TRASHING 

 THE 



OCEANS 



By Sarah Friday Peters 



Kuzu. Abfall. Ordures. 



No matter how the speakers said 

 it at the Second International Con- 

 ference on Marine Debris, the 

 words all meant the same thing. 



Trash. 



The speakers came from 11 dif- 

 ferent countries, but they spoke the 

 same language as allies against 

 plastics and marine litter. 



For a week in April in Honolulu, 

 Hawaii, the group learned that 

 trash has no boundaries with the 

 oceans as its highways. 



For most, the story was the same. 



Researchers Zoe Lucas and C.W. 

 Ross of Nova Scotia found 90 per- 

 cent of the items they picked up in 

 a Sable Island study were plastic. 



On six Mediterranean Sea 

 beaches, Abraham Golik of the Na- 

 tional Institute of Oceanography in 

 Israel collected trash in a study 

 earlier this year: 71.6 percent was 

 plastic. 



Russian packaging washed 

 ashore on New Zealand beaches. 



South American products an- 

 chored in Africa. 



And a Chilean detergent bottle 

 floated to North Carolina's Outer 

 Banks. 



No doubt plastic debris is a 

 global marine pollutant that inflicts 

 ever-increasing environmental and 

 financial costs, says Jim Coe of the 

 National Marine Fisheries Service 

 in Seattle, Wash. 



No doubt solutions must take an 

 international perspective, too. 



But too many questions stand in 

 the way of answers now, the ex- 

 perts say. Researchers, technolo- 

 gists, economists, educators and 

 policy-makers are just beginning to 

 address problems associated with 

 marine debris. 



Four years ago, the first marine 

 debris conference consisted mainly 

 of scientists who found entangled 

 birds or plastic pieces en route to 

 other research. 



Now counting those birds and 

 collecting that plastic is the main 

 focus of their research. 



Peter Ryan has had his eye on 

 birds for years. 



The South African ornithologist 

 says seabirds such as albatrosses 

 eat more plastics than any other 

 group of animals. Most often they 

 mistake the debris for food such as 

 shrimp. 



The amount of plastic that birds 

 ingest corresponds to the density 

 of debris at sea, Ryan says. With 

 those numbers increasing, he's 

 worried about seabird populations. 



Ingested plastics can physically 

 damage a bird's digestive tract, his 

 studies show. Some contain toxic 

 compounds such as lead, mercury 

 and PCBs. In addition, if a bird's 

 stomach fills with plastic, there's no 

 room for real food. And the plastic 

 they don't digest can sometimes be 

 regurgitated or "offloaded" to their 

 chicks. 



Bird nests tell the same story, 

 says Richard Podolsky, an ornithol- 

 ogist at the Island Institute in 

 Rockland, Maine. 



Of 497 double-crested cormorant 

 nests he examined visually, 188 or 

 38 percent had plastic in them. 

 When some of the nests were 

 dissected, the incidence of plastic 

 was much higher— 70 percent. 



