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There, he met biologist Heidi Auman, who had been collecting garbage swallowed by Laysan albatrosses. Eriksen witnessed the horror of such ingestion firsthand when he visited Midway Atoll, a U.S.-owned cluster of coral islands in the Pacific Ocean that is home to 3 million nesting seabirds. Mistaking the trash for food, many animals also eat plastic, suffering obstructions, stomach ruptures and starvation. According to a 2014 report from the nonprofit World Animal Protection, at least 136,000 seals, sea lions and large whales die from ghost-gear entanglement each year, along with an “inestimable” number of birds, sea turtles and other animals. Victims include more than 340 species, from bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales and endangered Hawaiian monk seals to brown pelicans and every known species of marine turtle. Entangled animals also have trouble feeding and escaping predators and suffer injuries that can become lethally infected. Discarded fishing nets (or “ghost gear”), for example, entangle countless creatures, strangling and drowning them and sometimes severing their limbs. The wildlife impact of plastic pollution is staggering. Ocean currents can move debris to distant shores or set it adrift, where marine animals (such as a seahorse off Indonesia, below) have to contend with the clutter. Plastic trash taints a remote beach on Aiduma Island in Indonesia, one of the world’s top five producers of plastic pollution. Larger items such as nylon fishing nets-designed to withstand saltwater environments-and debris from cargo ships, cruise liners, oil-and-gas rigs and other offshore operations add to this massive volume of trash, which can take tens to hundreds of years to decompose. More than 92 percent of those pieces are microplastics-less than 5 millimeters in size, or about half the width of a thumbtack. In a seminal report published in 2014, Eriksen and an international team of scientists calculated that there are at least 5.25 trillion individual pieces of plastic floating in the world’s oceans, a total of 268,940 tons. As he traveled the seas on research vessels during the following years, Eriksen found increasing evidence that they are contaminated by what he calls “a smog of microplastics-trillions of small bits of plastic swirling in our oceans, on the surface, in the mid-water, from Antarctica to the Arctic, and all waters in between.” After the trip, he made it his mission to stem that flow, ultimately founding, with his wife Anna Cummins, the 5 Gyres Institute, a research and education organization named for the oceans’ large current systems. What he saw the most, however, were single-use, throw-away items such as soda and water bottles, grocery bags, utensils and bottle caps, all strewn along the riverbank at the high-tide mark.Įriksen knew that river plastics eventually become the ocean plastics that are now killing marine animals worldwide.
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But he also witnessed “endless trails of plastic trash,” from milk crates and polystyrene foam to an entire portable restroom. In 2003, he launched his raft, named Bottle Rocket, from the Mississippi’s headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, heading south toward its mouth at Venice, Louisiana.ĭuring the five-month trip, Eriksen saw an abundance of wildlife along with breathtaking scenery. He welded two bicycles into a paddle wheel and salvaged a seat from a junkyard Ford Mustang. More than a decade passed before Eriksen lashed together 232 plastic bottles to form the bottom of a homemade pontoon raft. Hunkered down in the sand, surrounded by burning oil wells, the young Marine vowed that, if he survived the Gulf War, he would go home and embark on a classic adventure: rafting down the Mississippi River. MARCUS ERIKSEN was sitting in a foxhole in Kuwait in 1991 when he hatched a plan that guided the rest of his life. This albatross carcass was one of scores recently found packed with plastic trash on Midway Island, where scientists estimate 99 percent of the birds have some plastic in their stomachs.
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From the Arctic to Antarctica, ocean debris is killing marine wildlife-but we still have the power to stop plastic pollution.