So we need-- we need to change it. We need to try different things. There are campaigns across the country to ban straws and bags and try to reduce the amount of plastic we consume in the first place. But Susan Freinkel says it's simply not enough. Susan Freinkel: I know all the problems about plastic, and if you open my kitchen, you know, cabinets, I've got a box of Ziploc baggies there because it's easier.
So you know, we have to really wrestle ourselves with-- what conveniences are we willing to give up, what kind of cons-- consumption are we willing to sort of pull back on in order to change. It is a big ask that would require a major overhaul in the way we live our lives, which may be why Boyan Slat and his big idea have been getting breathless coverage from the world's media, nearly all of whom seemed to turn up for the spectacle this September, as his system was towed under the Golden Gate Bridge, miles out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Boyan Slat: It's-- it's overwhelming, exciting to see, going through the Golden Gate Bridge right now. It's a beautiful sight. But since its deployment, its performance has been less enchanting. The plastic it has managed to corral ends up floating right back into the Pacific; a major design flaw Slat's trying to fix. But even if he does get the device working, scientists we spoke to have serious doubts about just how effective it can be: For one thing, its ten foot screen can only skim the ocean's surface, missing plastic that's much deeper.
It could also end up trapping marine animals. But their biggest criticism is that it's pointless to spend millions of dollars trying to clean the middle of the ocean when more and more plastic is flowing into it from the coastlines. For researcher Denise Hardesty, Slat's device is certainly no silver bullet. Denise Hardesty: What I'm suggesting is that we use our resources wisely and focus on the items close to source, where we can clean them up. Denise Hardesty: Get it close to shore. And if you really wanna focus it, be smart, have-- have these big trash booms near the city centers.
Because that's where we lose much more of it as well. And if you wanna be even smarter, stop it before it gets to the coast. You know, have some rubbish traps at rivers that feed out into the mouth of the ocean or further upstream, even. Denise Hardesty: You know, I think the analogy that you hear often is, "If you've got a flood in the bathtub you're not gonna go just get a bunch of towels and try to keep cleaning it up, because it's still flooding over.
You really need to turn off the tap, right? Sharyn Alfonsi: People that we spoke to said, "This is like trying to mop up a flooded bathroom but leaving the tap on. Boyan Slat: I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time. And-- you know-- if your bathroom is over-flooding, I'm still pretty happy that the mop exists.
Plastic is everywhere. It's not unusual to see water bottles or grocery bags wash up on our beaches. But surely, if you travelled far enough away from people and cities you might be able to find a pristine beach, untouched by the plague of plastic, right? Well, we decided to find out. This summer, we travelled to Midway Atoll, a small group of islands "midway" between the U.
It's an American territory best known as the site of one of the most important battles of World War II. Today, the islands are closed to the public and home to a host of exotic animals including a charismatic sea bird called the Laysan albatross. It's not easy to get to Midway, visiting involves a long permitting process and a chartered plane from Honolulu to the middle of the ocean.
As soon as we landed, it felt like we'd tumbled down the rabbit hole, into a curious wonderland. There are so many birds on the atoll we could only get here after dark, once they'd settled down for the night. As we made our way inland, the albatross chicks were oblivious to our caravan. But by daybreak, it seemed like we'd found paradise, a tiny atoll surrounded by turquoise waters. Spinner dolphins patrol the coastline, endangered monk seals and giant sea turtles bask on its white beaches and of course the birds, so many birds.
Over a million flapping, snapping, chattering Laysan albatross. The largest colony anywhere in the world. Amanda Boyd works with the U. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees Midway. Everyday, its beaches are the scene of small acts of courage and clumsy crash and burns. Once they're off, the Albatross can spend months at sea venturing thousands of miles, but returning to the same spot, and the same partner. A relationship that begins with more preening and chest pumping than a Miami nightclub.
And as they're court-shipping and-- when you find a pair that has actually been together and they're in sync, it's mesmerizing. They know each other's cues. It's like art. It's beautiful. It-- it's inspiring to watch that. If any place should be unspoiled, it's Midway. The atoll is blissfully-isolated, off-limits to the public, and protected as part of one of the largest marine reserves in the world.
So it was disturbing to see this. Kevin O'Brien oversees marine debris removal in the region for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Hundreds of tons of plastic have been retrieved from Midway in the last two decades. He showed us this year's pile, a veritable department store of discarded debris. Kevin O'Brien: These can be dangerous because the young monk seals often will get curious and stick their snout into these eel cones.
Kevin O'Brien: Sometimes we'll find jugs full of chemicals with the lid still on which we have to treat pretty carefully. Kevin O'Brien: We found car bumpers, motorcycle helmets, firemen's helmets, golf clubs, bowling balls.
All this trash ends up here because Midway sits at the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast ocean whirlpool that draws in plastic from coastlines around the world. Kevin O'Brien has been coming to Midway for a decade to survey and retrieve the debris. This is some of what he hauled away last month. Long before plastics invaded Midway, U. The Japanese had hoped to use islands as a bridge to the mainland. The video above was originally published on December 16, Ann Silvio was the interviewer.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Please enter email address to continue. Please enter valid email address to continue. Thanks to human ingenuity and the human ability to work together, we do have a good shot at solving it. Ingenuity, well maybe, but for many researchers it was downright fanciful, given that eight million tons of new plastic flows into the ocean every year, mostly from places that have no way of dealing with their trash.
This is a fetid river in Manila. These are the shores of the Dominican Republic. But the problem is everywhere. This was Los Angeles last fall. Over time, that plastic disperses, disintegrates into smaller pieces, and often gets eaten by fish, making its way up the food chain.
Scientists still aren't sure what all that means for human health, but it's tightening its grip on marine animals and their habitat. Denise Hardesty: On the most remote, most pristine beach, in the middle of the ocean, on a little, tiny island, you will find trash there, too.
Denise Hardesty is a research scientist for the Australian government, and a leading authority on ocean plastics, who studies the problem around the world. Denise Hardesty: I was even just in Antarctica a couple years ago, and even there we're finding the refuse of human society.
Denise Hardesty: The ubiquity of plastics has really made its mark. You know, humans are really good at creating things, and we're really good at making things that last forever, clearly with plastics.
And they are everywhere. And that's been the case ever since plastic filled our homes in the s. It was revolutionary. Television commercials billed it as the material of the future. Susan Freinkel: It's kind of a technological miracle. I mean we've created this family of materials and figured out how to make them do pretty much anything that we want them to do, you know.
You want it to be bendy, you want it to be transparent, you want it to be squishy? You want it to keep lettuce fresh for two weeks? Sharyn Alfonsi: There are a lot of things that are made of plastic that we don't really think of as plastic. Where is plastic in our lives? Susan Freinkel: How long have you got? Sharyn Alfonsi: You look back at some of those old commercials, and it's really-- you know, plastic is sold as something that is life-changing. Susan Freinkel: Yes, yes, it will last forever.
And-- unfortunately nobody really thought about what that meant. There are really only three things you can do with plastic: put it in a landfill, burn it or recycle it. For decades, we thought recycling was the best answer, and we were told to throw our plastic, our paper and our aluminum cans into those familiar bins, to be picked up and carted away. But according to Roland Geyer, an environmental scientist at the University of California, 90 percent of the plastic we used never made it into one of those bins at all.
The other ten percent ended up in places like Recology, a recycling facility in northern California. And you'll be surprised to hear what they, and many other plants across the country, had been doing with that plastic. Roland Geyer: Until recently, in California, and probably much of the rest of the U.
Roland Geyer: China was accepting it and-- it appears that China found a way to recycle it economically which-- the-- the U. But all that changed two years ago when China decided it didn't want to be the world's trash dump and shut the door to our plastic.
Leaving plants like Recology scrambling. Sharyn Alfonsi: And of those countries, do we know that what we're sending to them is ultimately being recycled? Roland Geyer: We don't know. There's no real audit trail or anything like that so it's very difficult. And we know that a lot of plastic in Southeast Asia and other countries ends-- ends up in open dumps.
Roland Geyer: For plastic, it's currently not working. So we need-- we need to change it. We need to try different things. There are campaigns across the country to ban straws and bags and try to reduce the amount of plastic we consume in the first place.
But Susan Freinkel says it's simply not enough. Susan Freinkel: I know all the problems about plastic, and if you open my kitchen, you know, cabinets, I've got a box of Ziploc baggies there because it's easier.
So you know, we have to really wrestle ourselves with-- what conveniences are we willing to give up, what kind of cons-- consumption are we willing to sort of pull back on in order to change. It is a big ask that would require a major overhaul in the way we live our lives. Which may be why Boyan Slat and his big idea were getting breathless coverage from the world's media.
Nearly all of whom seemed to turn up for the spectacle last September, as his system was towed under the Golden Gate Bridge, miles out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Boyan Slat: It's-- it's overwhelming, exciting to see, going through the Golden Gate Bridge right now. It's a beautiful sight. But after deployment, its performance was less enchanting. First, the plastic it did manage to corral ended up floating right back into the Pacific, then the apparatus broke apart and had to be towed back to shore.
And even if he did get the device working, scientists we spoke to had serious doubts about just how effective it could be. For one thing, its ten-foot screen could only skim the ocean's surface, missing plastic that's much deeper. It could also end up trapping marine animals. But their biggest criticism is that it's pointless to spend millions of dollars trying to clean the middle of the ocean when more and more plastic is flowing into it from the coastlines.
For researcher Denise Hardesty, Slat's device was certainly no silver bullet. Denise Hardesty: What I'm suggesting is that we use our resources wisely and focus on the items close to source, where we can clean them up. Denise Hardesty: Get it close to shore. And if you really wanna focus it, be smart, have-- have these big trash booms near the city centers.
Because that's where we lose much more of it as well. And if you wanna be even smarter, stop it before it gets to the coast. You know, have some rubbish traps at rivers that feed out into the mouth of the ocean or further upstream, even. Denise Hardesty: You know, I think the analogy that you hear often is, "If you've got a flood in the bathtub you're not gonna go just get a bunch of towels and try to keep cleaning it up, because it's still flooding over.
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