To address the issue, we need to “properly consider the product’s life and its end of life right from the beginning, from the design stage,” said Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth in the UK.
Ocean cleanups, banning unnecessary single-use products, biodegradation, even recycling—none of these solutions alone will be enough to crack the problem, the researchers concluded. Interest has surged in tackling the problem of plastic in the ocean recently, but researchers have been studying the issue for years.
Thompson said that early on in his training in marine biology, he didn’t expect that “rubbish” would be a central focus of his work. But in his explorations of the world’s oceans, he found trash, especially plastics, everywhere, and in every size.
Since then, the research community has published hundreds of papers cataloging the potential harm that castaway garbage can pose to some 700 species of marine life, from entanglement in “ghost nets” to infiltrating the diets of zooplankton. But plastics are also valuable for applications such as healthcare, food storage, and manufacturing.
“They bring many benefits that could reduce our human footprint on the planet,” he said.
The problem is that much of the plastic generated every year is produced with “an outdated and inefficient business model,” Thompson said, one that isn’t aimed at the circular use of plastics.
“Plastic in the sea is a symptom of a much wider problem about the rapid linear use of resource to waste,” Thompson said.
Even though it’s where so much of the plastic ends up, “[we] all agree on the fact that the solution is not in the ocean,” said Jean-François Ghiglione, a microbiologist at the Oceanographic Observatory in Banyuls, France.
“There is no way to separate the [marine] life from the plastic,” Ter Halle said. “Fishermen need authorization to go fishing at sea. But those cleaning initiatives, they don’t need any authorization to put those big nets at sea.”
Ghiglione has been investigating bacteria that could degrade plastic. For some, it seems to be a favorite food source.
“They really love plastic,” he said.
But are they plowing through the tons of rubbish in the ocean? “That’s not the case,” he said.
“There are some plastics products that we didn’t need in the first place,” Thompson said. Going a step further than voluntary corporate commitments, he added, “I think we could have legislation to prohibit their use.”
But, he said, policy and legal changes aren’t possible for every type and use of plastic. And that proliferation of different forms of plastic, in many cases making their disposal too complex for the average person, is part of the problem, he said.
We could be recycling a lot more plastic than we currently are, he said. Only about 10 percent of what’s produced gets cycled back into new products.
“Why is it so low?” Thompson said.
Again, it goes back to the forethought that must go into plastics before they’re produced, he said: “If they’re not being designed so that they can be recycled, we’re wasting our time.”
