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 Solutions to Plastic Pollution in our Oceans 
 
 The Basics 
 
 We're treating the oceans like a trash bin: around 80 percent of marine litter originates on land, and most of that is plastic. Plastic that pollutes our oceans and waterways has severe impacts on our environment and our economy. Seabirds, whales, sea turtles and other marine life are eating marine plastic pollution and dying from choking, intestinal blockage and starvation. Scientists are investigating the long-term impacts of toxic pollutants absorbed, transported, and consumed by fish and other marine life, including the potential effects on human health. 
 
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 What it Means to You 
 
 Plastic pollution affects every waterway, sea and ocean in the world. When we damage our water systems, we're putting our own well-being at risk. This pollution also has huge costs for taxpayers and local governments that must clean this trash off of beaches and streets to protect public health, prevent flooding from trash-blocked storm drains, and avoid lost tourism revenue from filthy beaches. NRDC analyzed a survey of 95 California communities and found their total reported annual costs for preventing litter from becoming pollution is $428 million per year. See NRDC's Waste in Our Waterways: Unveiling the Hidden Costs to Californians of Litter Cleanup. 
 
 Solutions 
 
 The most effective way to stop plastic pollution in our oceans is to make sure it never reaches the water in the first place. We all need to do our fair share to stop plastic pollution: individuals need to recycle and never litter, but producers of single use plastic packaging need to do more too. We need producers to design packaging so that it is fully recyclable, and so there is less waste. We also need producers to help cover the costs of keeping their products out of the ocean. 
 
 NRDC is working on three key strategies to curb plastic water pollution in the U.S. and beyond: 
 
 1. Holding plastic producers accountable. Many states hold producers of materials like paint and carpet responsible for recovering and recycling their product after it is used. Producers of plastic packaging should be required to find innovative ways to design better packaging that can be more fully recovered for recycling or reuse, and they should help cover the costs required to keep plastic out of the environment. 
 
 NRDC is building a growing coalition of waste management, community, environmental, and business groups support measures that would stop plastic pollution at its source by creating incentives for industry to use less packaging for their products, make them recyclable, and ensure that recycling actually happens. Increasing recycling isn't just good for the environment; it's also a green jobs creator. Learn more in NRDC's report From Waste to Jobs: What Achieving 75 Percent Recycling Means for California. 
 
 2. Leading international action. NRDC's oceans and waste experts are working directly with international leaders and organizations such as the UN Environment Program to help establish international guidelines for curbing plastic pollution. We're also bringing government agencies and organizations together at the international level to showcase solutions. 
 
 3. Reducing plastic pollution. NRDC helps control the amount of litter in our oceans by pushing for legislation that will reduce plastic pollution. We offer strategic guidance to partner organizations and support policies at the state and municipal level in California that help to address pollution from plastic bags and foam to-go containers. 
 
 What You Can Do 
 
 Marine plastic pollution shows us that we cannot really throw anything "away." Reducing, reusing, and recycling is the best way to stem the tide of plastics into our oceans. Here are some specific steps you can take to cut down on your use and protect our oceans. 
 
 1. Cut disposable plastics out of your routine. Simple alternatives include bringing your own bag to the store, choosing reusable items wherever possible, and purchasing plastic with recycled content. 
 
 2. Recycle. When you need to use plastic, be sure that you recycle it after you've reused it. Each piece of plastic recycled is one less piece of waste that could end up in our oceans. 
 
 3. Take Responsibility. Whether you represent yourself, a business, or a government, know how much you are contributing to the problem of plastic pollution. 
 
 Conduct a waste audit and share the information. 
 
 Set specific goals to reduce or eliminate your plastic waste generation. 
 
 4. Clean up your beach. Many organizations host clean-up days where you can volunteer to pick up trash at your local beach. A few hours of your time can make a big difference. 
 
 5. Support NRDC's work. Because marine debris primarily originates on land, NRDC's ongoing work on waste prevention and recycling plays a critical role in resolving this issue. With your support, NRDC can continue urgent work to reduce plastic waste from reaching our oceans. Donate now » 
 
 last revised 3/8/2014 ||||| In August of 2014, biologists from the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center Stranding Response Team were notified of an unusual sighting in the Elizabeth River, a busy, industrial tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. A 45-foot-long young female sei whale was spotted swimming up the river, far from the deep waters of the Atlantic where the species, listed as endangered, is normally found. 
 
 "She was in the wrong place at the wrong time," says the aquarium's research coordinator Susan Barco. 
 
 The whale seemed disoriented. Barco and her colleagues followed it for several days in an attempt to protect it from a fatal collision with a ship. Despite these efforts, the whale was found dead a few days later. 
 
 A necropsy revealed the animal had swallowed a shard of rigid, black plastic that lacerated its stomach, preventing it from feeding. The weakened whale also had been struck by a ship and suffered a fractured vertebrae. "It was a very long and painful decline," Barco says. 
 
 The shard that caused the whale's demise was identified as a broken piece of DVD case. Most likely the marine mammal had swallowed the debris while feeding at the surface. 
 
 "It makes me very sad that a piece of plastic that was not disposed of properly ended up killing a whale," she says. "It was a preventable death." 
 
 Plastic ingestion is a widespread problem for marine animals, particularly seabirds and turtles, which can easily confuse the debris for food. The indigestible material can obstruct the stomach or intestine, leading to starvation and death. As the amount of sea trash increases, so do the risks to marine life. 
 
 View Images A necropsy revealed a shard of a DVD case (at left) in the stomach, which prevented the whale from feeding. The floating piece of debris had not been "disposed of properly," and caused a preventable death, said a marine biologist. Photograph by Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center 
 
 Whales Starve With Bellies Full of Trash 
 
 To compound the problem, scientists are still trying to fill in the blanks when it comes to the impact of marine debris on cetaceans. A 2014 study found that ingestion of debris has been documented in 56 percent of cetacean species, with rates of ingestion as high as 31 percent in some populations. 
 
 "The whales that wash up on the beach are only a small percentage of those that die," says Frances Gulland, a senior scientist with the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California. 
 
 Sperm whales are particularly susceptible to plastic debris ingestion, she explains; they mistake debris for squid, their main prey. "Every sperm whale that I have necropsied has had a lot of nets and pieces of plastic" in its stomach, she says. 
 
 Gulland encountered her most extreme case in 2008—two male sperm whales stranded along the northern California coast, their stomachs full of pieces of fishing net, rope, and other plastic trash. One animal had a ruptured stomach. The other was emaciated, suggesting that it had been unable to eat. In both cases, the debris proved fatal. 
 
 The variety and age of some of the plastic suggested it had accumulated over many years. According to Gulland, who performed the necropsy, one of the whales had at least 400 pounds of debris in its stomach. 
 
 "They slowly died of starvation," she says. "It was the first time that I had seen a large whale die from eating garbage debris." 
 
 NOAA Fisheries Southeast marine mammal stranding coordinator Blair Mase says the number of whales and dolphins impacted by floating marine debris seems to be on the rise. Though the statistical accounting can be tricky, Mase counts at least 35 strandings of bottlenose dolphins in her region between 2002 and 2013 due to marine debris. 
 
 But surface debris is not the only culprit. Gray whales feed on the ocean bottom and inadvertently suction up marine debris along with small organisms like amphipods. In 2010, John Calambokidis, a research biologist with Cascadia Research in Olympia, Washington, assisted in the examination of a dead gray whale that had stranded near Seattle. 
 
 The debris found in the 37-foot male included more than 20 plastic bags, small towels, surgical gloves, a pair of sweatpants, duct tape, and a golf ball. 
 
 "It was," Calambokidis says, "a dramatic representation of the degree to which we impact the marine environment." ||||| The albatross chick jumped to its feet, eyes alert and focused. At 5 months, it stood 18 inches tall and was fully feathered except for the fuzz that fringed its head. All attitude, the chick straightened up and clacked its beak at a visitor, then rocked back and dangled webbed feet in the air to cool them in the afternoon breeze. The next afternoon, the chick ignored passersby. The bird was flopped on its belly, its legs splayed awkwardly. Its wings drooped in the hot sun. A few hours later, the chick was dead. John Klavitter, a wildlife biologist, turned the bird over and cut it open with a knife. Probing its innards with a gloved hand, he pulled out a yellowish sac — its stomach. Out tumbled a collection of red, blue and orange bottle caps, a black spray nozzle, part of a green comb, a white golf tee and a clump of tiny dark squid beaks ensnared in a tangle of fishing line. "This is pretty typical," said Klavitter, who is stationed at the atoll for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "We often find cigarette lighters, bucket handles, toothbrushes, syringes, toy soldiers — anything made out of plastic." It's all part of a tide of plastic debris that has spread throughout the world's oceans, posing a lethal hazard to wildlife, even here, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest city. Midway, an atoll halfway between North America and Japan, has no industrial centers, no fast-food joints with overflowing trash cans, and only a few dozen people. Its isolation would seem to make it an ideal rookery for seabirds, especially Laysan albatross, which lay their eggs and hatch their young here each winter. For their first six months of life, the chicks depend entirely on their parents for nourishment. The adults forage at sea and bring back high-calorie takeout: a slurry of partly digested squid and flying-fish eggs. c Comments Add a comment See all comments 1 As they scour the ocean surface for this sustenance, albatross encounter vast expanses of floating junk. They pick up all manner of plastic debris, mistaking it for food. As a result, the regurgitated payload flowing down their chicks' gullets now includes Lego blocks, clothespins, fishing lures and other pieces of plastic that can perforate the stomach or block the gizzard or esophagus. The sheer volume of plastic inside a chick can leave little room for food and liquid. Of the 500,000 albatross chicks born here each year, about 200,000 die, mostly from dehydration or starvation. A two-year study funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed that chicks that died from those causes had twice as much plastic in their stomachs as those that died for other reasons. The atoll is littered with decomposing remains, grisly wreaths of feathers and bone surrounding colorful piles of bottle caps, plastic dinosaurs, checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles, fishing line and small Styrofoam balls. Klavitter has calculated that albatross feed their chicks about 5 tons of plastic a year at Midway. Albatross fly hundreds of miles in their search for food for their young. Their flight paths from Midway often take them over what is perhaps the world's largest dump: a slowly rotating mass of trash-laden water about twice the size of Texas. This is known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, part of a system of currents called the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Located halfway between San Francisco and Hawaii, the garbage patch is an area of slack winds and sluggish currents where flotsam collects from around the Pacific, much like foam piling up in the calm center of a hot tub. Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been studying the clockwise swirl of plastic debris so long, he talks about it as if he were tracking a beast. "It moves around like a big animal without a leash," said Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Seattle and leading expert on currents and marine debris. "When it gets close to an island, the garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic." Some oceanic trash washes ashore at Midway — laundry baskets, television tubes, beach sandals, soccer balls and other discards. Nearly 90% of floating marine litter is plastic — supple, durable materials such as polyethylene and polypropylene, Styrofoam, nylon and saran. About four-fifths of marine trash comes from land, swept by wind or washed by rain off highways and city streets, down streams and rivers, and out to sea. The rest comes from ships. Much of it consists of synthetic floats and other gear that is jettisoned illegally to avoid the cost of proper disposal in port. In addition, thousands of cargo containers fall overboard in stormy seas each year, spilling their contents. One ship heading from Los Angeles to Tacoma, Wash., disgorged 33,000 blue-and-white Nike basketball shoes in 2002. Other loads lost at sea include 34,000 hockey gloves and 29,000 yellow rubber ducks and other bathtub toys. The debris can spin for decades in one of a dozen or more gigantic gyres around the globe, only to be spat out and carried by currents to distant lands. The U.N. Environment Program estimates that 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the oceans. About 70% will eventually sink. Albatross are by no means the only victims. An estimated 1 million seabirds choke or get tangled in plastic nets or other debris every year. About 100,000 seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, other marine mammals and sea turtles suffer the same fate. The amount of plastic in the oceans has risen sharply since the 1950s. Studies show a tenfold increase every decade in some places. Scientists expect the trend to continue, given the popularity of disposable plastic containers. The average American used 223 pounds of plastic in 2001. The plastics industry expects per-capita usage to increase to 326 pounds by the end of the decade. The qualities that make plastics so useful are precisely what cause them to persist as trash. Derived from petroleum, plastics eventually break down into carbon dioxide and water from exposure to heat and the sun's ultraviolet rays. On land, the process can take decades, even centuries. At sea, it takes even longer, said Anthony L. Andrady, a polymer chemist at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina who studies marine debris. Seawater keeps plastics cool while algae, barnacles and other marine growth block ultraviolet rays. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," Andrady said, "because there is no effective mechanism to break it down." Oceanographers have counted on beachcombers around the world to help them plot the course of plastic flotsam as it circumnavigates the globe. Ebbesmeyer has found that some debris gets hung up for decades in gyres before being spun out into different currents, flung ashore or picked up by animals. 
 
 A piece of plastic found in an albatross stomach last year bore a serial number that was traced to a World War II seaplane shot down in 1944. Computer models re-creating the object's odyssey showed it spent a decade in a gyre known as the Western Garbage Patch, just south of Japan, and then drifted 6,000 miles to the Eastern Garbage Patch off the West Coast of the U.S., where it spun in circles for the next 50 years. The Hawaiian archipelago, which stretches from the Big Island of Hawaii westward for 1,500 miles to Kure Atoll, acts like 19 unevenly spaced teeth of a giant comb, snagging debris drifting around the Pacific. Most of the archipelago's atolls are awash in plastic junk, as are some beaches on the main islands. Native Hawaiians, seeking wood for dugout canoes, used to go to Kamilo Beach at the southernmost tip of the Big Island to collect enormous logs that had drifted from the Pacific Northwest. Now, locals like Noni Sanford pick through the debris for novelties to enter in a trash-art show in Hilo every fall. Sanford, 58, a free-spirited great-grandmother with long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, once won second place for a mobile fashioned out of fishing line, floats and a colorful palette of plastic toothbrushes. As a lifelong beachcomber, she is fascinated and horrified by the transformation of Kamilo Beach since she first set foot there in 1959. She was searching for driftwood with her father, a sculptor. She remembers seeing a few tires back then. Now, plastic debris litters the crescent-shaped beach for more than a mile. "This is nothing," Sanford said, stepping over a pile of twisted lines and nets. "This used to be 8 and 10 feet high. Of course, that was three or four cleanups ago." c Comments Add a comment See all comments 1 Sanford and her husband, Ron, have joined in regular cleanup efforts, organized most recently by Bill Gilmartin, a retired wildlife biologist who studied monk seals. "The rule is, don't pick up anything smaller than your fist," Gilmartin told a team of volunteers. "Otherwise, it'll take forever. We'll never be done." Noni Sanford reached down, scooped up a handful of beach sand and let it trickle through her fingers. Most of the grainy mix was bits and pieces of plastic. The beach itself, it seemed, was turning into plastic. Cleanup efforts in Hawaii and elsewhere have focused on "ghost nets," tangles of abandoned fishing lines, nets and traps that snare and kill marine life. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dispatches scuba divers every year to cut tons of these deathtraps off Hawaiian coral reefs. It's dangerous and costly work. In July 2005, a 145-foot charter vessel brought in to haul away nets ran aground on the reef at Pearl and Hermes Atoll, about 100 miles from Midway. The ship was lost. The Coast Guard flew the 23 divers and crew 1,200 miles back to Honolulu. If it were easier to find them, it would make sense to round up the medusas of nets and synthetic lines at sea before they snagged on coral reefs and endangered monk seals and other coastal wildlife. But the Pacific spans millions of square miles, and even the debris circulating in the Eastern and Western garbage patches is often diffuse and hard to see, bobbing just below the surface. Connecting the two patches is a ribbon of oceanic highway that stretches 6,000 miles, an extension of Japan's Kuroshio Current heading east. Oceanographers call this the Subtropical Convergence Zone, where the cold, green, heavier waters from the north slide under the warm, blue waters of the south. A team of scientists working on NOAA's GhostNet Detection Project suspected that flotsam collected along this line, making it an ideal place to concentrate cleanups. Yet they couldn't be sure. They needed to see it. The team got its chance last year, after persuading NOAA to lend them an instrument-packed, four-engine reconnaissance plane often deployed to study hurricanes. Wearing life jackets while flying 1,000 feet above the ocean's surface, observers were positioned at windows to spot nets and floats. They were to call out each sighting over the plane's intercom. Others were poised to jot down the location of each sighting. "When we got into it, we couldn't write fast enough," said Tim Veenstra, an Alaskan pilot and private researcher working with government scientists. The meandering line of buoys, nets, life rings, buckets and other castoffs stretched for hundreds and hundreds of miles — until the airplane had to turn back. "It was sort of a bittersweet feeling," Veenstra said. "Sweet in the fact that what we had postulated was proven true. Bitter in the fact that there was actually that much debris floating around." Tuna fishermen have long known about the convergence zone and the debris. They know that fish like to congregate beneath anything that floats. Off the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, recreational fishermen like Guy Enriques will race miles offshore to fish beneath the flotsam. It's important to get close to the trash, but not too close, Enriques explained, or the nets and lines will wrap around a boat's propeller. He said the best fishing was around what looked like an enormous metal garage door floating just below the water's surface. Even some charter boat skippers learned of that one, Enriques recalled, and took fishermen there day after day, until it vanished. But it wasn't a garage door. He and other fishermen were looking at the top of an 8-by-40-foot cargo container that fell off a ship. Such containers can float for as long as nine months. Until they sink, they are the bane of sailors in fiberglass boats who watch for them like icebergs on the high seas. Charles Moore, a member of the Hancock Oil family, was on his way home from the Los Angeles-to-Hawaii Transpacific Yacht Race in 1997 when he took a shortcut through the Eastern Garbage Patch. It's a place that sailors usually avoid because it lacks wind. As he motored through on his 50-foot catamaran, Moore was startled by what he saw thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?" The experience changed Moore's life, turning him from an adventurer into a self-taught scientist and environmental activist. Two years later, he returned to the garbage patch with a volunteer crew to survey its contents. He knew he would collect plenty of plastic bags, bottle caps, nets and floats. He didn't expect what turned up in a special net, one with a tight mesh for collecting plankton, the bottom link in the oceanic food chain. Instead of plankton, it was choked with a colorful array of tiny plastic fragments.
– A discarded DVD case is offering a brutal example of the effects our trash continues to have on marine wildlife. A young sei whale—a member of an endangered species—was found in a Chesapeake Bay tributary, seeming confused. Within days, it was found dead: It had been unable to eat after swallowing a sharp piece of a DVD case, which ripped its stomach. Already weak, it was also wounded by a collision with a ship, the National Geographic reports. "It was a very long and painful decline," says a researcher, noting that the whale probably ingested the case during surface feeding. The incident is not an isolated one. Some 56% of cetacean species have been found to have consumed debris, a study last year found, and scientists offer all kinds of disturbing stories. One describes a dead sperm whale with 400 pounds of debris in its belly. A dead gray whale had 20 plastic bags, surgical gloves, towels, a golf ball, and even a pair of sweatpants inside it. Seabirds and sea turtles are among other animals suffering. "We often find cigarette lighters, bucket handles, toothbrushes, syringes, toy soldiers—anything made out of plastic," a researcher told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. Some 80% of ocean litter comes from land, the Natural Resources Defense Council notes. (Two easy ways to help? Avoiding disposable plastics and improving our recycling habits.)