Home: the SSV Corwith Cramer.

I just want to say one word to all of you. Just one word.

Are you listening?

Plastics.

Forty-three years ago this sage advice was given to Benjamin Braddock, played by 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman, at a cocktail party in the 1967 film The Graduate. At the time, plastics were a booming industry for a young college graduate to be involved with.

A net tow in action.

No more than five years after The Graduate hit theaters, in 1972, the first studies regarding plastic accumulation in the North Atlantic were published in the journal Science. Edward Carpenter, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, conducted eleven surface net tows and found that an increased prevalence of plastic in everyday use will “undoubtedly lead to increases in the concentration of these particles.”

Plastic in the open ocean is not a new phenomenon. We’ve known about it for years.

So far we've found over 40 000 pieces of plastic in our nets.

This summer, thirty-three volunteer deckhands and professional crewmen from Sea Education Association (SEA). set sail on the 134 ft. SSV Corwith Cramer to further investigate the problem. We conducted more than 128 surface net tows and found more than 40,000 pieces of plastic in our nets. From the deck, we saw hiking boots, loofahs, toilet seats, nutrition fact labels, you name it. At one point, we caught a five-gallon bucket in our one-meter wide surface tow net. It just floated right in (along with thousands of other pieces of plastic and a few coastal-dwelling triggerfish that happened to follow the bucket out to sea.) You can’t make this stuff up.

 
In the lab.

Although we scooped a good amount of plastic from the surface, our aim was not to clean up the ocean. Instead, we sought to study plastics from a scientific perspective. Where is the plastic coming from? Where can we find the highest concentration? Where is it going? Is there any microbial life attached to plastic? Plastic in the open ocean is a modern day sea-monster: no head, no arms, no legs, but an endless body. Cleaning up the problem is a task beyond the scope of our imagination. Aside from the occasional loofah or hiking boot, the plastic we saw was infinitesimal and indistinguishable. Open ocean plastic does not form “islands”. It breaks down into millions of tiny pieces that either float on the surface or get mixed into the water column. Learning from our bad habits, asking questions about plastic’s nature – and conversely, our nature – seems a better use of resources.

Setting sails.

Like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, I too am a recent college graduate. This summer I teach sailing in Newport, Rhode Island. Everyday I sail Narragansett Bay and watch as plastic bags, milk gallon jugs and plastic bottles float by. No one seems to notice. I must admit, I never did either. Only when I was confronted with where this plastic goes, where it drifts off to, did I realize the environmental quandary we have on our hands, in our oceans.

So, regarding plastics. Are you listening? I have three words for you.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Tyson Bottenus,

Volunteer on the Plastic at SEA Expedition 2010