to high winds on the lake.

Plastic is so omnipresent that its easy to forget what it actually is.

Plastic is mostly made from crude oil. This black goop, hundreds of millions of years
in the making, is first sucked from the ground. Then its refined, blasted in furnaces
and mixed with additives

The resulting material plastic can be molded into everything from spaceship
parts to Mardi Gras beads.

Plastic is cheap and strong. Its so durable, in fact, that it never really dies. A plastic
soda bottle in the ocean may retain its shape for 400 years but, even after that, it
breaks apart and lives on as poisonous confetti.

Just 100 years ago, everyday people barely used plastic. Now, thanks to
multinational conglomerates, its the lifeblood of a disposable consumer culture
spanning the globe. Plastic is enmeshed in the lives of billionaires and peasants
alike.

But when its time to toss it away, a wealth divide emerges.

In America or any place with a well-functioning waste disposal system garbage

trucks whisk away junk at least once a week.

At that point, plastic bottles, spoons and wrappers seem to disappear forever. But
there are 3.5 billion people on Earth who know better.
No agency, public or private, comes to collect the plastic junk thrown out by
roughly half of humanity. It often piles up at their feet.

Aena, a tween girl from Muara Angke, is one of these people.

Her little Javanese village is a maze of houses assembled from tin sheeting and
cheap plywood, some of it salvaged from the beach. The air smells of sea salt,
mussels and rotting vegetables.

This settlement is drowning in plastic trash. Trash bins? We dont have many of
those, says Aena, 12, wearing flip-flops and Doraemon pajamas. The only place to
throw trash is on the ground or in the sea.

Sometimes, village grandmas will rake all that plastic into a pile and set it aflame. Its
mostly crude oil, after all, so it lights up quick.

But trying to burn away all the garbage is almost futile. In this village, plastic junk
litters every footpath and every patch of sand. When Aena and her friends scamper
around the beach, you hear plastic crunching under little feet.

Much of this mess is churned out by Western multinationals: Proctor & Gamble and
Unilever, Nestle and Coca-Cola. Some of the beach rubbish bears brand names, like
Pantene or Cerelac, that would look familiar to a Wal-Mart shopper.

But on this side of the world, there are fewer jumbo-sized plastic containers. In
Southeast Asia, Western corporations sell products in little packets cheap
portions that the poor can afford. They call the appeal of these mini-portions
masstige: prestige for the masses.

Thats great for Aena. She may live in a shack made of scavenged planks. But she
can wash her shoulder-length hair with ICE COOL MENTHOL shampoo made by
Unilever. One small dollop sells for less than 10 cents.

Its not so great for the sea. From Java to Vietnam, the waves glitter with thousands
of little plastic packets. Once used, theyre worthless and practically impossible to
recycle.

Aena says that, if she could wish away all this garbage, she would. But honestly, we
dont think about it much. Its looked like this my entire life, she says. Like our
whole village is a trash bin.

A few of Aenas friends, gathered near the shore, giggle in agreement. One drains
the last drop of sweet tea out of a plastic bottle and then chucks it over her shoulder.
And why not? Littering has lost any sense of taboo. Even if she placed it in a trash
bag, no one would come to haul it away.
From Brazil to Vietnam, countless villages like this dot the worlds shorelines. If their
inhabitants were the only people dumping plastic into the sea, our oceans would be
in far better shape.

Unfortunately, the problem runs much deeper and the island of Java helps explain
why.

Java is one of the worlds most densely peopled islands: 141 million are squeezed
onto a patch of land smaller than Louisiana. Many live by the shore. But many more
live further inland in cities built up beside rivers.

In the latter half of the 20th century, when Asia went industrial, this islands
population skyrocketed. But Indonesias government a young and quasi-
dysfunctional democracy has not kept up. The country offers regular trash
services to only about half of its citizens.
So many families, deprived of dumpsters and garbage trucks, treat the local river as
a trash chute.

Tossing trash into waterways is a fairly common practice from Latin America to the
Indian sub-continent. River currents act as a conveyer belt, sweeping junk over the
horizon and out of sight.

But these days, in Java, rivers can grow so clogged with trash that the water is
barely visible.

Take the Cikapundung River. For millennia, the river has bathed and nourished the
people of Java. Its coffee-colored water snakes around volcanoes before emptying
into the Java Sea.

Now, on a bad day, it is an undulating ribbon of wet garbage. And the rest of Javas
dozen or so rivers arent faring much better.

A volunteer clears rubbish from the Ciliwung River in the Jatinegara district of
Jakarta, on Dec. 3, 2014. More than 1,000 soldiers and volunteers cleared 80 tons of
garbage after flooding hit parts of the capital.

In recent years, these rivers have suffered the equivalent of coronary ruptures. Like
blood clots, all that junk can block riverine arteries until SPLOOSH! the water
gushes on shore.

These man-made floods send soggy styrofoam washing into peoples living rooms.
This isnt merely disgusting. Turning neighborhoods into sewers is potentially deadly.
Water-borne infections prey on children and grandparents. And disease, carried by
mosquitoes and panicked rats, can prove fatal.

Late last year, Javas rivers were so plugged up that the government proclaimed a
garbage state of emergency.

It was a rallying cry for cities to crack down on littering often in the form of heavy
fines totaling around $40 per violation. For the many Indonesians who eke by on $2
per day, thats a life-ruining sum.

Before, when we were caught, the cops would just give you a lecture. Or maybe
make you do six push-ups, says Agus Ahmad, 50, the ex-headman of a district in
Bandung. The city of roughly 2.5 million is infamous for its polluted waterways.

Now people are more afraid to throw plastic in the river, Agus says. Or at least
theyre afraid to get caught.

Ingrained habits explain part of Indonesias trash epidemic, says Yayat Supriatna, an
urban planning scholar who has advised the government. People dont understand
how dangerous plastic can be.

But so far, he says, the governments strategy is emphasizing scare tactics over
actually hauling away more junk. Only about 40 percent of Javanese homes get
good trash service, he says, and the population never stops growing.

Whats the point of fining people? Youre punishing them but youre not holding up
your end of the deal by picking up their trash, Yayat says. Thats an injustice.

So people continue to rebel.

Adults still throw stuff in the river. Theyre just doing it at night, says Muhammad
Randika, an 11-year-old in Bandung. His little neighborhood is called Braga, a
labyrinth of stone pathways designed by Dutch colonists.

He lives above a soupy canal. For Muhammad and his pals, this fetid tributary
doubles as a swimming hole. They have come to know it as a place where grown-
ups try to make stuff disappear: bags stuffed with diapers, intestines from sacrificed
cows, even homicide victims.

Not that long ago, we swam across a floating dead man with a slashed throat, says
Muhammad, flanked by a gaggle of boys in flip-flops. His face was as white as
yours.

The throng of kids nod along. That wont stop us from swimming here though,
Muhammad says. Theres nowhere else to go.
A man collects plastic for recycling from a polluted river in a Jakarta slum, Oct. 1,
2010.

Have you checked your sons sperm count lately?

Thats how Ebbesmeyer, the oceanographer, will sometimes greet audience

members who come to hear his lectures on ocean debris.

If you want to see how fast you can stop a conversation, try talking about sperm
counts, he says. Thatll do it.

Awkward, perhaps, but not nearly as unpleasant as the fall of humanity.

Studies indicate that, in the last 50 to 70 years, human sperm has grown less potent.
One of the more comprehensive studies, conducted in France, shows sperm counts
plummeting by 30 percent in less than two decades and its continuing to drop.

Why is this happening? Scientists arent sure. Potential causes range from pollution
to obesity to drinking from aluminum cans. But the fact that sperm counts are falling
so fast, according to leading fertility researcher Richard Sharpe, suggests the causes
must be lifestyle and environmental.

Mounting evidence suggests the culprit could be estrogen. Not the naturally
occurring hormone, but its evil cousins chemicals in consumer goods that mimic
estrogens effects.
There are roughly 5,000 of these chemicals lurking in our everyday products. Plastic
is most often their Trojan horse. In fact, research shows almost all plastics ooze
estrogen imitators.

The most notorious of these estrogen imitators is Bisphenol A, or BPA.

This substance is already on the radar for many consumers, who seek out BPA-free
plastics. But BPA (and BPS, its equally worrisome sibling) is almost impossible to
avoid. Its in everything from canned goods to Tupperware.

You probably have traces of this stuff in your blood. More than 90 percent of
Americans do. And you dont want more than a trace.
A large body of experts, after reviewing hundreds of studies, declared that the
amount of BPA already found in the typical human living in a developed country
could potentially bring on maladies from weak sperm to cancer.

But dont worry, says the $374 billion plastics industry. Its lobbyists and sponsored
studies contend that small amounts of BPA wont hurt humans. Corporate advocacy
groups, such as Facts About BPA, concede that the substance is weakly
estrogenic but say it is harmlessly peed out by consumers.

Indeed, the World Health Organization notes the potential toxic and hormonal
properties of BPA but notes no adverse effects from small doses.

For now, the FDA, which has relied in part on industry-funded studies, is on the
manufacturers side.

Lets hope theyre right. Because just look at what this stuff can do to animals.

It can reverse a rats gender and alter its genitals. It causes pregnant monkeys
to birth deformed babies.

It can even lurk in an animals cells to sabotage future generations.

A fish tainted with BPA may have babies with no problems. But its children and
even grandchildren will become less fertile. According to a University of Missouri
study, the chemical could have similar adverse reproductive effects on humans.

A biological scientist and well-known BPA critic named Frederick vom Saal, speaking
to Mother Jones magazine, puts it succinctly: A poison kills you. A chemical like
BPA reprograms your cells and ends up causing a disease in your grandchild that
kills him.

Just as BPA swims around in our blood, its saturating our plastic-strewn seas. When
researchers took seawater samples from 200 sites across the US and Asia, they
found significant levels of BPA in every single one.
All this research has brought Ebbesmeyer, an elder statesman of sea pollution
research, to a grim conclusion.

Plastics in the ocean, he says, may threaten existence as we know it.

Mother Nature is getting rid of us by our own sword, he says. Of all the potential
nastiness out there, humanitys inability to reproduce is at the top. But no one wants
to talk about it.

In Ebbesmeyers view, this end-of-days scenario could outpace the ravages of

climate change. To hear him tell it, our extinction could look like a mash-up between
An Inconvenient Truth and Children of Men, the 2006 thriller in which infertility
plunges the world into chaos.

Humanity is pretty good at avoiding the important questions, Ebbesmeyer says. I

think the evidence here is pretty conclusive.

Perhaps this extinction-by-estrogen scenario is overly apocalyptic.

In the meantime, this is what we know for sure.

Humans are disgorging 8 million tons of plastic into the sea each year. Before we
know it, those whirlpools of junk in the ocean could soon cover half the planets
surface.

This junk is killing off millions of creatures. Plastic-infected fish are turning up on our
dinner plates. In some parts of the sea, theres six times more plastic in the water
than plankton.

This nightmare begs a number of questions. Among them:

Can humans clean up all this mess?

There are 5.2 trillion bits of plastic in the sea, according to the 5 Gyres Institute.

Thats 52 times the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way.

The answer is probably no.

Can we at least stop leaking plastic into the sea?

Perhaps. But itll be expensive.

In the leakiest plastic-pollution zone on the planet China plus Southeast Asia
waste disposal systems are underfunded, opaque and often corrupt, according to the
non-profit Ocean Conservancy.

The group has tried to calculate the cost of overhauling this regions waste systems
to keep plastic out of the sea.

Their figure: $4.5 billion per year, sustained throughout a decade.

Thats a lot, sure, but its not an inconceivably high sum. The US hands that much
money to the militaries of Egypt and Israel each year all in the name of protecting
American interests.

But at the moment, overhauling Asias trash crisis is an environmentalist fantasy.

Theres no indication such an effort will be funded by anyone not countries in
Asia, nor the United Nations, nor billionaire donors.

Counting on the United States government to lead the fight against this scourge
seems particularly futile. The White House, under incoming President Donald Trump,
wont even concede that climate change is a massive threat. The odds of a fringe
issue like plastic pollution appearing on his agenda appear close to nil.

There are flickers of hope, however. China has banned the thinnest plastic bags,
which are difficult to recycle and prone to tangle up with just about anything floating
by. So has a busy district in Manila, the Philippines capital.

Workers clear floating plants and garbage off the surface of the Yangtze River in
Chongqing municipality, China, July 22, 2015.

In Jakarta, the local government is deploying 4,000 people paid $60 per week
to dredge plastic junk out of rivers before its hits the ocean. Locally, this endeavor
is enormously popular.

But even if this approach were replicated from Lagos to Buenos Aires, armies of
trash scroungers cant save the seas. Any trash that plops into a river is likely to
reach the ocean. Cities and towns generate far too much pollution for people to
collect by hand.

What are plastics corporations doing to help?

Not enough. Especially in countries such as Indonesia, where regulatory agencies

are comparatively weak.

The corporations may offer a bit of charity here and there, Yayat says. But they
dont really help. Theyll say the environment is the governments responsibility.

Even the US wont rein in its plastics industry. According to the Union of Concerned
Scientists, lobbyists are working overtime to keep plastics unregulated or under-
regulated.

This scientists union also accuses the American Chemistry Council, a powerful pro-
plastic trade association, of following a pattern modeled by the tobacco industry:
deny the science, bring in its own experts to counter the evidence and pressure
lawmakers to maintain the status quo.

Neither of the plastics industrys top BPA lobbies, Facts About BPA and BPA
Coalition, responded to PRIs questions about the chemical's contamination of the
sea.

So, whats the solution?

If you produce plastic, its assured that it will eventually end up in the sea,
Ebbesmeyer says. So we have to stop producing plastic.

This is a fairly radical notion. Even hardcore environmentalists struggle to rid their
lives of plastic.

Humans worldwide use roughly one million plastic bags per minute. Americans
among the worlds most unrepentant plastic junkies toss 2.5 million plastic bottles
per hour.
A trash collecter drops a plastic bag into a basket on the island of Java.

Killing off disposable plastics would end our way of life. It would slaughter
convenience on the altar of ecology. Were addicted to plastic. Its literally in our
blood.

Maybe we could revert back to glass. Or we could transition to bio-plastics, made

from plants such as corn or soy. But as it stands, bio-plastics are more expensive to
produce and amount to a tiny portion of the overall plastics market.

As with global warming, humanity might be too myopic to alter its behavior before the
oceans are ruined. But what many Western environmentalists often fail to see is that
their domestic efforts like banning plastic bags in Portland will never be good
enough.

Even if the US federal government embraces the most enlightened anti-plastics

policy possible, a fanciful notion at best, that wouldnt spare the ocean from
catastrophe. Any potential solution must be executed globally.

As long as Java and places like it gush tons of plastic into the ocean all while
corporations in Europe and the US profit our bodies will steadily soak up more
and more plastic residue.

Perhaps you are among the wealthy minority of humans who have great control over
what you eat for dinner. Fearful of estrogenic chemicals, you can quit eating ocean-
caught fish. (Youll also want to swear off other main contributors of BPA to human
blood: canned drinks and chemical-laced paper receipts.)

But even if you succeed, that wont spare the billions of less fortunate people who
rely on fish as a primary protein. Nor will it spare the fish themselves. At this rate, in
a few decades, there will be more plastic swishing about the ocean than fish.
The full implications of this crisis remain unknown. Many environmentalists portend
doom. Conglomerates tell us not to fret.

As for Ebbesmeyer, hes betting on disaster.

These endless shenanigans are driving us toward mass extinction, he says. Were
one of the many animals that will become extinct ironically by our own
intelligence.