Transcript
CHARLES MOORE - The consequences are unknown and there's no way we can compare it like we can with climate change - we can say the earth was hotter before, but the earth was never populated with synthetic polymers. Science is trying to keep up with the phenomenon, but the phenomenon is changing much faster than we can keep determine the effects. I've now seen this phenomenon occurring in the South Pacific, I've seen what I estimate [to be] millions of pieces per square kilometre. We haven't done the analysis yet but that's in process. My subjective feeling is that it's about 10 years behind the north Pacific garbage patch in the sense that in 2007 I was getting samples like what I was seeing in 2016 in the South Pacific [gyre] which is basically located between Easter Island and Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile.
TIM GLASGOW - So this south Pacific garbage patch you estimate to be at least 1 million km in size and possibly bigger than that?
CM - You know you get into the business of determining where to stop in estimating the size of these phenomenons. The modellers that make a sort of hazy cloud of plastic pollution with their models based on buoy movement, definitely show something in that range. The model is enormous.
TG - It conjures up this idea of plastic bags and bottles and toys, but it actually takes quite a different form and that's why it's quite hard to quantify, isn't it?
CM - Yeah, it;s fragments for the most part. Between 1-2 mm. The stuff that is smaller than 5mm and greater than half a millimetre is most of what you're going to find out there.
TG - A high proportion of this plastic is from the fishing industry, isn't it?
CM - One of the most common things we found were these tubs from a New Zealand company that makes them for sorting fish. Buoys, line, it just doesn't go away.
TG - What impact of this having on the wildlife there?
CM - Well what I learned on this trip is really important to me. The southern ocean is the richest in terms of marine resources, but in terms of this gyre, it's the poorest. You think of the ocean the as being homogenous, but it's not. It's got this river that within in it, and this river goes under the South Pacific gyre and services the North Pacific gyre, so I saw much more life in the north Pacific gyre than I did in the south Pacific gyre. It's really, truly a desert there. Probably the most deserted in terms of life, the most depopulate on the planet in some senses especially in terms of the marine habitat. And that marine desert was more dramatic than I've ever seen in the South Pacific, it was just a dead place. You don't catch any fish, you don't see any flying fish for the most part, there's no food web there.
TG - Do you think that the South Pacific, and in particular the fishing industry there need to start taking steps to stop polluting in the way they are?
CM - Yeah, they could make those crates out of heavy paper or card if they're going to be losing them like they are constantly. Fishing is a big problem and so is aquaculture. Both of them lose a lot of plastic to the environment. We need to take measures in both the wild caught and the farmed fish industries to be aware of their loss of plastics to the environment and substitute materials that will biodegrade as much as possible.
TG - The harmful effects of this pollution probably more than other nations around the world, so do you think they have more responsibility to start taking action?
CM - Absolutely. They're the examples that we all have to use to get out of this mess because they have no places to put this stuff. You know i hear horror stories about island clean ups, and this is not a unique event, where they pick it up on the windward side of the islands and they take it and they take it over to the leeward side and they dump it back in the ocean. They don't have anywhere to put this stuff. It piles up on the windward side and they have no place to put it. Now there are measures they can take, but they require a lot of political will and a lot of training. They need to not allow the Walmart-type packaging, they're on an island they shouldn't have the same packaging as they do in other places. They have to eliminate a lot of that packaging. They need to have rules about what you allow on an island. So if you have a hurricane you're going to need to have water, so they bring it in bottles. But they don't bring any infrastructure to deal with the bottles. After every hurricane there's water bottles all over the beach. Because they bring in the water, but no measures to deal with the after effects.
