What is the main form of pollution you are seeing on San Salvador Island?

My reflections on the Earthwatch experience on San Salvador may take more than one post. Like any other important experience in life, my time there has influenced my ideas in a number of ways. In addition, the students I've been working with raised many thought-provoking questions during our teleconferences using Skype and their comments to my blog.

So, I will begin with questions that I did not have a chance to answer while on San Salvador....

What is the main form of pollution you are seeing on the island?

Plastic everywhere~
I was shocked to see how many tons of plastic is washed ashore daily on the remote island of San Salvador. It is far too much, proportionally, to be coming from the immediate area...the nearby Bahamian Islands. What is going on?

East Beach- San Salvador Island

Ghost nets - East Beach San Salvador

I posed this question to two of our resident experts, Bahamian Reef Survey staff members , Annette Pennock, and Elizabeth Brill. Annette, an environmental consultant who has been on the project since 2003, and Elizabeth, an artist and environmentalist who has been working on the project since the very beginning, said that this much plastic has been washing up on San Salvador for years, and it is from all over the Atlantic Ocean...New York, England, and as far away as Africa.

East Beach, San Salvador Photo credit: Christina Willmarth

Annette pointed out that since plastics don't biodegrade, or break down on their own over time, they stay in the ecosystem, in some form, pretty much forever...thousands of years, at least. Plastics do break down, but they break into smaller and smaller pieces, releasing toxins (such as DDT, PCB, formaldehyde) during the process, in the presence of the UV rays in sunlight. This is called photodegrading.

However, no matter how much the plastics break down, they simply become smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. Fish, birds, even filter feeding marine invertebrates, like jellyfish, eat the plastic, mistaking it for food. Since there are no nutrients in plastic, eventually, the animals who eat it either strangle or die of malnutrition.

A dead albatross on a remote island in the North Pacific, it's gut filled with indigestible plastic Photo credit: Charles Moore

Even if an animal who has eaten plastic doesn't die, the toxic compounds from the plastic become concentrated in the animal's tissues, poisoning any other animal who, in turn eats the animal. In this way, toxins work their way up the food chain in marine habitats, which as you know, includes man, since we eat marine animals.

Elizabeth Brill with Earthwatch volunteers cleaning up beach debris on San Salvador

When I started thinking about the amount of plastics my family uses, multiplied by all of the households in the United States, I began to see that we are creating a huge amount of waste that may never break down, and a great deal of it is ending up in our oceans. I did some research, and I found out that closer to home, there is a raft of floating plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas. It is in a place called the Pacific Gyre.

Image credit: Charles Moore

It just so happens that Annette's next research project will involve joining a group of scientists who will travel to the Pacific Gyre to map and study the huge 'floating continent' of trash in the ocean there. I'll add more to this blog as I get info about Annette's project, but meanwhile, I'm asking myself "What can I do?"

I found a great San Francisco Chronicle article by Justin Berton, on plastics in the Pacific Ocean.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL

Here are some suggestions that we can follow to help stop this problem from getting even bigger:

• Limit your use of plastics when possible.
• Use a reusable bag when shopping. Throwaway bags can easily blow into the ocean.
• Take your trash with you when you leave the beach.
• Make sure your trash bins are securely closed. Keep all trash in closed bags
• Investigate biodegradable alternatives to plastic
  

Here are links to other articles on the plastics problem in our oceans:

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Sea-Plastic-LN-PG5oct05.htm

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm

http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2.shtml

Trash is also a problem in parts of San Francisco Bay. For an interactive map showing some of the worst locations, go to

http://www.savesfbay.org/baytrash