Whale dies from eating plastic bags as ocean pollution rears its ugly head. (2019, March 19). Retrieved from https://news.theceomagazine.com/news/whale-found-plastic-bags-in-its-stomach/

As old as the tale gets, another whale washed up on the Philippine shore, full of plastic. It was first reported to be vomiting blood, but after it died and the museum team performed a necropsy, “They found a mass of plastic bags as well as 16 rice sacks and four banana plantation bags in its stomach.” there was 40 kg of plastic in that whale, and with that one museum alone, they’ve reported 57 dead whales and dolphins over the past decade that died due to plastic in the ocean. This comes just months after a sperm whale washed up on Indonesian shores with a hundred plastic cups, bags and even flip-flops. The team that recovered it said the stomach was literally hard as a baseball after all the plastic got packed inside it.

And sperm whales are huge, and spooky. It’s hard to think that a creature capable of tangling with gigantic squids can be taken down by so much as plastic, but it happens. And at the rate that our plastic dumping rates increase (4% more every year according to the WWF), it would stand to reason that the rate of large mammals will increase too. You have to look at the ocean like any other natural area to fully understand what must be happening to it. If we commission convicts and volunteers to clean the side of streets and pick up trash we left in forests, it stands to reason that we can do the same in the oceans. If we dumped 13 million tons of trash in the savannah and elephants started to drop as much as the whales are, there’d be a bigger outcry.

Charlton, E. (n.d.). 5 steps that could end the plastic pollution crisis – and save our ocean. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/5-steps-that-could-end-the-plastic-pollution-crisis-and-save-our-oceans-eb7d4caf24/

According to a report by the World Wildlife Fund, there’s actually plenty to be done in terms of reducing our effect on the plastic pollution crisis. Unfortunately, the world isn’t as well versed in this particular issue as most environmental science teachers, so they broke it down into five methods. The World Economic Forum chimed in on this, outlining in a report the benefits of changing to a more circular system, where nothing made gets wasted. One big factor that contributes to plastic being wasted in the first place is it’s usability, and how most plastic products are used once then thrown away. A good first step would be to improve the product and make it recyclable while retaining its inexpensive nature.

The WWF is definitely aware of its audience, and how to talk to them. Putting potential solutions into just five points makes the plastic pollution crisis that much more digestible to the average consumer, and doesn’t throw big or confusing words and statistics out. Usability is being tackled at a different level however, with consumers simply buying metal water bottles and glass straws. It speaks for consumer priorities, however that isn’t an innovation on the plastic industry, just the water bottle industry. A more plastic-focused solution is required, one that doesn’t necessarily result in the purchase of more expensive alternatives, but ones that can still be recycled properly. Starbucks may have had the right idea with larger, recyclable lids.

Wilkins, A. (2019, March 06). These Terrifying Images Show The Real Impact Of Ocean Pollution On Sea Life. Retrieved from https://www.gentside.co.uk/earth/these-terrifying-images-show-the-real-impact-of-ocean-pollution-on-sea-life_art2952.html

It’s no surprise that plastic is everywhere in the ocean. What is surprising is the fact that estimates say by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. The effects are already showing, and one famous picture is that of a hermit crab trawling around with the cap from a tube of toothpaste on its back instead of an actual shell. There’s also countless photos of birds being opened up, full of lighters and plastic caps and countless other pieces of indigestible rubbish. It’s not even just birds though, countless other fish, seals and other creatures getting strangled and tangled up by string, fishing lines and other garbage that gets tossed out and dumped into the ocean. The numbers are hard to imagine, but every year 13 million tonnes of garbage ends up in the ocean, affecting the lives of over a hundred thousand marine mammals and a million sea birds.

The pictures in this article are another example of how gross over consumerism and a lack of garbage processing taints the natural world over a thousand miles out to sea, despite that garbage coming from a thousand miles inland.  It’s hard to ignore that our methods of processing trash needs refurbishing, but it should also be considered not only how to go pollution-neutral, but also pollution-negative. There’s already tons of trash in the ocean, and it’s clearly not going to go anywhere, so simply fixing our domestic issues won’t save the millions of marine birds and mammals. The trash in the pacific ocean has already mostly contained itself in the north pacific gyre, and it already stands out from nature what with brand names on half of it.

Mahdawi, A. (2018, July 23). Starbucks is banning straws – but is it really a big win for the environment? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/23/starbucks-straws-ban-2020-environment

In July, Starbucks joined the bandwagon of companies banning single-use plastic straws, saying that they plan to have them gone by 2020. The straws will be replaced by plastic lids, which are used for the now 50% of cold beverages sold by Starbucks. This will reduce the amount of plastic straws each year by over a billion, and will certainly bolster the pride of anti-straw advocates. However, it’s been found that the “Nitro” lids have the potential to actually be less healthy for the environment. They’re thicker, heavier and, over a long period of time, very substantial. Starbucks argues that the lids are made from polypropylene, which is a recyclable plastic which can be caught in recycling infrastructure. While that is good, in reality only 9% of the world’s plastic is recycled, and it was made worse when China implemented a ban on plastic waste imports, which is where the majority of the US exported plastic waste goes.

I laughed at Starbucks when they first got rid of their straws, mostly because of a picture that had cardboard straws in disposable plastic wrappers. However, they did have the right idea, it just didn’t get the right kind of media or brain power. The simple fact of the matter is that Starbucks as a company sees the environmental issue and is working towards a better solution, blind though it may be sometimes.

Cairoli, S. (2017, November 21). Statistics on Pollution in the Pacific Ocean. Retrieved from https://education.seattlepi.com/statistics-pollution-pacific-ocean-6027.html

The Pacific ocean is pretty big. As a result, there’s some pretty staggering statistics regarding it. For one, about 90% of the trash floating about is plastic. That plastic takes hundreds of years to decompose, so it’s just been spinning around in the gyres, collecting into trash islands. There’s even one called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and takes up 8 million square kilometers. That’s larger than the United States. The floating garbage is often very small, which presents a threat to fish and birds that might eat the shiny by mistake. Dumping isn’t as big an issue as it used to be, but whatever’s already been dumped is doing its damage. Nuclear waste is also causing problems, all 80,000~ terabecquerels (a measure of the rate of radioactive decay) of it. The US alone has dumped 100,000 barrels of waste into the Pacific alone, but this only makes up 1% of the waste in the ocean.

You know there’s a problem when nuclear waste is a secondary issue, especially to plastic. I realize that there’s probably not a lot we can do about the pollution in the ocean at this point simply because of the insane volume of it, but I also think that something could be done, like monitor the environment more closely to see what kinds of communities will grow up around the existence of a lot of floating plastic. It probably hasn’t changed a lot yet, but in the future fish could adapt to eat the plastic, or something wacky of the sort.

Milman, O. (2018, March 22). ‘Dead zone’ in Gulf of Mexico will take decades to recover from farm pollution. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/22/dead-zone-gulf-of-mexico-decades-recover-study

New research has found that even with the stoppage of farm pollution into the Gulf of Mexico, it will take decades for the “dead zone” to recover. The pollution was caused in the first place by intensive agriculture techniques near the Mississippi river and overuse of fertilizer, which leached into the river and deprived the water of oxygen. Obviously, this led to dead fish, and research says that if the nitrogen from the fertilizer was totally stemmed off, it would take 30 years for the gulf to recover on its own. Even that strategy is considered unsustainable, but this example is just one that shows the roots of a bigger problem, that being human impact on the environment. The goal for farmers is to cut nitrogen flow by 20% by 2025, but that seems unrealistic so the Gulf might be screwed.

The Gulf of Mexico has often been a source of pain. Deepwater horizon is just another example of how messed up it’s gotten, but the farming pollution was at least avoidable. Technically Deepwater horizon was too, but we wanted the oil. The issue with farming pollution was we as economists put the price too low on food, so farmers found ways to make more food faster. The root of the issue could then be traced to the economy and our own greed, which is often the case of taking things to the extreme and causing artificial but natural disasters. When we think about it, Deepwater horizon only existed because of our greed and need for oil, so that’s a root problem of the economy too.

China promises restrictions on plastic waste. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/10412-China-promises-restrictions-on-plastic-waste

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced in January that it is looking at new ways to reduce plastic waste pollution. It plans more comprehensives rules and regulations on plastic products, more banned items, and a continued switch to less bad materials. They also plan to revise the 2008 restriction on plastic bags, which banned bags thinner than 0.025 mm. 80% of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from land and washes out, and while these policies have the potential to reduce the production of more litter, there’s already plenty of waste in the ocean doing harm. Both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have plastic patch islands bigger than some countries, bigger even than mexico. The issue might take longer than a night to figure out however, given that loads of resources are already being spent on tackling air and water quality. That leaves little leftover for marine plastic waste. There’s no real global or international initiative or negotiation either, so there’s no external incentive.

As is often the case with China, they do need an outside incentive to do stuff. It is understandable, however, that they would first protect their domestic interests and put the world second. The atmosphere is pretty bad over there given all the emissions, and they certainly should focus on their well-being and not destroying their lungs before figuring out how plastic makes the ocean die. But it’s also a glaring fact that the rest of the world needs to pitch in and get things started too, rather than waiting for one country at a time to start doing things.

Ocean acidification: The other CO2 problem. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/2359-Ocean-acidification-the-other-CO2-problem

Carbon dioxide is not only changing the climate but also polluting the oceans, of which take up two thirds of the surface of the planet. It changes the chemical balance of the oceans, and over 500 gigatonnes of CO2 have saturated the water. While this has slowed the effects of climate change, the result is a lowered pH level in the water. The source of all the CO2 is mostly fossil fuel burning, and has caused a 0.1 drop in pH. It sounds small, but to return to the original pH would take thousands of years, and this phenomenon hasn’t been occured in over 400 thousand years, so marine organisms have had a static pH to live in. Millions of years ago the oceans’ acidity did rise, resulting in the extinction of many calcifying organisms despite the occurrence taking thousands of years.

We’ve covered CO2 pollution a lot this unit, and how we plan to fix it. The article simply covers the marine bio side of the spectrum rather than the atmospheric ones. As many have said, life started in the oceans and it will likely end in the oceans too, but ocean acidity harming calcifying organisms is nothing new. It’s just sad to see that we’ve accelerated a process that millions of years ago took thousands of years. The hope for us is that we can either do a Noah’s ark and skedaddle to Mars in time before the earth gets annihilated by all the carbon emissions or figure out how to fix all the issues we’ve made that take thousands of years to reset.