You've no doubt heard before that a large part of the ocean is covered with massive, floating mountains of plastic trash. Implied or expressly stated is the idea that you, Western Consumer, are the cause of this, and that if only you had quit your nasty, shameful habit of using plastic straws, bottles, and grocery bags, none of this ever would have happened, so it's up to you to save the world by immediately swearing off plastic and supporting the passage of laws that would impose criminal penalties on other people for continuing to use the plastics that you've been told to hate.
Sound familiar? It's bullshit.
There are, in fact, huge, floating piles of plastic garbage. But that's where the truth of it stops. According to Qatica, an organization dedicated to cleaning up the oceans and recycling the plastic gathered from them, approximately 1.5 billion pounds of trash (it doesn't say all of it is plastic, just trash) is dumped in the ocean each year, and nearly half of that trash is commercial fishing nets.
There's more, but let's just get a quick perspective check. I want you to do a quick, mental inventory of all the single-use plastic you've used in the past week. Every milk jug, every bag of frozen vegetables, every cracker wrapper, every fast food beverage cup, every coffee can lid, every plastic film or price tag or blister pack, every Band-aid or plastic-handled cotton swab--tally it all up. And don't forget the plastics that might seem like they're not plastic. Maybe your kid's gummy fruit treats came in a "foil" bag. That's plastic. The milk he's served at school? That little cardboard milk carton is coated in plastic to make it waterproof. The fresh vegetables that you very conscientiously placed in your cloth shopping bag at the grocery store? They were shipped to the grocery in a box that was either made entirely of plastic or, more likely, cardboard coated with plastic.
Okay, so you've got a mental image of all that throw-away plastic you used this past week? Good. Now...how much ocean-caught seafood did you eat in that same period of time? Did you eat any seafood last week? Maybe a can of tuna in a salad or casserole one time? Or maybe there was a fish sandwich from McDonald's? If you eat fish every day, especially if you don't live on the coasts and didn't catch it yourself, that's very unusual for an American. Most Americans' animal protein comes from chicken, beef, pork, cow milk (including cheese), and turkey. Fish and shrimp come in far behind those. Lamb is practically exotic these days, and many of you may have never even had goat, rabbit, or duck, let alone venison, bison, snake, gator tail, etc. It's a fair bet that none of you have ever eaten whale, horse, or monkey. We Americans eat chickens, mostly, followed by cows, pigs, and turkeys. Fish is a once-in-a-while thing for most of us who aren't on the coasts.
Now try to resolve these two facts. You used the amount of plastic that you tallied up, and you almost never eat fish, yet half of the trash--more than half of the plastic--in the world's oceans is fishing nets. How does that make sense?
It's not about you. You didn't put that garbage there, just like you didn't put those fishing nets there. I mean, yeah, when you went to Red Lobster for Mother's Day, you contributed a little bit. But think about how much disposable plastic you've used since then, versus how much fish you've used since then. Who's eating all this fish?
This shouldn't be shocking, but surprisingly, it seems to never cross the minds of many activists who want to ban plastic straws or grocery bags in the U.S.--the amount of plastic in the ocean is not an indicator of how much plastic we're using. It's an indicator of how much plastic is being used by people who dump their trash in the ocean. Who is that? You?
Did you think that every grocery bag and straw you don't recycle somehow blows out of the bin like a tumbleweed and turns into the little canoe from Paddle to the Sea?
No, if you aren't a disgusting litterbug, and you don't recycle your plastics, then chances are, like most people, you put them in your garbage, which is picked up once a week and hauled off to the local landfill, where it is entombed in an insanely watertight, airtight, light-proof, underground vault to be discovered a thousand years from now, probably in the same condition, by future archaeologists or miners. We don't ship it to the coast with instructions to dump it into the water.
So who's putting all this junk in the water?
Well, prior to 1972, everybody was, at least along the coasts and rivers. And it wasn't just household garbage. Industrial wastes, raw sewage, and radioactive wastes were all dumped straight into the ocean like it had a big sign on it that said, "AWAY." Then, 51 years ago, 87 countries got together and signed an agreement called the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter 1972 (more commonly known simply as "the London Convention"). It prohibited the dumping of certain wastes into the ocean, and regulated the dumping of some others. Eighty-seven. The number of countries that border the ocean is 133. That means 46 countries with coasts never signed this thing. It was updated in 1996 in what is referred to as "the London Protocol." Only 53 countries joined in on that, and it didn't even go into effect until ten years later, in 2006.
Most of the countries dumping most of the waste into the ocean--including the fishing nets--are in Asia. A law passed in Ohio prohibiting plastic grocery bags will be no more effective at getting Filipinos to quit throwing their garbage into their rivers than it will be at getting the Japanese to quit eating whales. It certainly won't prevent any Asian ships from chucking their garbage overboard while they're out in the middle of nowhere.
So am I telling you not to reduce your plastic waste? No. Conservation is a good thing. Most of that stuff is made from oil, and you already know the harm that comes from that--whether direct pollution from getting it out of the ground and refining it, or the lives and limbs lost in the wars fought to secure access to it. The less of it you choose to use, the better. Reduce, reuse, recycle. But don't go drafting legislation based on the idea that whether an Ohioan uses a plastic straw or not is a fight to the death for the survival of our planet's oceans, and that it justifies expanding our criminal justice system any further.
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