to label plastic waste in the environment as pollution. I was invited to speak at a meeting of the Southern California Film Extruders and Converters Association and was introduced to an industry response that focused on making plastic waste “disappear” using an “OxoDegradable” plastic additive. There were two benefits promoted by the producer of the OxoDegradable additive. The first was that it would accelerate the breakdown of the polymer chain, minimizing the risk of entanglement, such as was seen to occur with plastic six‐pack rings used to hold canned beverages. When discarded into the marine environment, they had been photographed choking several species. The second supposed benefit of the additive was more rapid biodegradation. The idea was that no matter how slowly, plastic polymers will undergo some biodegradation in the environment, and this process could be accelerated by mixing fragmenting agents into plastics to make them smaller. Although oxo additives did not themselves improve biodegradation, the fact that they produced smaller pieces of plastic suggested that they would disappear sooner through greater exposure per unit of mass to biodegradation organisms. A representative of the company was showing a jar of soil with fragmented plastics to make his point. However, when asked to produce proof of final degradation, none was forthcoming. This did not stop the company from telling its customers to label their plastic products biodegradable if they contained oxo‐degradable additives. Experiments with the six‐pack rings showed OxoDegradable additives to be ineffective in the cold, wet environment of the ocean, making their effectiveness in preventing entanglement questionable.
So, if you are the plastic industry, and you can’t show that vagrant plastic waste will go “away,” you might find it advantageous to blame consumers of plastic products for their failure to properly dispose of plastic waste. An extremely effective campaign was mounted by an industry‐ sponsored organization in the US called “Keep America Beautiful.” Its focus was the “litterbug,” who did not properly dispose of their used products. If only people would not litter, the problem of plastics in the ocean would go away. Even scientists studying the problem of ocean plastics believed this theory. After listing potential (though not actual) solutions in their paper: “Global research priorities to mitigate plastic pollution impacts on marine wildlife,” Vegter and 26 co‐authors con cluded that, if their potential solutions were implemented “…it would be feasible to deal with what is ultimately an entirely avoidable problem.” It seems at just this point; the scientists stop being objective, and revert to fantasy. There is no avoiding the problem of ocean plastic pollution in any sense, nor is there any way for it to reach some sort of equilibrium or begin to diminish in any realistic near‐term scenario. Plastic use will surge with the conversion of oil for fuel to oil for plastic. 3‐D printing of everything imaginable with plastic feedstocks along with plastic packaging for nearly every manufactured product and many fruits and vegetables will contribute to the projected doubling or tripling of plastic production by mid‐century. Therefore, it is very important to have a broad view of the resulting issues that you will get from studying the subjects covered in this volume. Plastic pollution and its effects will continue to plague the ocean for many future generations of scientists.
After my discovery or, more accurately, my confirmation of the existence of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” and publication of my findings in Marine Pollution Bulletin 42:12 (2001), I resolved to work diligently to highlight the issue of ocean plastic pollution, not only with the public but also with industry and the scientific community. I believed the role of “popularizer” of scientific find‐ ings to be an important one, and that I had sufficient speaking and writing skills to fill that role successfully. The most widely read article I wrote appeared in Natural History magazine. The article titled “Trashed, Across the Pacific Ocean, plastics, plastics, everywhere,” appeared in November, 2003. After this article, I was besieged with requests for interviews with writers for many different publications from “Best Life, Our oceans are turning into plastic … are we,” to “US News and World Report,” and “Rolling Stone.” Audio‐visual media were also interested and I never turned down a single interview, from a student classroom to Late Night with David Letterman. Documentaries were made by the likes of Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons, who sailed aboard my research vessel to do the film, Trashed. Also sailing with me were the crews of Nightline and CBS Sunday Morning, among many others. I even took a public television film crew from the Korean Broadcasting System out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to film our research As the media began to produce more content on the issue of ocean plastics, the scientific community also began to show greater interest in the topic. A little‐known Italian scientific organization, The World Federation of Scientists, started by a physicist and scientific advisor to the Pope, had been holding annual conferences to discuss what they considered “planetary emergencies,” such as climate change and pollution. For their 2006 meeting at their headquarters in Erice, Sicily, they wanted to include “Pollution of water by plastic” as a new planetary emergency. They reached out to Jean Michele Cousteau, President of the Ocean Futures Society, who had given a keynote address, “Trashing the Sea” at the 3rd International Marine Debris Conference in 2000. The organizers wanted him to present data on ocean plastic pollution, but his group had done no studies of the subject and had no data to present. They then contacted me to see if I would be willing to present my data at the conference, and I agreed. This meeting of top scientists was to become more productive than I could have imagined. There was a small press room, and a past editor of the Transactions of the Royal Society overheard me talking to someone about plas tic pollution. He approached me and offered to create a dedicated issue on the topic in one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific journals. Up to this time, no researcher had published on the transmission of chemicals sorbed to plastic into wildlife. Several papers were presented at the conference in Erice on the endocrine‐disrupting effects of compounds in plastics such as BPA and phthalates, but the connection had never been established linking them directly to wildlife through plastic ingestion. The Theme Issue was edited by Richard Thompson, author of the paper “Lost at Sea: Where is all the plastic?,” Shanna Swan, a researcher on phthalates at the USEPA and author of Countdown, Fred vom Saal, a pioneering researcher on the effects of BPA, and myself. The theme issue in Transactions of the Royal Society B, was titled “Plastics, the environment and human health.” It contained the article by Teuten et al., “Transport and release of chemicals from plastics to the environment and to wildlife,” which was an important milestone in the field of ocean plastic research. I bring up these personal experiences for two reasons: (i) some of these aspects of the history of plastic pollution research have not before been reported and (ii) to show how scientific progress may in some cases be advanced by individuals who straddle the line between research and activism.
After the Royal Society publication in 2009, research papers on the effects of chemicals associated with plastics became commonplace and we began to enter the rapid growth phase of ocean plastic research. The paper that created the most interest in ocean plastics after my actively promulgated finding that plastic outweighed zooplankton in the central Pacific was Jenna Jambeck’s paper published in Science in 2015 titled “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean.” The editor of this volume and the author of chapter 12 were co‐authors. Both the scientific community and the public were shocked at the median figure of eight million tons of plastic waste per year enter ing the ocean, and that this amount would be likely to grow into the next century, since “peak waste” would not be reached before 2100. In 2016, based on this paper, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicted that there would be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 and that one refuse truck’s worth of plastic is dumped into the sea every minute. I would speculate that few major newspapers or online news platforms failed to mention one or both of these estimates. Images that showed the sea surface covered with plastic in near coastal areas became more com mon. Many had requested similar images of the “trash island” because of my work in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. However, because debris there occurs in Langmuir windrows (long lines) that can stretch for more than 50 miles, and the debris is rarely touching, no areas covered in debris existed in the gyre, even in the areas with the highest concentrations of surface plastic. I have emphasized the point that plastics in the ocean are pollutants, but there is still considerable debate concerning their harmfulness. A milestone 2013 paper linking plastic ingestion in fish to negative physiological outcomes was by Chelsea Rochman and colleagues, “Ingested plastic transfers hazardous chemicals to fish and induces