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See how whiskey brought these oysters back to life
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Startup has new technology to help fix plastic crisis
In June, Ben Lecomte set out on a boat from Hawaii to spend 80 days swimming through the world’s largest collection of marine litter.
The 52-year old Frenchman, who has been based in the US since 1991, swam for up to eight hours at a time within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In total, he swam 300 nautical miles.
Also known as the Pacific trash vortex, the garbage spans an area between North America and Japan of roughly 1.6 million square kilometers – three times the size of France, and more than double the size of Texas. It is bounded by an enormous gyre – spinning oceanic currents that pull trash towards the center and trap it there, creating a garbage vortex.
A recent survey estimates that at least 79,000 metric tons of plastic swirl around the patch. Between 10% and 20% of the debris is thought to have been swept out to sea by the Tohoku tsunami which struck the coast of Japan in 2011.
Some of the garbage biodegrades, but anything made of plastic does not. Instead, pummeled by waves and broken down by sunlight, it fragments into tiny pieces – known as microplastics.
Lecomte says he expected to see big debris and was not surprised to encounter toothbrushes, plastic bags, children’s beach toys, fishing nets, trash cans and laundry baskets bobbing around in the water. However, he says, he was startled by “the high concentration of microplastics,” which has turned the once sparkling ocean into a cloudy plastic soup.
Albatross chick —
Plastic pollution in the ocean is a massive -- and growing -- problem. Midway Atoll, a remote island situated on the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is covered with plastic debris swept onto its beaches by oceanic currents. This Laysan albatross chick is being fed pieces of plastic by its parents, which mistake the waste for food. Seabirds which ingest plastic waste are smaller, lighter and suffer from a litany of health problems. Plastic waste kills up to one million seabirds every year.
COURTESY NOAA
Seal —
The Hawaiian monk seal is one of the most endangered seal species in the world with an estimated population of 1,400. Chewing on plastic bottles will not help their survival.
COURTESY NOAA
Sunfish —
This sunfish has got trapped in a ghost fishing net, off the coast of Spain's Costa Brava. According to Greenpeace, an estimated 640,000 tonnes of fishing gear is dumped or lost in the ocean every year, making up a significant proportion of all marine plastic waste. The nets can carry on fishing for hundreds of years, killing fish, whales, dolphins, turtles and seabirds.
Reinard Dircherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images
Sea turtle —
Sea turtles fall victim to ghost fishing nets.
NOAA
Plastic seas —
An estimated 8 million tons of plastic waste enter the world's oceans each year.
plastic oceans
Consuming plastic —
People risk consuming plastic through contaminated fish. A 2015 survey revealed that a quarter of market fish in Indonesia and California contain plastic.
TED ALJIBE/AFP/AFP/Getty Images
Hermit crab —
This hermit crab in the Maldives has mistaken a plastic cup for a suitable home.
Malcolm Schuyl/Flpa/imageBROKER//Shutterstock
Plastic diet —
Herons feeding on plastic at a garbage dump near the coast in Aceh province, Indonesia. Indonesia is among the biggest contributors of oceanic plastic.
Zikri Maulana/SOPA Images/Getty Images
What is ocean plastic doing to marine animals?
Lecomte says that most of the time the water is choppy and the microplastic is not visible from the surface. Instead, “it is pushed down in the water column to about 5 meters.” From a swimmer’s perspective, it’s like “looking up at the skies on a snowy day – but in reverse,” he tells CNN.
The swim wasn’t dangerous: Lecomte was able to maneuver around bigger pieces of debris and wore a snorkel, so there was little chance of him swallowing microplastic. “The most unpleasant thing was facing this awful scene every day,” he says.
Ben Lecomte swims through "a plastic soup."
Josh Mu?oz / The Vortex Swim
Long distance swimming
The “Vortex swim” was not Lecomte’s first extreme marine swim. In 1998, aged 31, he swam across the Atlantic from Cape Cod to France.
In December 2018, he attempted to set a world record by being the first person to swim the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean, from Tokyo to San Francisco. After 1,500 nautical miles, the expedition was scuppered when storms irreparably damaged the mainsail of his support boat.
Encounters with albatrosses were among the expedition's highlights.
Corbin Marshall/The Vortex Swim
But his time in the Pacific inspired Lecomte to undertake a different mission. Appalled by the amount of trash he encountered on the high seas, he decided to dive into the garbage patch and share his swimmer’s perspective with a global audience.
Fishing for plastic
During the voyage, Lecomte and his crew of nine gathered detailed data on the plastic in the garbage patch.
Marine debris researcher Drew McWhirter led the scientific research on board. “I wanted to find out ‘what does the garbage patch look like? What kinds of plastic are accumulating there,’” he says.
Crew member Josh Mu?oz retrieves a plastic basket -- home to some gooseneck barnacles -- from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
David Langdon / The Vortex Swim
With direction from land-based scientists, the boat’s crew attached floating GPS trackers to large pieces of debris, so their movements can be tracked.
The team also collected, and counted, more than 43,000 plastic fragments using a “manta trawl” net – a fine-meshed oceanographic instrument designed to skim the surface of the water to collect samples. They towed the net for half an hour, twice a day, and then counted and analyzed the contents.
At the start of the journey, as the boat sailed away from Hawaii, “we were getting 40 to 80 pieces of plastic in a 30-minute tow,” says McWhirter. “It was really easy to count.”
But as the boat traveled further from land, the number of fragments climbed rapidly.
In early July, the boat “crossed an invisible border,” says McWhirter. The water’s surface looked the same but over three days, the plastic concentrations scooped by the net leaped from the hundreds to the thousands. “One day we hit 3,028pieces of microplastic in a 30-minute net tow,” says McWhirter.
By extrapolating the numbers, it’s clear that “there are millions of pieces of microplastic in a square kilometer of ocean,” says McWhirter. “There’s so much plastic, it’s hard to wrap your head around it.”
The team also looked for plastic inside fish. Every time they caught one, they examined its gut contents and took a flesh sample – before cooking and eating it.
The stomach of a mahi mahi fish, caught by the crew, contained two small fish, three squid beaks and a large piece of vexar -- a plastic commonly used by the shellfish farming industry.
Corbin Marshall / The Vortex Swim
Plastic fragments were not visible in most of the dissected fish, but one mahi mahi had a piece of plastic in its stomach that was macro – not micro – in size. “It was really disturbing,” says McWhirter, “but we still ate it.”
Invisible to the naked eye
The crew sent samples of seawater and slices of fish flesh to Sarah-Jeanne Royer, a marine plastics expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the expedition’s lead scientist on dry land.
“Most of our clothes nowadays are made out of different types of plastic including polyester, nylon, Lycra, polypropylene … and they shed microfibers at all times,” says Royer. When laundered, a standard, six-kilogram load of synthetic fiber clothing releases “about 700,000 microfibers,” she says. Scattered into the air or flushed down water pipes, the fibers eventually reach the ocean via waterways.
Team member Yoav Nevo counting pieces of microplastic.
Adam Hill / The Vortex Swim
According to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 60% of today’s clothing is made of plastic-based textiles.
Although microfibers are a source of plastic in the ocean, “we don’t know how much it accounts for in terms of total marine plastic pollution,” says Royer.
Royer is analyzing the seawater samples to better understand the geographical distribution of microfibers, and is examining the fish flesh to see if microfibers are lurking there. She says it will take another six months to get the results.
“Finding microfibers would show that they are not always excreted by the fish but can pass through cell walls and get lodged in flesh,” she says. Research on the impact of microfibers is in its infancy and “we don’t know if that would have health consequences for people who eat the fish,” she says.
It is hard to conceive of a way to remove microfibers from the ocean on a grand scale, says Royer, but she hopes that scientific data will prompt policymakers to legislate for technical fixes to prevent the fibers entering the ocean in the first place. She points to companies such as Filtrol that are developing filters that remove microfibers from washing machine outflows.
Awareness-raising is another priority. Ben Lecomte says his face-to-face experience with the Pacific’s garbage has prompted him to reduce his consumption of plastic. He hopes that by revealing what’s going on “below the surface” he can “inspire people to stop using single-use plastic and to rethink the way we live.”
