Erica Cirino - Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis

by Carl Safina

I recently got an appeal from the environmental group Oceana asking, When did you first become aware of the ocean plastic pollution crisis? For many people, it all started in 2015 with a viral video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in his nostril.

Well, hmm. Let me tell you how, for me, it all started decades ago.

When I was a kid living in a city apartment, my family got deliveries of milk and soda. Wed put our empties in the crate in the hallway, and the delivery person would leave the new bottlesand take the empties. The empties werent recycled. Nor were the new bottles all new. Empty bottles got sterilized and reused. The new milk and soda came in bottles that were sometimes brand new but usually scratched from repeated use.

Many things that now seem hard to imagine in anything but plastic came in, or were made from, other materials. Glass. Metal. Waxed paper and waxed cardboard.

Waste was considered unethical. People wanted not to waste things, and it was cheaper not to. My parents had gone through the GreatDepression, and the scarcities they endured made them appreciate what they had. My father would sometimes say, Waste not, want not. I looked up the origin of that phrase, and heres what popped up:

This adage was quotedand perhaps coinedby Maria Edge-worth (The Parents Assistant, 1800)... It was widely repeated throughout the nineteenth century, but has been heard less in the current throwaway society.

The current throwaway society, indeed. Getting from a culture of reusables to a throwaway society didnt happen by accident. Because plastic was wasteful, advertising campaigns had to accustom consumers to the idea. It took a very concerted effort, over years. I remember when companies started advertising wastefulness as a virtue and something to be desired. The ads made a massive new push for a plastic revolution. Use once; throw away was one common tagline. Disposable was another.

A few things were better in plastic. It was no fun accidentally breaking a glass shampoo bottle in the shower, and TV ads energetically demonstrated plastic as safer.

Plastic soon began replacing all kinds of things. Success of the revolution was such a sure bet that in the classic movie The Graduate (1967), the twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) receives this now-infamous advice about the direction his future should take: One word: plastics.

Back in the real world, we watched plastic overtake our material existence. Soon you could get yogurt, a snack with a two-week shelf life, packaged in an eternal material that could break up physically but never break down chemically. But I dont recall anyone suggesting that throwing plastic away was a problem. Until

Just a few years later, in the 1970s, birds, turtles, and other wildlife started to turn up tangled in plastic six-pack rings. The conscientiousamong us learned to snip the rings before throwing them away. But there were two problems. The unconscientious werent snipping, and they werent careful about throwing things away.

By the 1990s, it was clear to some that plastics were building up in the ocean and washing ashore on the most distant coasts. By the early 2000s, on Laysan Island and Midway Atoll, as far from the continents as it is possible to be, I saw dead albatrosses full of plastic. Id seen an albatross try to feed a toothbrush to her chick. By then, everywhere I went, no matter how distant from people, even wilderness shores of Alaska, I was continually amazed and dismayed at the plastic building up. Whales and turtles were becoming tangled in plastic, or dying after eating it.

Glaring as the problem seemed to those of us who were experiencing it, it remained out of sight and mind to nearly everyone else. When Captain Charles Moore invited me to go on a trip to witness firsthand the North Pacific Gyre, which hed dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I tried to interest National Geographic in the story. They declined, sayingof all thingsthat plastic in the ocean wasnt visual enough. Can you imagine? A few years later, the tragedy of ocean plastic was, very visually, National Geographics cover story. It has become so inescapable, its even in our seafood.

Though I havent sailed to the North Pacific Gyre, author Erica Cirino has. Picking up the story and making it her business, shes traveled to many seas and shores to bear witness. Here, in Thicker Than Water, she takes us with her to distant oceans and faraway coasts. Erica Cirino shows what its like to live on the high seas while sleuthing into a quiet, monumental problem. Up close and in person, Erica lets us see, feel, taste, and smell what the ocean plastic crisis is, what it means. She shows why recycling has failed, and how oil and gas companies (which sell the fossil fuels that plastic is made from) have helped make sure recyclingcontinues to fail. Erica brings us up to date on a problem that continues to mount butas she shows usis not insurmountable.

Plastic is a problem we make. Its a problem well solve. Already, municipalities and countries are passing laws to limit the use of throwaway plastics. And lets not forget the most important fact: Plastic is made by people. It doesnt have to be. Plastic has been in commercial production for only about eighty years. New companies are developing new materials that can give you your yogurt and perform like plastic in every way except that they dont last forever. The answers lie in ending planned wastefulness and developing new materials for a post-carbon, post-plastic world.