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Charles James Moore

Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research, 160 N. Marina Drive, Long Beach, CA, USA

As I began writing this Foreword in the waning days of 2020, the media was replete with reviews of the year soon to be thankfully gone. Besides 2020 being one long battle against COVID‐19, the narrator of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s (CBS) year in review made the following statement: “2020 was the year the plastic pollution problem got the world’s attention.” Apparently, the problem was baking in the world oven for a good half‐century and finally came out in a form that caught “the world’s attention.” For those of us working for decades to draw back the plastic curtain of ignorance that has kept the public from a general understanding of the material that characterizes the modern era, this was a belated yet welcome assertion.

The study of marine plastics arose before plastics were acknowledged to be problematic for the ocean. At first, marine scientists were simply noting that plastics had been found in birds and on the sea surface and were unsure of what this meant. The problematic nature of synthetic polymers in our water world could have been inferred from the fact there is no background or natural level of these persistent anthropogenic compounds anywhere. This makes them a priori a pollutant; they do not belong in or to any natural system. Small amounts of synthetic polymers in the environment might have been ignored by science, but the quantities rapidly increased and became impossible to ignore. Sadly, it is because of plastic pollution that we study ocean plastics. In this volume, an esteemed publisher of scientific literature and a world‐renowned expert on environmental plastics have teamed up to give you widely varied perspectives that together demonstrate clearly that marine plastic pollution its own field of science. If science can be characterized as a branch of knowledge that provides answers by carefully studying a phenomenon from as many areas of expertise as possible, then the study of plastic pollution of the marine environment has surely become its own field of scientific inquiry. For a deep and broad understanding of the issues surrounding ocean plastics, Wiley could not have found a better editor for this volume than Dr. Anthony Andrady. His 2003 volume Plastics and the Environment, was the most comprehensive treatment of the subject ever written with contributions from twenty‐two authors.

No scientists are exempt from the world views known as paradigms that reign in their historical milieu. Scientists are slow to acknowledge the need for a completely new field of research, and academic institutions and their funders are slow to divert resources to a new scientific discipline, so it has taken over half a century to create awareness and a consensus so that institutions can seek and give funding that opens wide the doors to plastic pollution research. The production of 1000’s of peer‐reviewed studies and several textbooks over the last quarter‐century is strong evidence that plastics and the ocean are now linked in a novel, though highly undesirable marriage for the foreseeable future; an unhappy union whose dissolution will be messy and unknowably prolonged. A world polluted by plastic is indeed a new world, and its discovery and elucidation could be described as a scientific revolution.

Thomas Kuhn stated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world…” May we not take exception to this dictum in the case of plastic pollution? The world has changed, since its water, air and soil, as well as the space around it, are infected with synthetic polymers never before seen in its long history. The contemporary scientific paradigm is an anthropogenic one, and the modern scientist works in a world, in many ways, made by humans.

The field of marine plastic research may conveniently be divided into three chronological phases:

1 The Discovery Phase, 1960–1999, when the phenomenon of ocean plastic was first reported and confirmed.

2 The Consolidation Phase, 2000–2014, when ocean plastic research produced considerable quan‐ titative data and highlighted areas of concern, mainly entanglement and ingestion. Other areas considered collateral were aesthetics, increasing international production of plastic consumer goods leading to increasing ocean plastics, biofouling, three‐dimensional movement in the water column, transport of exotics and effects on the health of marine species.

3 The Rapid Growth Phase, 2015‐present, when large institutions and governmental organizations began to see ocean plastics as worthy of high‐level research and remedial action, and nongovernmental organizations focusing on plastic pollution worldwide.

The dawn of the Age of Plastic can be traced to its increased development and use in WWII. During the Pax Americana that followed, synthetic polymers spread rapidly from wartime to peacetime consumer and industrial applications. The famous LIFE Magazine article entitled “Throwaway Living,” made single‐use foodservice “modern” in 1955, but never addressed the after‐ life of the items thrown away. Away was far, not near. After three decades of this growing single‐use lifestyle, the public became aware of problems with finding a faraway place for waste. This was highlighted by the long but circular voyage of the barge Mobro 4000 from New York to Belize and back, when despite repeated attempts, no U. S. state, territory, or foreign country would accept 3000 tons of New York’s garbage. Upon the barge’s return to New York, symbolizing a very expensive and failed attempt to find “away,” the refuse was burned and the ash buried in a landfill. To this day, many forms of burning and burying continue to dominate plastic disposal, both of which are polluting “solutions” that waste the energy and resources used to make the original products.

The question of what happens to trash in a landfill was explored in the 1970s by William Rathje, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. He found that when buried deep in a landfill, common biodegradable items, such as carrots, hot dogs, and newspapers did not biode‐ grade. A similar result for the ocean was observed after the sinking of the deep submergence vehicle Alvin, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Carl Wirsen and Holger Jannasch recovered the soup, sandwich, and apple lunch that sank to a depth of 1500 meters when Alvin’s lowering cable broke during surface launching. After 11 months of inoculation with seawater, “The apples were in a condition equal to that of conventional careful storage, and the bread, may onnaise, ham, and bouillon appeared to fare considerably better than they would have under normal conditions of refrigeration.” Jannasch and Wirsen conducted subsequent experiments, using specially designed vessels lowered to great depths with biodegradable materials inside and then inoculated with seawater. They concluded that, “if the true removal of pollutants is intended, then the slow rates of microbial degradation argue clearly against deep ocean disposal.” (Oceanus)

Seventeen years after the end of World War II, Steve Rothstein was studying seabirds and found certain petrel species (collected in 1962) had eaten plastic. As he told an interviewer compiling the early history of plastic pollution: “I didn’t quite realize the significance of things. I figured, well, there’s probably, maybe some plastic out there in the ocean and the birds are swallowing it. And I assumed that maybe everyone knows this, or it’s not that worth reporting that much” (Plastisphere). As it turned out, it was indeed “worth reporting,” but it would take two decades of such reports, mostly in journals and reviews characterized by Peter Ryan in “A Brief History of Marine Litter Research” as “not such good places,” before the First International Marine Debris Conference was convened by the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Honolulu in 1984.

Ed Carpenter, the first scholar to characterize floating marine plastics in the “good” peer‐reviewed literature, (Science 1972), recognized potential problems associated with plastics in the ocean, such as their ability to sorb PCBs, and then be ingested by marine animals due to their ability to mimic natural prey, but he let the subject lapse after getting pressure from the Society of the Plastics Industry, leading him to wonder if his position as a marine biologist at Woods Hole might be placed in jeopardy by the industry complaining to his superiors. (Plastisphere Interview) Another paper published in a “good” journal, Nature, in 1974 by Wong et al. looked at “Quantitative Tar and Plastic Waste Distributions in the Pacific Ocean.” The surface tows done for this study were conducted during the 1972 San Francisco to Honolulu Transpac sail race and would have avoided areas of light winds where debris concentrations may have been higher.

The initial response of the plastic industry to environmental plastic pollution was to consider plastic “litter” merely an aesthetic problem. After Carpenter’s papers were published in Science, and Wong’s in Nature, W.C. Ferguson, a member of the Council of the British Plastics Federation and a fellow of the Plastics Institute stated that “Plastics litter is a very small proportion of all litter and causes no harm to the environment except as an eyesore.” This may still be the general public’s attitude. Their nearly constant contact with the material, its lack of taste, smell, and obvious physical effects, have led most people to consider consumer plastics inert. If it were harmful in any way, why would it be used for our clothing, our home furnishings, and to serve and contain our food?

The need for a volume on plastics and the ocean before a volume on plastics in the soil or the air, or even in earth orbit, arises from the fact that the land we live on slopes down to the sea and grav‐ ity, coupled with wind and rain results in the ocean being the first receiving body to absorb massive amounts of vagrant plastics. The first plastics found by ocean scientists were a mix of discarded plastic consumer objects, but also pre‐production plastic resin beads that came to be known as nurdles, the form that thermoplastic resin raw material is shipped to “converters,” as the fabrica‐ tors of plastic objects for the marketplace are known. These pellets showed up in the bellies of seabirds and in small mesh nets towed mostly at the ocean surface. In the decade following Carpenter’s paper, larger objects came to be noticed and spawned the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA) international marine debris conferences. The early conferences focused primarily on derelict fishing gear as indisputable harm was being done to ships by blockage of intake ports and entanglement around propellers and drive shafts. To try to stop derelict nets and lines from being caught in propellers, several companies developed knives that could be attached to driveshafts to cut these lines as they wound around them. This fouling with debris had been a rare problem for vessels before the age of plastic, but as the age progressed, and less expensive and more persistent plastic fishing nets and lines proliferated, entanglement increased, and with its high cost to remedy, interest in tracking concentrations of this material became a new focus. Increasing reports appeared on derelict nets and fishing gear killing thousands of marine mammals through entanglement. This led to an interest in observing and recording the occurrence of floating marine debris. In 1987, two NOAA scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service Auke Bay Laboratory, Steve Ignell and James Seger, prepared a paper on methods for observing debris using line transects of vessels in transit. It was apparent to the authors that sunlight reflected by wavelets or “glare” would be “the most important single environmental factor affecting the sighting probability…” The paper was never submitted, probably because “Extensive analyses of sighting probabilities relating distance, wave height, and light conditions to type, sizes, and colors of marine debris will be needed to incorporate these data into debris estimation procedures.” (Manuscript provided by Steve Ignell). The year before, Ignell had written another paper with Day and Clausen that emanated from the Auke Bay, AK laboratory entitled: “Distribution and Density of Plastic Particulates in the North Pacific Ocean in 1986.” This paper preceded a more comprehensive study by Day, Shaw, and Ignell in 1990, “The quantitative distribution and characteristics of neuston plastic in the North Pacific Ocean, 1985–1989,” published in the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Marine Debris in 1989. Plastic particulates were becoming more interesting, but the term “microplastics” was not yet used.

Surface drift up to this time had been in large part focused on the transport of fish eggs and larvae, especially those of commercially important species like salmon. James Ingraham Jr. had developed the Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) for this purpose while working for NOAA in the Pacific Northwest. Collaborating with oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, he was able to adapt this simulator to track a container spill of Nike sneakers and predict where they would wash ashore on the West Coast. He expanded on this work to focus on North Pacific accumulation zones and presented his findings in the year 2000 at the 4th International Marine Debris Conference in Honolulu. The results showed two major areas of drifter accumulation: (i) off southern Japan, which has come to be known as the Western Garbage Patch and (ii) the middle of the eastern North Pacific which has come to be known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The work by Day and colleagues never focused on the east‐central North Pacific. When I crossed the area in 1997, I was impressed by the abundance of floating plastics. Two years later, I returned and sampled the area, finding three times the abundance and seven times the weight of the highest concentrations per km² found by Day a decade earlier in the western Pacific. In order to assess the potential for ingestion of plastics by open ocean filter feeders, we compared the abundance and mass of the zooplankton caught to that of the plastic in our manta trawls. We found the number of zooplankton was five times greater than the number of plastic pieces >0.3mm in diameter, but the weight of the plastic was six times greater than the zooplankton. We published our findings in Marine Pollution Bulletin (42,12, 2001). This finding was shocking and controversial, but to have more plastic than life anywhere in the ocean, no matter how you look at it, was explosive. Another important paper linking floating plastics to absorption of persistent organic pollutants was published the same year by Mato and Takada et al., “Plastic resin pellets as a transport medium for toxic chemicals in the marine environment.” They found the pellets could sorb hydrophobic pollutants up to one million times their level in the surrounding seawater. This gave credence to the description of small ocean plastics as “poison pills” for marine creatures.

Of course, during these developments, the plastic industry and its professional organizations were becoming aware of calls to label plastic waste in the environment as pollution. I was invited to speak at a meeting of the Southern California Film Extruders and Converters Association and was introduced to an industry response that focused on making plastic waste “disappear” using an “OxoDegradable” plastic additive. There were two benefits promoted by the producer of the OxoDegradable additive. The first was that it would accelerate the breakdown of the polymer chain, minimizing the risk of entanglement, such as was seen to occur with plastic six‐pack rings used to hold canned beverages. When discarded into the marine environment, they had been photographed choking several species. The second supposed benefit of the additive was more rapid biodegradation. The idea was that no matter how slowly, plastic polymers will undergo some biodegradation in the environment, and this process could be accelerated by mixing fragmenting agents into plastics to make them smaller. Although oxo additives did not themselves improve biodegradation, the fact that they produced smaller pieces of plastic suggested that they would disappear sooner through greater exposure per unit of mass to biodegradation organisms. A representative of the company was showing a jar of soil with fragmented plastics to make his point. However, when asked to produce proof of final degradation, none was forthcoming. This did not stop the company from telling its customers to label their plastic products biodegradable if they contained oxo‐degradable additives. Experiments with the six‐pack rings showed OxoDegradable additives to be ineffective in the cold, wet environment of the ocean, making their effectiveness in preventing entanglement questionable.

So, if you are the plastic industry, and you can’t show that vagrant plastic waste will go “away,” you might find it advantageous to blame consumers of plastic products for their failure to properly dispose of plastic waste. An extremely effective campaign was mounted by an industry‐ sponsored organization in the US called “Keep America Beautiful.” Its focus was the “litterbug,” who did not properly dispose of their used products. If only people would not litter, the problem of plastics in the ocean would go away. Even scientists studying the problem of ocean plastics believed this theory. After listing potential (though not actual) solutions in their paper: “Global research priorities to mitigate plastic pollution impacts on marine wildlife,” Vegter and 26 co‐authors con cluded that, if their potential solutions were implemented “…it would be feasible to deal with what is ultimately an entirely avoidable problem.” It seems at just this point; the scientists stop being objective, and revert to fantasy. There is no avoiding the problem of ocean plastic pollution in any sense, nor is there any way for it to reach some sort of equilibrium or begin to diminish in any realistic near‐term scenario. Plastic use will surge with the conversion of oil for fuel to oil for plastic. 3‐D printing of everything imaginable with plastic feedstocks along with plastic packaging for nearly every manufactured product and many fruits and vegetables will contribute to the projected doubling or tripling of plastic production by mid‐century. Therefore, it is very important to have a broad view of the resulting issues that you will get from studying the subjects covered in this volume. Plastic pollution and its effects will continue to plague the ocean for many future generations of scientists.

After my discovery or, more accurately, my confirmation of the existence of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” and publication of my findings in Marine Pollution Bulletin 42:12 (2001), I resolved to work diligently to highlight the issue of ocean plastic pollution, not only with the public but also with industry and the scientific community. I believed the role of “popularizer” of scientific find‐ ings to be an important one, and that I had sufficient speaking and writing skills to fill that role successfully. The most widely read article I wrote appeared in Natural History magazine. The article titled “Trashed, Across the Pacific Ocean, plastics, plastics, everywhere,” appeared in November, 2003. After this article, I was besieged with requests for interviews with writers for many different publications from “Best Life, Our oceans are turning into plastic … are we,” to “US News and World Report,” and “Rolling Stone.” Audio‐visual media were also interested and I never turned down a single interview, from a student classroom to Late Night with David Letterman. Documentaries were made by the likes of Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons, who sailed aboard my research vessel to do the film, Trashed. Also sailing with me were the crews of Nightline and CBS Sunday Morning, among many others. I even took a public television film crew from the Korean Broadcasting System out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to film our research As the media began to produce more content on the issue of ocean plastics, the scientific community also began to show greater interest in the topic. A little‐known Italian scientific organization, The World Federation of Scientists, started by a physicist and scientific advisor to the Pope, had been holding annual conferences to discuss what they considered “planetary emergencies,” such as climate change and pollution. For their 2006 meeting at their headquarters in Erice, Sicily, they wanted to include “Pollution of water by plastic” as a new planetary emergency. They reached out to Jean Michele Cousteau, President of the Ocean Futures Society, who had given a keynote address, “Trashing the Sea” at the 3rd International Marine Debris Conference in 2000. The organizers wanted him to present data on ocean plastic pollution, but his group had done no studies of the subject and had no data to present. They then contacted me to see if I would be willing to present my data at the conference, and I agreed. This meeting of top scientists was to become more productive than I could have imagined. There was a small press room, and a past editor of the Transactions of the Royal Society overheard me talking to someone about plas tic pollution. He approached me and offered to create a dedicated issue on the topic in one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific journals. Up to this time, no researcher had published on the transmission of chemicals sorbed to plastic into wildlife. Several papers were presented at the conference in Erice on the endocrine‐disrupting effects of compounds in plastics such as BPA and phthalates, but the connection had never been established linking them directly to wildlife through plastic ingestion. The Theme Issue was edited by Richard Thompson, author of the paper “Lost at Sea: Where is all the plastic?,” Shanna Swan, a researcher on phthalates at the USEPA and author of Countdown, Fred vom Saal, a pioneering researcher on the effects of BPA, and myself. The theme issue in Transactions of the Royal Society B, was titled “Plastics, the environment and human health.” It contained the article by Teuten et al., “Transport and release of chemicals from plastics to the environment and to wildlife,” which was an important milestone in the field of ocean plastic research. I bring up these personal experiences for two reasons: (i) some of these aspects of the history of plastic pollution research have not before been reported and (ii) to show how scientific progress may in some cases be advanced by individuals who straddle the line between research and activism.

After the Royal Society publication in 2009, research papers on the effects of chemicals associated with plastics became commonplace and we began to enter the rapid growth phase of ocean plastic research. The paper that created the most interest in ocean plastics after my actively promulgated finding that plastic outweighed zooplankton in the central Pacific was Jenna Jambeck’s paper published in Science in 2015 titled “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean.” The editor of this volume and the author of chapter 12 were co‐authors. Both the scientific community and the public were shocked at the median figure of eight million tons of plastic waste per year enter ing the ocean, and that this amount would be likely to grow into the next century, since “peak waste” would not be reached before 2100. In 2016, based on this paper, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicted that there would be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 and that one refuse truck’s worth of plastic is dumped into the sea every minute. I would speculate that few major newspapers or online news platforms failed to mention one or both of these estimates. Images that showed the sea surface covered with plastic in near coastal areas became more com mon. Many had requested similar images of the “trash island” because of my work in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. However, because debris there occurs in Langmuir windrows (long lines) that can stretch for more than 50 miles, and the debris is rarely touching, no areas covered in debris existed in the gyre, even in the areas with the highest concentrations of surface plastic. I have emphasized the point that plastics in the ocean are pollutants, but there is still considerable debate concerning their harmfulness. A milestone 2013 paper linking plastic ingestion in fish to negative physiological outcomes was by Chelsea Rochman and colleagues, “Ingested plastic transfers hazardous chemicals to fish and induces hepatic stress.” Consumption of plastic particles that had sorbed pollutants while floating in San Diego Bay resulted in liver abnormalities in fish.

There remained what many considered the most important aspect of plastic pollution, its effect on human health, as papers quantifying the plastics consumed in seafood were becoming common. In 2017, Fred vom Saal and Aly Cohen edited an Oxford University Press Publication titled Integrative Environmental Medicine intended for medical practitioners. Their goal was to mainstream cutting‐ edge concepts that were not taught in traditional medical courses. Sara Mosko, a physician and I contributed a chapter: “The Plastic Age: Worldwide Contamination, Sources of Exposure and Human Health Consequences.” The Key Concepts included this provocative statement: “The list of human health problems that correlate with exposure to chemicals in plastics reads like a catalog of modern Western diseases.” Although correlation is not causation, correlations do merit further investigation. We are now in the phase of plastic pollution research where the dividing line between environmental effects and medical research has been breached and medical researchers are looking seriously at potential human health effects. While at first, concerns about eating fish that had consumed plastic were paramount, we now have ample evidence that exposure through respiration is a greater threat, and that plastics at the nanoscale have invaded consumables of all kinds.

An implication of the dictum that the dose makes the poison is that as the dose of a substance increases, so does its potential toxicity. There are certain substances in plastics that contradict this. I imagine a crowd unable to get through a door when an individual could. Binding to receptors can exhibit a U‐shaped curve where a very low dose given at the right time binds to a receptor and larger doses have less effect until the system is eventually overwhelmed at very high doses. Future ocean plastic research will examine such questions and others as they relate to population‐level effects.

This volume concludes with two chapters on behavior change and legal remedies, which are certainly important in stemming the tide of vagrant plastics invading the ocean and the entire biosphere. However, the economic drivers of plastic pollution are in the ascendant, and until the worldwide growth of infinitely variable plastic products is redirected by a major paradigm shift, scientists will continue to work in a “different” plastic world.