Captain Moore showing some plastic debris in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with his research crew and catamaran, Alguita. Image courtesy of Marine Environmental Research Institute.
The Alguita, a research catamaran boat, was adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Plastic nets had wrapped themselves around the propeller. Captain Moore dived down into the ocean at 4:15 a.m. to cut the net loose, a dangerous task given the darkness and sharpness of the propellers. He managed to cut it loose and signaled to his crew to try the engine again.
Luckily, the engine caught. Captain Moore and his research crewmembers could continue their four-month long expedition collecting plastic samples from “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”—a swirling gyre of garbage formed by the ocean’s currents. This was in 2009, during Moore’s third research study on marine plastic pollution in the North Pacific.
In Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans, Captain Moore, with researcher Cassandra Phillips, describes this research and how exactly so much plastic has managed to get where it does not belong.
In 1997, Captain Charles Moore discovered “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” on a sailing competition from Honolulu to Santa Barbara. Though unintended, this expedition actually set Moore on another course—a course that led to Captain Moore researching this “garbage patch” for over fifteen years.
Moore said after this life-changing trip, “There were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see. Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.” That is why Moore thinks of it more as “plastic soup” rather than as a “garbage patch.”
This discovery also led to Captain Moore founding the non-profit organization Algalita, whose mission is to research and resolve this plastic pollution problem. Moore still leads Algalita today.
In chapters that combine seafaring research adventures with the history of plastic proliferation, Moore weaves together a compelling account of our obsession with plastic and its ecological impacts.
Compared to their first study in 1999, the results are astounding and scary. Moore and his team found that plastic outweighed plankton six to one in 1999 and twenty-six to one in 2009, showing how quickly the amount of plastic has increased in only a decade.
Plankton is the foundation of the marine food web and makes up 98% of all life in the ocean. Yet plastic, a recent human invention that was never meant to even be in the oceans, has far surpassed even the amount of plankton in this “garbage patch.”
The consequences of our obsession with plastic are becoming all too evident today. On social media and in the news, videos and images are constantly surfacing of turtles with straws in their noses and dead albatross with stomachs full of plastic bottle caps and disposable lighters. As consumers of these products, it is easy to feel guilty for these deaths and this environmental destruction.
In Plastic Ocean it is refreshing to hear Moore argue that the industries making these goods should bear the responsibility for solving this marine plastic crisis. Moore presents an intriguing timeline for how we have become such a consumerist society and industry’s surprising role in this outcome.
For example, during The Great Depression, in order to spark economic activity, corporations began creating products that would break down after a certain amount of time, forcing consumers to buy more—a practice called “planned obsolescence.”
“Planned obsolescence” led the way to throwaway living with new products and new models of products coming out every year, many made of plastic. The first company to do this was General Motors, which purposefully engineered cars not to last to promote sales.
More products means more plastic packaging and plastic waste from production. All of this—the products themselves, packaging, waste—can end up in the sea, whether from littering, being blown off of a garbage truck, or being knocked off a shipping vessel by a wave.
Using his prized Catamaran, Alguita, Captain Moore has ventured 100,000 sea miles witnessing and quantifying plastic pollution through his research. Through Plastic Ocean, Moore testifies to the impacts plastic has on the marine environment and its creatures.
Plastic Ocean will hook you and reel you in. But beware.
After reading Plastic Ocean, you may start to look at the world around you differently. Our consumer “throwaway” society and plethora of “new and improved” products may not look so enticing anymore. Especially since they and their packaging are more likely than you might have thought to end up as condiments in our plastic soup—oops, I mean our oceans.