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Saturday, February 12, 2000
Engulfed in
a sea of plastic
Rampant consumerism has
By R. Elton Johnson III
made Hawaii's beaches a
wasteland of plastic debris
and only we can change it
Special to the Star-BulletinLimu. A gracefully curved mangrove seed. The occasional feather or part of a coconut husk. These belong.
But it's been distressing to see, as I have periodically since about 1996, little particles of plastic, most white or faded pastel blue or red or green in color, in various sizes from about a half-inch on down to nearly invisible, floating on the surface of the perfect aqua waters of Makapuu Bay.
I've puzzled over the source of this debris. I imagined some sort of defective recycling process that doesn't quite break things down before it spits them into the ocean.
I'd been meaning to find out who is responsible and how it might be stopped. For it really must stop. But I let other things take priority.
Then one Thursday, I had the rare opportunity to go to Makapuu on a weekday afternoon instead of a weekend. The more hectic my life becomes, the more I've come to rely upon my weekly bodysurfing and swimming session as a sort of religious ritual, a baptism, a return to the womb of all life, aqua vitae.
Though storms have changed the underlying topography so that the exhilarating outside break isn't what it used to be and only the line shore break is consistent, this is a special place to enter the water.
On that day, however, as soon as I got in, I realized something was dreadfully wrong. Thousands of plastic particles floated on the water. They were everywhere.
As a swimmer, one's face is at the surface of the water. I found myself worrying that I might inadvertently swallow some of this flotsam, or get it in my eyes or ears. I wondered what effect some pieces of plastic stuck in the sinuses might have.
But most disturbing was just the very idea that this trash was in the ocean, that we're somehow managing to ruin even this wondrous resource.
That day there were not only millions more small particles of plastic in the water than I'd ever seen at Makapuu, but there were also hundreds of other, larger pieces of trash in the water. The largest was a heavy-duty, deep industrial-size plastic silverware tray, the kind you might see at a hotel kitchen.
I saw hundreds of plastic or rubber tubes and sealed plastic liquid-filled light-sticks (used by fishermen), pieces of nylon rope, plastic bottle tops and balloons. There were plastic curtain hooks and toys, and a three-foot-long glass fluorescent light tube.
Makapuu Bay had become a toilet. It made me sick.
I asked several other regular surfers about it. One said that it had been like that earlier in the week too, and he pointed out that once the trash comes in, the tides keep picking it up off the beach and pulling it back out, unless it's cleaned up off the beach.
Another fellow said he'd seen several sharks that week, something I've never seen in nearly 20 years of weekly visits to this bay. He figured that they're attracted by the smaller fish that are attracted to the trash. I've heard that many sea creatures that swallow or get tangled in plastic or nylon get sick or even die.
The next day, during my lunch hour, I called around to learn where this trash comes from and what could be done about it.
Someone at the state Department of Health told me he doesn't know of any possible source of the little plastic particle, that it was probably the broken-down remains of plastic things from land sources all over the world that have found their way into the ocean, and that the currents carried them here. Others I consulted offered similar theories.
Shall we just get used to it, then? Shall we resign ourselves to accepting the trashing of Hawaii's beaches as "the way things are," a regrettable inevitability? Or might we rather recognize our responsibility and our ability to act?
I suspect that, as is the case with most of our problems, the short-term and the long-term solutions are best pursued concurrently.
We can help with the annual national clean-up effort and encourage the perpetual smaller city and state clean-up efforts. We can support and pass the perennial bill at the Legislature that would place a deposit on plastics to encourage their removal and recycling.
Such efforts treat but one of the symptoms of the problem; the solution is surely going to involve some more substantial changes in how we live.
I don't yet know if the problem is simply that the items are being disposed of improperly, or if it's inevitable that all this trash makes it into the ocean given the amount of insufficiently biodegradable articles that we produce.
If all this debris has landed on these little islands in the vast Pacific, that means that there are probably millions of times more pieces of plastic and nylon and the like in the ocean that we never see.
Might this have anything to do with the recent decline of sea lions and penguins, oysters, sea fans and coral, and other marine organisms? Might the ingestion of plastic have anything to do with the soaring incidence of tumors in our sea turtles?
It's frightening to note the amount of plastic that we produce and throw away. Computers, CDs, toothbrushes, pens, shavers, trash cans, containers for innumerable products and so on. And most of us see only what's offered at the retail level; wholesale dealers trade in larger, heavy duty plastic containers of all descriptions.
If one multiplies what each of us uses or engenders each year by the number of people in the world who consume such products, it's no surprise that our landfills are bulging with insufficiently bio-degradable trash and the ocean is full of rubbish that won't go away.
Maybe it's time to heed the warnings, reconsider our path and take steps toward a future in which our precious natural resources are preserved for those who follow us.
R. Elton Johnson lives near Diamond Head and is founder of the fledgling Zoosphere Society, an organization that promotes respect for all living things and their natural environment through education.
