Plastic Soup

500 words

In July the international Earth Charter Day Academic Conference 2009 will take place in the Netherlands. I received an email from Charles Moore calling for abstracts for contributions to this conference.

I thought it a great challenge: on paper precisely define the problem in five hundred words.

This is what I came up with:

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Saving the oceans by closing the plastic circle.

Floating in the Pacific Ocean is a vast amount of plastic waste, twice the size of the United States. Marine life and sea birds are dying, and we are also finding plastic in our own foods from the sea … all with dire consequences – not only because of the toxic effects of the different kinds of plastic, but also because in the sea water toxic substances have attached themselves to the plastic.

As far back as three years ago, shocking United Nations accounts show that every square mile of ocean water contains 46,000 plastic particles. Alarmingly, this number is rapidly increasing. Whoever considers that on a global scale, one million plastic bags are produced every minute and 2.5 million plastic bottles are discarded every hour, can draw their own conclusions. Hardly any of this plastic will end up neatly in a trash can.

April 2009 is the launch date for an extraordinary project: A Convenient Truth, or ACT. Young Dutch academics create an international network to look for solutions to important global problems, and will put their solutions into practice. The first subject they will tackle is the plastic waste in the oceans.

The main problem is caused by the fact that a linear consuming process has been created. Raw material is being extracted, plastic is being produced and products are being made from it, which, after use end up in a garbage dump.

When this linear process is reformed into a circle (and the plastic is reused), a first step towards cleaner oceans has been made: the garbage dump will no longer increase.

In this way we also save oil and gas, the only raw material from which plastic is being produced. It is a myth supported by the plastic industry that much plastic is not recyclable. Research has proven that technically every type of plastic is recyclable. When producing recycled plastic to produce the same amount of equal quality to new plastic, only 5% of the current energy is required and only a fraction of the amount of clean water.

Governments can act as forerunners by banning or taxing the distribution of disposable plastic articles, and by stimulating the plastic recycling industry. But by now all over the world, the chemical industry lobby has quashed innumerable initiatives.

Yet still the solutions are available to ensure that the amount of plastic in the oceans does not increase.

Now science is faced with an important task: the answering of pressing questions. How large is the damage that has already been done? How really toxic are the seemingly harmless plastics that we so take for granted? And above all, how does one filter out microscopically tiny particles from 170 million cubic miles of Pacific Ocean (only one of the five locations where plastic in the seas has accumulated).

In order to provide a solution, the ACT scientists need the full support of the international academic community.

Currently, ACT is supported by the Wetsus Institute, nine universities, and eighty private companies.

Maybe I’ll submit this …

Lees deze tekst in het Nederlands