Plastic almost leads to a fight

While out and about, we saw a car driver throw a piece of plastic out of his brand new, shiny MPV. As we regularly see dolphins and turtles saved from plastic, and have seen various animals die by drowning as they have been caught in plastic, or die because they have eaten it, this for me was enough reason to tell the man about the consequences of his carelessness. I got out of the car and walked towards his car. Before I could say a word, the ‘gentleman’ had jumped out of his car and was aggressively holding up his fists, ready for a fight.

Plastic is one of the biggest dangers in the ocean

You often hear swearing and cursing in ports when a ship has picked up plastic in the pipe leading to the raw water cooling pump. This causes thousands of euros of damage. The swearing is only the expression of frustration for something visible. The real damage on the large scale is less visible. Plastic kills land animals, and if it finds its way to the ocean, it causes even more problems. For turtles, a piece of floating plastic looks like a jellyfish, one of its food sources. Many of the plastic bags that we see in the ocean have clearly been picked at by birds and other animals.

Dolphins are regular victims of plastic. They can easily suffocate if they swim into plastic – they cannot remove a plastic bag from their blow holes by themselves. The week before we filmed a necropsy at the Veterinary Faculty at the University of Las Palmas, the vet and students had done a necropsy on another dolphin. Why the animal had died was initially puzzling. It looked healthy and well fed. The puzzle was solved when they reached the stomach. This was entirely filled with an enormous plastic bag that the poor animal had started to swallow. As dolphins are unable to regurgitate, once the plastic was in its mouth the dolphin could do little else but swallow. 

As big as Africa

In the Pacific Ocean is an area of broken down plastic the size of Africa that runs throughout the entire water column. The currents and waves have brought the plastic there, and have broken it down into miniscule pieces. It is so small that even the krill, minute shrimplike animals and food for many predators including whales, ingest the plastic. The result is that not only does this affect their health and numbers, but puts other predators at risk of inadequate food resources. On top of this, the plastic is passed up the food chain into the bodies of the predators, and thus comes into our own food. As top predators, we are eating our own plastic and other rubbish with associated negative consequences.

It takes 150 years to break down plastic bags, and 400 years for plastic bottles. This does not mean that it is gone, only broken down into such tiny pieces that it is no longer visible. And no longer possible to remove. Apart from the problem of plastic for animals, there is another problem. The floating plastic drifts from continent to continent, and forms a part of the so-called ‘marine debris’. Various plants and animals attach themselves to the debris, while under the debris swim all sorts of other creatures. These ‘invasive species’ are transported to new destinations where they can destroy the ecosystem.

Back to the ‘gentleman’

After telling the man about the consequences of his behaviour, and ignoring his ‘animal instincts’, the whole affair fizzled out. Red in the face he stepped back into his ‘palace’ and drove away swearing. I hope that he will stop and think the next time before he throws plastic out of his window. 

I too have caught myself, before I knew of the dangers of plastic, throwing a simple piece of plastic out of the window in the interests of keeping my car clean so I can hardly judge others. But what we can do is tell people about the consequences of their actions. It sounds so simple to put a rubbish bag in your car. You can throw your rubbish in it, and when it’s full it’s easy to dispose of at any petrol station. You keep both your palace and your nature clean.

Links

The problem:
http://www.marine-litter.gpa.unep.org
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/1103/1103_feature.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre
http://www.blueoceansociety.org/plastics.htm
http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/whatis/welcome.html

Becoming part of the solution:
http://www.acfnewsource.org/environment/eco-plastic.html
http://www.science.org.au/nova/061/061key.htm
http://www.greenplastics.com