Every year, 11 million metric tons of plastics enter our oceans, adding to the 200 million metric tons that already circulate in marine environments. Putting that number in perspective, in a November 2021 study done by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, plastic accounts for 80 percent of all marine debris from surface waters to deep-sea sediments.
In research done in 2021 by Earth.org, 100,000 marine animals are killed each year by ocean plastic ingestion or entanglement.
And this might just be the tip of the ocean.
In 2019, the Center for International Environmental Law predicted that plastic production will grow by 60 percent by 2030 and triple by 2050.
That’s a lot of spent plastic bottles of Fiji water on the beach.
Making matters worse, plastics do not biodegrade, but break down into smaller pieces of plastics called microplastics. In short, plastic and its debris stick around for centuries.
In a recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, entitled, “Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Atheromas and Cardiovascular Events,” microplastics double the risk of stroke and heart attack.
In keeping with this year’s Earth Day theme of “Planet versus Plastic,” the American Geosciences Institute recently held a webinar entitled, “Breaking Down Microplastics” in which the issues of plastic pollution and microplastics were examined. Introducing the webinar was Aidan Charron, director of End Plastic Initiatives at EarthDay.org, who began by underscoring the problems of plastic and microplastics on health and marine life.
Breaking Down the Problem
“We want to raise awareness about plastic. It’s not inert. And every bit of it that’s ever been made is still on Earth,” said Charron.
During the initial presentation, “Plastic in the Ocean: What We Do and Do Not Know,” Maia McGuire, associate director for extension and education with Florida Sea Grant at the University of Florida, said that the initial hurdle facing all who research the topic of how much plastic is in the ocean – as well as the size of that plastic and where, specifically, it is at its worst – is the lack of standardized methodology to measure it all.
“Plastic represents between 45 and 95 percent of marine litter. That’s a huge range and that gives you an indication it is something we don’t know much about,” she said.
However, she added, we do know that since 1950, the world has produced 2 million metric tons of plastic and much of it comes from land-based sources.
Where is it all?
“Some might be in landfills, some might be in the environment, some might have been recycled,” she said.
Getting a full picture of the problem is also impeded by the fact that plastics have different densities; therefore, it will be found at different levels of the ocean and that the longer plastics are in an ocean, “the more they will have things accumulate on them,” which will then change the density even further.
But it isn’t just what’s going on in the ocean that is concerning.
In the segment on the webinar entitled, “Fate and transport of microplastics in the subsurface and groundwater,” Melissa Lenczewski, professor in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Environment at Northern Illinois University, said that plastics also affect groundwater but since groundwater is “sometimes considered invisible,” it is often ignored. But that, she underscored, is where most of the liquid and freshwater on the planet is located.
“Microplastics get into our ground water from our urban areas, our agriculture, our septic systems,” she said.
Measuring the amount of plastic in the groundwater, as well as seeing how plastics are transported through it, according to Lenczewski, is complicated by how we try to sample it.
“A lot of times the items are made of PVC pipes … our equipment, our gloves – everything we use to look at ground water is made out of plastic, so we really have to separate those out before we can see what plastics are getting into our groundwater supply.”
Many of these experiments are now being made with all metal and the tubing is made from natural rubber, she said.
There appears to be a reverse-aging dynamic, as well.
“The longer the microplastics stay in the subsurface, the older they get, the faster they are moving through the groundwater,” she explained.
Government, Institutional Interventions
Scott Coffin of the California State Water Resources Control Board said that his state has what he called “a statewide microplastics strategy” to study and hopefully reverse the effects of plastic. In a part of the webinar entitled, “California’s adaptive risk management of microplastics in aquatic ecosystems and drinking water,” he related an effort that began in 2018 when California took a number of initiatives to assess the dangers of plastics in the drinking water. It did so by first defining which microplastics were prevalent, followed by standardizing methodology, prioritizing health-based guidance levels, and instituting a system to accredit laboratories – 26 total – throughout the state to do the work. Specifically, the testing methods included Fourier transform infrared and Raman spectroscopy, both tailored to individual scenarios with plastic and where it was found. The work concentrated on drinking water, ocean water, fish tissue and sediment.
Coffin said the goal was to assess the dose metrics and particle characteristics that produce toxicity, delineate the adverse effects, and then have what he called a “threshold framework” for action.
There are 10,000 known additives in plastics, of which he said 2,400 are substances of concern; 53 percent of toxic substances in plastics are currently unregulated, he added.
Ultimately, he said, and unfortunately, due to an inadequate data base, poor particle characterization, limited polymers, shapes and sizes, “It was not currently possible to derive regulatory levels.”
In the meantime, California has created a database for those municipalities nationwide that wish to check their specific level of microplastic toxicity.
At Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, professors of marine science Shannon Gowans and Amy Suida, in their talk entitled “Moving from monitoring to advocacy: Reduce Single-Use promotes prevention,” revealed the efforts their college made to change how it deals with plastic.
“If we could change our college campuses’ approach to consumption,” said Gowans, “if the plastic is never used, then it’s not a problem.”
Suida talked of a monitoring program, which collects samples from in and around Tampa Bay, which at 400 square miles is Florida’s largest open-water estuary, which both identified and removed microplastics.
To reduce single-use plastics at the school, they both advocated for plastic alternatives – materials like bamboo utensil sets and refillable drinking stations around campus, as well wider education on the issue in the St. Petersburg community.
The webinar also featured a Long Island high school student, Toby Leng, winner of the 2023 Earth Science Week Video Contest, who introduced the topic of ferrofluids – a fluid containing a magnetic suspension that could cut down on microplastics in large bodies of water.
There was some doubt from the other panelists whether adding ferrofluids was a good idea, as adding additional products to oceans and groundwater might actually exacerbate the problem. For his part, Coffin said such an approach with ferrofluids might be more effective in a controlled environment, like a wastewater treatment facility.
Oil Industry’s Role
In terms of the oil and gas industry, and where and how it fits in to all this -- plastic is made from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels. At present, 8-10 percent of total supply goes to making plastic (12 million barrels of oil are used just in the making of plastic bags). According to the International Energy Agency report, “The Future of Petrochemicals,” plastics are set to drive nearly half of oil demand growth by mid-century. In the United States, according to a report entitled “How much oil is used to make plastic,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration concluded, the scope of problem is still being determined.
“Although crude oil is a source of raw material (feedstock) for making plastics, it is not the major source of feedstock for plastics production in the United States. Plastics are produced from natural gas, feedstocks derived from natural gas processing, and feedstocks derived from crude oil refining. The U.S. Energy Information Administration is unable to determine the specific amounts or origin of the feedstocks that are actually used to manufacture plastics in the United States.”
Proposed Solutions
Ultimately, the panelists agreed that the first step in combatting plastic pollution is to wean society off of disposable plastics by buying plastic bottled water, to pressure companies to lower their plastic footprints, to boycott products with microbeads (plastic microscopic microspheres used as exfoliating agents in cosmetics and personal care products such as toothpaste, body scrubs and face wash), and to recycle more.
On that last point, America does not as yet have the capacity to handle the large plastic waste that’s being generated – only 9 percent of all plastics are recycled.
“One of the things we learned is we don’t need a few people using no plastics,” Gowans said. “We need a lot of people using less plastic. If we keep using less, we can get these changes happening.”