This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. “How about a nice, fresh
boysenberry?” he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man
wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking
epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense
blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore
is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic
when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s
calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist
who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore
recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out.
“We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump,” he says with a
shrug. “That’s what we wanted to see.”
Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore
has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there.
Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration
business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to
spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies,
which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a
university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort
has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle.
After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive
director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and
an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for
analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the
Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has
grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the
size of Texas.
At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic
pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making
its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the
dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their
bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette
lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging
bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers
contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea
creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to
zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea
turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass
shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make
it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds,
100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific
each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being
ensnared in it and drowning.
Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of
trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far
less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a
manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely
visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He
and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and
arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea
contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.
This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so
for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more
likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and
disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and
that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene
activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You
could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100
industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these
toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean
they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term
ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own
biochemistry.
In simple terms, plastic is a
petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which
additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and
other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables
are scary. For instance, if you’re thinking that perfluorooctanoic acid
(PFOA) isn’t something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn,
you’re right. Recently, the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) upped its classification of PFOA to a likely
carcinogen. Yet it’s a common ingredient in packaging that needs to be
oil- and heat-resistant. So while there may be no PFOA in the popcorn
itself, if PFOA is used to treat the bag, enough of it can leach into
the popcorn oil when your butter deluxe meets your superheated
microwave oven that a single serving spikes the amount of the chemical
in your blood.
Other nasty chemical additives are the flame retardants known as
poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been
shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and
memory loss in preliminary animal studies. In vehicle interiors,
PBDEs—used in moldings and floor coverings, among other things—combine
with another group called phthalates to create that much-vaunted
“new-car smell.” Leave your new wheels in the hot sun for a few hours,
and these substances can “off-gas” at an accelerated rate, releasing
noxious by-products.
