The Plastic Age
This week, I bring you another excerpt from the upcoming book, Kon-Tiki2, which Torgeir and I hope will be completed and released soon. This segment is about a special passion of Torgeir’s. This topic is so important to him that we are considering adding an appendix to the book offering more details of what his research and experiences uncovered about the environmental menace of plastics.
As always, your comments are welcomed.
Chapter 16 The Plastic Age
A sea tale, a true one:
June, 2013. Everything was normal on board the container ship MOL Comfort when the Russian captain, a man in his fifties, took a last sip of the Coca-Cola before slowly screwing the cap on the empty bottle. Suddenly, he pricked up his ears. What was that sound?
The Comfort’s 80,000 horsepower engine ensured that the ship pounded forward at a speed of 20 knots, even with six-meter-tall waves crashing in from the north, on the starboard side. This was not unusual in the Arabian Sea. The monsoon swept white foam from the crests of the waves as the 85 miles-per-hour wind howled and screamed in the narrow passages between the containers on the deck.
But this new sound stunned the experienced sailor. It was a metallic and hollow crashing. He took a nervous drag on his cigarette and looked out over the front deck. There, he saw the stacked containers lay unevenly, fallen as if thrown by a giant toddler. Beneath the six now-disheveled layers of containers on the deck was a giant hatch to give the cranes access to the remaining 2,000 containers below. The unknown sound came from down there, amidships.
Underwater plates had fractured, allowing water to flood into the holds. That fateful day, the captain’s inspection showed that the ship was sinking; it was breaking in half. When all attempts to contain the damage failed, he gave the order to abandon ship. Returning topside, the captain took a minute to think about the procedure, before activating the distress beacon which alerted all ships in the vicinity that they were in trouble and showed their position as 400 nautical miles from the coast of the two desert states of Yemen and Oman. Thus began a modern maritime and ecological disaster.
The captain and all the crew were saved but, in the coming days, the unmanned container ship continued to take on water. The Comfort literally broke in two. Ten days after the crew was rescued, the ship's stern, containing 1,500 tons of fuel, sank. The bow section that a salvage team tried to tow to shore with the remaining containers caught fire. The things that did not burn or sink to the bottom of the sea 3,000 meters below are still floating around in the world's oceans. To this day, they continue to constitute a danger for any ships that encounter them.
But the story does not end there. In addition to the 4,382 containers, the captain's empty soda bottle also ended up in the sea. That plastic bottle was carried with the southern ocean currents down the east coast of Africa until it met the strong westerly ocean currents that pushed it on a multi-year journey. That bottle continued floating on the surface, on its way across the southern hemisphere toward South America. Few things last forever; an empty plastic bottle is one of them.
I told this story to Andrey, as we sat on the roof one afternoon, watching an albatross and the sea while eating the popcorn that was lunch that day. Pointing at a map, I continued, "Exactly there - where we intend to be with this raft a couple of weeks from now - that empty soda bottle would have turned north. It would float in the Humboldt Current along the coast of Chile for a couple of months, up to Peru where it would turn west. Later, it would end up in the same ocean current we sailed on during our first leg to Easter Island.
“Perhaps we sailed through fragments of another such plastic bottle today, a bottle that has been traveling across the world's oceans since the 1980s. For those plastic bottles, the dissolution process will take a few centuries to complete. If that isn’t lasting forever, it’s pretty damn close.” That day, as Andrey and I sat there on the cabin roof, we could spot several bigger plastic pieces floating nearby. These were objects that might have been in the sea for decades.
On the front deck below us was Pedro, working with gloves and tweezers. He picked out pieces of plastic from the contents of a fine-mesh net shaped like a cylinder. Microplastics are plastic particles smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter. Pedro sorted these and the slightly larger identifiable pieces such as old nylon line from a fishing boat. These had all been captured in the net.
In 1947, the Kon-Tiki was equipped with a similar but smaller net. Their collection tool was “a silk net with almost three thousand meshes per square inch. It was sewn in the shape of a funnel with a circular mouth behind an iron ring, eighteen inches across, and was towed behind the raft.” Heyerdahl described at length the plankton it gathered as it trawled through the waves and the reaction of the crew to the types, appearance, and edibility of the plankton. On the Tupac, our net could also gather plankton as we sailed through the water. But our net also trapped something more sinister, the plastics that were not a part of sea life in Kon-Tiki’s era.
Erik had lifted the heavy aluminum Manta trawl out of the sea, balancing on the smooth balsa logs aft with sea water up to his knees. The trawl had been towed behind the raft for a couple of hours. Now, Pedro was recording what we had scooped up.
Our trawl was brought to us in a large suitcase from California by our manager in Peru, Yaneth Cisneros. She was like Gerd Vold, the woman secretary of the Kon-Tiki expedition. Yaneth delivered the trawl device and much more in the last hectic days before the launch. She grew up in the slums outside of Lima with her mother. Both started their own businesses and were examples of “The Peruvian Dream”. I met them on an earlier trip and was impressed. So much energy and positivity! Yaneth grew up hungry every day. Now she speaks English and Chinese and owns her company in the Andes. She was my facilitator in Peru from the beginning of Kon-Tiki2. The multitalented young woman also designed the expedition logo. Yaneth was an example of the type of individual who enthusiastically supported the Kon-Tiki2 expedition on land and at sea.
“What, you still have the manta trawl onboard?! Can we use it, please?” That was Pedro’s first reaction when he noticed the big grey piece of aluminum attached to the logs of the raft. He had noticed it on his first day on Tupac, a week earlier. He was quite excited and was looking forward to testing it – even in The Roaring Forties.
“Yes, let’s put it out when conditions are okay,” I had replied. It was used every third day on the voyage to Easter Island, but only a few times in these rougher seas in the south. The next time the waves calmed sufficiently, we were approaching one of the floating garbage patches where plastic accumulates because of circular currents. The manta trawl was once again launched. (In use, our trawl assumed a shape reminiscent of the fish known as the manta ray, hence the name.) It is used in research projects where volunteers like us record plastics and microplastics in the world's oceans. We were the first, however, to research floating plastics from a drifting raft.
The huge opening of the trawl is shaped like the mouth of the manta ray. It ensures that a lot of seawater is brought into the trawl where it collects everything that wasn’t small enough to pass through the long fine-mesh tail. On a piece of graph paper in front of Pedro, his catch was fully described. Fourteen objects came from nature. He recorded and set them aside. Nine objects were left behind; they were man-made plastic.
Maybe nine, the amount we captured this day, sounds like not so much. But if you calculate the area the trawl sifted through in two hours, you get only 5,000 square meters. That amount is just 0.005 square kilometer in the immense Pacific Ocean. If the entire Pacific Ocean had as much microplastic floating on the surface as the area we checked on a relatively calm February day, we would have found more than 30 million such pieces of plastic. Sadly, the truth is even worse. The amount of surface plastic is much, much greater in other areas than the remote part of the Pacific in which we sailed. The Tupac sailed far from the large gyros (circular ocean currents around areas the size of France) where thousands of tons of floating trash pile up.
How pervasive is this problem? During my father's lifetime, the production of plastic increased from one million tons to 300 million tons annually. It is now estimated that three to five million tons of plastic waste end up discarded in nature every year. This plastic won't go away; it is gradually broken up into smaller and smaller parts. A plastic Coke bottle turns into as many as 10,000 plastic fragments over time. Lots of time.
Pedro studied the pieces on the millimeter grid page. He folded the sheet with its contents, put it in an envelope, marked it "Norwegian Institute for Water Research", and added the sample number, the date, and the position.
I was remembering all the trash that covered the banks of the Quevedo River, a river that Thor Heyerdahl had described as a tropical paradise in 1947. I said, "When we floated these logs down the river in Ecuador in March a year ago, several times we saw people along the riverbank just throwing their waste into the river. Much of the oceans’ plastic comes from the big rivers in Asia, Africa, and South America."
Eric was, as usual, fishing while we sat on the roof. Andrey and I were sometimes a little embarrassed that we did not contribute more to the fishing. But it was usually a fruitless exercise. We were not as optimistic as Erik who currently had his shift from 6 to 8 PM. I said, "And right now, we're sitting here hungry as hell with no fish caught this day – only plastic!”
During the planning stage of Kon-Tiki2, I read some of the research on this topic and decided to include plastic collection as we went drifting across the Pacific. A raft is perfect for the purpose. We sail slowly, for a long time, and always very near the surface of the sea we are studying. A normal boat needs a crane to hoist the manta trawl into the sea. We just needed a muscle man like Erik - or Jostein, who had the job on the first leg.
I had learned that the plastic we were floating through is also a kind of magnet or glue for other chemicals found in the sea, such as the pollution that comes from agricultural waste and detergent runoff. Microplastics are a perfect carrier for dangerous chemicals that are even smaller molecules, such as flame retardants and pesticides. A recent study showed that there is microplastic in the stomachs of one out of four fish bought at the fish market. We don't eat the stomachs themselves but they contribute to the pesticides found in the edible flesh. There is microplastic in one of three oysters which get their food by straining seawater containing the microplastics; in mussels, it is even worse.
So, what does all this say about us? How will the people of the future judge us?
I remembered a meeting with oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham. We were in Alaska on a veranda overlooking gigantic Sitka spruces, trees over a hundred meters tall. In that pristine and peaceful setting, Curtis said something quite disturbing. I will never forget his words.
"For centuries, historians and archaeologists have defined periods of human history by the technologies or materials that made the greatest impact on society—like the Stone Age, Bronze Age, or Iron Age.
“Imagine that, in the distant future, entrepreneurs like you will dig deep into the earth and find the layers that may best define our current period within the Anthropocene. And then, after an archaeological study of the evidence, they will find that most of it is plastic. And they all will wonder; the foremost of them will have the honor of calling our age ‘The Plastic Age’ ".