For The Planet: Ridding The World of Plastic Pollution

There are literally trillions of pieces of discarded plastic floating in Earth’s rivers and oceans; amalgams of the untold amounts of oil and toxic chemicals used in their manufacture. We all benefit from plastics on a daily basis but like so many other resources on this planet, we have not used them wisely. Just as burning fossil fuels has created atmospheric and climate disaster, so has turning them into solids that get dumped into our waterways and oceans. Although plastic producers claim the science around the dangers of plastic waste is not conclusive (sound familiar?), scientists at the recent meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution in Ottawa cited over 21,000 peer-reviewed articles documenting the harms of discarded plastics.

Plastics were invented in the 1950s and their annual production is forecast to increase for decades to come. Essentially all plastic ever produced is still in our environment: it does not disappear, it simply gets smaller and harder to see. A discarded water bottle (macro plastic) floating in the ocean will eventually get broken down into smaller pieces less than 5mm in size (micro plastics) and subsequently into non-visible nano plastic particles less than 0.0001mm in size. Each of these broad categories has different impacts in ecosystems and on human health.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the years seeking and photographing pristine coastal environments and every single one has been marred by plastic debris to some extent. Macro plastics are easily seen and shockingly common, even in supposedly wilderness environments. 

Macro plastics’ effects on wildlife are all too easy to spot also, with seabirds ingesting so much plastic they starve to death and marine creatures becoming so entangled in floating debris they starve or drown.

As if the toxic components of plastics themselves weren’t enough, these tiny pieces of plastic move through water, soil, and even the air absorbing more pollutants (known as persistent organic pollutants) as they go. These toxic chips are then ingested by small creatures who are in turn ingested in large numbers by larger creatures (including seafood eating humans!) thereby amplifying the dose of toxins. Micro plastics can physically block digestive systems but research has demonstrated that it’s the release of the toxins once ingested that causes the most harm.

Like their larger cousins, nano plastics exert their negative effects both by physically accumulating in their host and also by releasing toxins. The thing is, these harms are exerted at the cellular level. Forget just ingesting micro plastics at your local sushi restaurant, you can absorb these nano plastics directly through your skin! Now we’re talking oxidative stress, cellular transport disruption and induction of inflammation. The medical literature is replete with studies demonstrating that these effects are very bad things. Nano plastics have the ability to fully pull the rug out from entire ecosystems by potentially wiping out the very foundations of the food web.

The world seems to have at last woken up to the issue and the UN is attempting to address not only plastic waste but also its production and recycling; a so called “circularity” approach. Given that the world continues to get hotter despite 27 UN sponsored climate conventions, and that the fourth plastic conference just wrapped up without firm action, I don’t hold out a lot of hope that this approach will lead to meaningful change any time soon.

While ways of reducing one’s carbon footprint can seem a little detached or abstract at times (after all, who can see CO2?), at least with macro plastics they’re obvious for the most part. One can simply just pick them up and thereby start addressing a large part of the problem. On a personal level, for years my family and I have removed garbage bags full of the marine debris we find as we kayak and camp along the coast. The great thing is, this approach is fully scalable.

My good friend Russell Markel of Outer Shores Expeditions was able to do just that. When COVID-19 shuttered the tourism industry, Outer Shores and other boat-based coastal ecotourism companies here on the BC coast put their boats and crews to work removing marine debris from the remote shorelines Great Bear Rainforest. Collectively in 2020 they were able to remove a shocking 127,000Kg of marine debris (over half of which was discarded fishing gear) from the remote beaches of the BC central coast.

There is a charity called The Ocean Cleanup that removes marine debris at an even greater scale. They have designed and deployed plastic waste capture systems in rivers and oceans worldwide. The images from the videos below demonstrate an almost incomprehensible amount of waste but at the same time offer some hope that it can be remediated.

I donate part of the proceeds from my print sales and other income monthly to support their cause. 

As a family, we still spend a few hours gathering and removing all the plastic waste we can find as we travel along the BC coast and also take heart that we’re supporting those capable of acting at an even greater scale. I hope you’ll consider doing the same wherever your travels take you in the natural world.