Ocean Plastic Analyzed

Cryptic Moth left San Francisco for Stockton, CA on Thursday.



Stockton is home to the University of the Pacific and we were visiting Dr. Lorena, Visiting Chemical Researcher in the area of environmental pollutants.



Dr. Lorena’s early work focused mainly on contaminants found in soil but when she met Captain Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, she discovered a whole new material: plastic.



If you’ve seen the short movie (see Internet Debut of Alphabet Soup), you know that plastics attract oily chemicals like DDT and PCB’s. If a marine mammal eats some of that plastic, then the toxins accumulate in the tissues over time and can be passed up the food chain.



Dr. Lorena accepted the challenge of measuring the toxins found in plastic that Charlie collected from the North Pacific Central Gyre in 2003 as well as last summer’s Alphabet Soup visit.



She continues to be alarmed by the findings.



It was no surprise that visibly older pieces of plastic had more accumulation (some plastic can float for more than 50 years)...



...but how the smaller pieces showed higher levels of contaminants. These are the pieces that could be mistaken for food.



A large number of samples showed high levels of everything from pesticides to gasoline to flame retardants (and that’s not including the compounds within the plastic). By “high levels,” we learned that these plastic samples were on par with soil tested in busy Chinese shipping ports.



But unlike contaminated soil or sediment that can lay undisturbed or only impact a few bottom-dwelling species, synthetics travel freely through every ocean habitat. And that – according to Dr. Lorena – is the problem.



Out.

I+G