Back when all the doom and gloom about air pollution, CO2 emissions and deforestation was beginning to become boring, environmentalist Charles Moore discovered a new ecological disaster - plastic soup. The three-day Plastic Soup Conference which begins in the Netherlands on Wednesday is focusing on awareness and solutions.

US marine yachtsman and environmental campaigner Charles Moore has seen hardly any progress in combating plastic pollution in the 15 years since his discovery. In fact, new research he will be presenting at the conference shows the problem has worsened. In 1999 he found six times more plastic than plankton in the northern Pacific. That ratio now stands at 36 to 1. Plastic ends up entering the food chain – specifically, in the stomach of the lantern fish.

"I think the major discovery is that 35 percent of the lantern fish that we caught had eaten plastic. The lantern fish is the most common fish in the ocean, responsible for over 55 percent of the entire biomass in the ocean and it’s the fish that feeds all the other fish. And plastic is not simply taking up room in their stomachs without giving them nutrition, it is also poisoning them. It contains poisons and contaminants that are released when an animal eats it. So the entire base of the ocean’s food web is being contaminated with plastic."

Silent Spring
Plastic is for fish in 2011 what DDT was for birds in the 1960s. In her book Silent Spring, published in 1962, US biologist Rachel Carson described the effects of insecticide on the environment - a little known phenomenon at the time. First the insects disappear, then the songbirds. The poison not only builds up in their bodies, it also affects their eggs. Insecticides works their way up the food chain until it kills the largest birds of prey.

The book contributed to a global ban on DDT but the use of plastic these days in still increasing. The business world keeps finding new applications for it which may be even more deadly. Cushions filled with polystyrene pellets and tiny plastic grains for facial scrubs. You’d think industry had never heard of the problem, says Hans van Weenen. Former professor of sustainable product development at Amsterdam University, he is now part of the Plastic Soup Foundation.

“New plastics are being marketed that are made small at the design stage, in other words, consciously. They are added to products, get mixed with water and end up in the sea. There they form an easy food source for animal planktons. This means we are now skipping a couple of stages of degradation. We’re giving nature a helping hand by offering plankton instant plastic meals. I think it’s an extremely objectionable development.”



27,000 years
After Charles Moore’s discovery an image developed in the public imagination of plastic islands in the ocean. Some kind of stable mass a ship could head for to clear up the mess. In fact, it's widespread pollution. In some places, where the wind and currents drive the plastic together, the soup is a bit thicker than in others. Moore calculated that a ship with cleaning capabilities that don’t yet exist would take about 27,000 years to clean up the surface of the water. Ninety percent of the soup is up to ten centimetres below the surface.

The problems are illustrated by shocking photographs: rivers in Indonesia and the Philippines covered with immense amounts of rubbish. An albatross cut open to reveal stomach and intestines full of bottle caps, bits of fishing line and unidentifiable plastic muck. Moore admits to having nightmares about the collapse of marine food chains.

“We’re putting the fish on a plastic diet which gives them no nutrition and actually makes them sick. If you don’t give fish enough energy resources to reproduce and you make them sick in the process, you may be forcing a crash of the ocean food web. That would be extremely problematic foe humans since they get the major part of their protein from seafood.”

Learn from experience
A number of countries, including China, have banned plastic bags. In Europe, the business community is working with fishermen to clean up European waterways and beaches. It’s no more than a drop in the ocean, almost literally. A better approach is stopping further pollution at the source, according to Professor van Weenen.

"We’re dealing with fundamental questions about the availability of raw materials and energy in the long term. What kind of products are we making and how will nature react? We have to learn from the experiences of the last 50 years. How can we incorporate those into new plans? We’ll have to think about sustainable production and consumption. There is far too little of that taught at universities and colleges. You can start as early as primary school. Sustainable primary and higher education gets far too little attention in this country."

For the next three days scientists, students and industry hope to take a step in the right direction.

(imm)

The Plastic Soup Foundation  

Algalita marine Research Foundation

The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson