Winter's Wave of Waste

The fight goes on:  Plastic does not go away, it simply goes somewhere else.

The Easter long weekend signals the start of the tourist season here in the South West of the UK, and over the next seven months a whole economy will be running off the back of our beaches.  And they're in a right state.  Last weekend there were two consecutive beach cleans on my local beach, Polzeath, and at the end of it all there were still multi-coloured bits of plastic in the sand.
On the Friday the local VMCA (Voluntary Marine Conservation Area) did a litter pick on the beach, and then on Saturday there was another one organised as part of Surfers Against Sewage's Big Spring Beach Clean.  At the end of it all you could still turn over any one of the big piles of rotting seaweed (natural and normal) and at the bottom, where the sea lice have decomposed the seaweed into a stinking mush, you could scoop up a big handful and it would be full of tiny particles of plastic.  They were almost impossible to pick out; all of the volunteers were just picking up the visible pieces of plastic - those big enough to grab with rubber gloves on and, usually, the brightly coloured and highly visible pieces.  All of the tiny pieces of clear plastic remained for another day, and that's the sad fact of the matter; you could spend all day every day picking up all of the tiny pieces of plastic and each high tide would just wash in even more.

   

These little pieces of plastic, often called "nurdles" or "mermaids tears", come from a variety of sources.  Many are the small pellets used in the primary production of injection moulded plastic products such as buckets, bins and things like that.  You know when plastic products have that little circular blob somewhere on the bottom with a kind of stringy bit of plastic hanging off it?  That's a product that's been injection moulded, a process where tiny plastic pellets are heated up and squirted into a mould.  Other tiny plastic particles come from things like face-scrubs and exfoliators.  Yup, those tiny beads that you rub into your face to clean it are actually plastic, and they go down your plughole and end up, eventually, in the sea and on the beaches.  One positive point is that Unilever announced in January that they will remove all plastic microbeads from their products by 2015.  It's a start I guess.

So what's the problem with such tiny pieces of plastic?  Out of sight, out of mind no?  Definitely not.  Plastic acts like a sponge to chemicals and toxins, absorbing them and carrying them around.  Fish, shellfish and seabirds ingest the plastic and it often fails to pass through their digestive systems, so they accumulate plastic and the toxins that they carry.  We eat said fish and shellfish, and the process of bioaccumulation stops with us, the apex predator.  Of 504 fish examined in a recent study undertaken by a team from the University of Plymouth and the UK Marine Biological Association, more than a third were found to contain pieces of plastic less than one millimetre in size.

Sir David Attenborough can say it far more eloquently than I can.

Part of an outdoor art installation on the beach in Rio constructed entirely from discarded plastic bottles.  This was an exhibit for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20) from which the EU pledged to be at the forefront of efforts to reduce marine litter.

Beach litter isn't a particularly pleasant subject to photograph.  I've got a whole folder on my hard drive full of images of beaches covered in plastic, bits of fishing net, bottles and dead birds.  It's grim.  This May 21st I'll be giving a presentation on Marine Plastic Pollution for Polzeath VMCA at the Tubestation in Polzeath, and whilst I'm certain that they could have got somebody in who is much more of an authority on the topic than me, I've definitely got enough images to illustrate an hour long talk.  It will be publicised more nearer the time but if you're in the area then you're more than welcome to attend.  I have a feeling that I will be preaching to the converted however I've been keeping a few choice images back and I hope that I'll be able to make it as interesting and engaging as possible.

For past rants about the subject of marine litter and plastic on our beaches (they're becoming an annual feature on here) and for hints and tips on small things that you can try to do to make a difference, please click through to read previous posts "Give Up SUP's" and "Pick Up 3".  

Beauty in Nature

Nature, whether on a large or a small scale, is unquestionably one of the most incredibly, awe-inspiringly, beautiful things that we are all able to interact with on a daily basis.

Planet Earth, you're amazing. Keep up the good work.

Tom Blake wasn't wrong.

Call me a pessimist, but...

Sometimes I just feel like casting off the lines, hauling in the fenders and getting the hell away.

I'll apologise here and now for following a none too chirpy post with one with a rather bleak outlook, but the timing is rather appropriate for this one and you can blame my piss-poor planning. I promise to publish something far more optimistic and full of sunshine next week.

You see, this weekend saw the politicians of the world gather in Durban, South Africa, for another seemingly doomed climate conference although you'd be forgiven for not being aware of that. The world is rather preoccupied with global economic woes right now and as such the fate of the planet that hosts us and our silly games of gambling invisible money seems to have slipped down the agenda. No habitable ecosystem on planet earth = no venue for our global economy. Seems to me therefore that it ought to be higher up the list of things to do.

Back in September, on or around the 27th, humanity exhausted nature's budget for the year. Earth Overshoot Day signifies the point at which we start using resources that the planet cannot regenerate or absorb the waste from within that year. It's the point at which we humans started spending more than we earnt in the year 2011 in an ecological sense, effectively living off an environmental credit card. Every year the planet can only absorb so much CO2, grow so many plants or support so many fish, however each year we use more than that. In 2007, the last year that data is available for, we used 1.5 planets worth of resources. Since 1966 humanity's ecological footprint has more than doubled.

All of this really, really scares me. I guess I'd be even more scared if I was a penguin or a polar bear though.

Jackass penguins, South Africa, some 1,600km from where their fate is being decided.

So how's about we all pull together and each try to do a little so that together we can achieve a lot. If not then perhaps I'll break the piggy bank and buy this little submarine so that I can visit the cities of the world in 50 years time when they're all underwater. It's quite expensive though...anybody want to go halves?

"It's not beyond possibility that warming will actually cause sea-level rises which could threaten the centre of London. The stakes are very high. We know these changes are happening – the evidence is incontrovertible – and if they go on, they will have catastrophic effects on the human race."

Sir David Attenborough

Broadcaster and naturalist (The last episode of Frozen Planet, On Thin Ice, will be shown on BBC 1 on Wednesday at 9pm)

£28,000 + VAT. Who's in?

Pick Up 3

In mid-winter we have all sorts of flotsam and jetsam wash up on the beaches of Cornwall.
Photo by Dave Williams.

Iniative Surf recently ran a training camp on Long Island, New York and the groms got involved with improving their beach environment after a training session.
Getting good habits at an early age.
Photo by Alex Espir.

All this will end up in the Ocean that you can see at the end of the ditch (right into the line-up of a surf spot) next time it rains. This has to change.

An Tor Orth An Mor took a two week holiday this northern summer, a bit last minute and far enough off the map to make posting photos difficult so apologies if you missed us...but we're back now, so on with business.

This one is an important one, both to spread a message well worth spreading and to try and shout it from the roof tops and encourage you the reader to pass the message on, but also to salute the people in this post who lead the charge in one way or another and do their bit.
Litter. You wouldn't believe how much of it ends up in the oceans or washed up on beaches, almost anywhere in the world no matter how remote and off the beaten track you go there's a pretty good chance that you'll find some plastic washed up on your idylic beach, maybe carried there by the winds and currents from thousands of miles away. In some places there are unbelievable levels of rubbish on the beaches and in the water, perhaps because of the prevailing wind direction or because the locals there don't have any refuse collection and wherever they throw it, it washes downstream to the coast. But regardless of the reasons why, it really shouldn't be there at all. But how can you help? Sometimes there's just too much to feel that you can make a difference.

Pick Up 3. It's that simple. The brainchild of 16 year old Cobi Emery from San Diego, California, Pick Up 3 asks you to pick up just three pieces of litter or trash when you walk back up the beach from the surf. You can carry three bits in one hand and dump them in a bin at the top of the beach or put them in a bag in your car to dispose of later, that way slowly but surely, little by little, we can start to make a difference; it's enough to have an impact whilst still being easily manageable.
Not only does the beach look nicer then, but the impact on the marine environment is amazing too - thousands of turtles and dolphins die each year because they mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them, only to either fill their guts with undigestable plastic and starve, or in the case of turtles, float to the surface because of the increased buoyancy and bake to death in the sun. Wrong. So plastic bags, bottles, bits of fishing nets and line...if it didn't grow there it shouldn't go there.

My friend Alex from Initiative Surf asks all of his clients, be they junior competitive surfers or clients on guided surf trips to pick up 3 on their way back from every surf as part of his coaching regime, whilst Tom and the staff and customers of Island Vibe in Jeffreys Bay do regular beach clean ups there, with one big annual effort. This year 80 of them collected litter on the western beaches of J-Bay, filling bags and bags with unwanted refuse. Unfortunately, the next time the wind blows offshore, more plastic will blow out of the township and down the beach, just as after the first rains of the season in Morocco, Indonesia or any other developing coastal nation the water is too filthy to surf or swim in because the floodwater washes out all of the ditches and drains that locals use to dump their refuse in to. But perhaps slowly, 3 pieces at a time we can set an example, educate and begin to clean up the marine environment because we all live downstream of something and the oceans are too important to mess with.

Leave it better than you found it. Please.

Staff and guests at Island Vibe clearing the beach and drains that make up their back yard.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

More people and less litter than the previous year, so it's looking hopeful.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

A good job well done.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

Volounteers from the Polzeath VMCA clearing our local beach, thanks guys!

www.pickup3.org
www.sas.org.uk
www.surfrider.org
www.polzeathmarineconservation.com

The End of the Line

“Turn your television on right this second!”
I tend to take my Dads advice, he’s generally pretty spot-on. I also tend to not watch very much TV, except for in this instance. End of the Line had its terrestrial premiere last night on Channel 4 and it was an eye opener – a documentary heralded as “An Inconvenient Truth for the oceans” it shines a light on the plight of our marine environment and just what we are doing to it. Destroying it.
If humans continue pulling fish out of the oceans for consumption at our current rates, BY 2048 THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT bar plankton, algae and worms. 1.2 billion humans on this planet depend on fish as the key source of protein in their diets, and furthermore in terms of not only impact upon humans, fish poo has been shown to actively absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. No more fish=no more fish poo=more CO2 and accelerated global warming and ocean acidification. These kinds of facts scare me.
Humanities current capacity for fishing far exceeds the amount of fish in the oceans. Four fold. Some more scary facts: Illegal fishing is worth $50 billion per year effectively making every other fish on your plate stolen, and of all the fish caught every year, approximately 7 billion tons (1/10 of the total world catch) goes back overboard dead because it’s by-catch. Harvesting wild fish from our oceans has become a highly industrialised, military-esque operation, hunting down every fish in the ocean until there are none left. Annually, the number of long lines laid could circle the planet 550 times, whilst the mouth of the largest purse seiner net would easily accommodate 13 747’s. It’s not really a fair fight. Many fish stocks, such as Atlantic Cod, have crashed beyond retrieval whilst others like Blue Fin Tuna are critically endangered. That doesn’t stop them showing up on menus, but can you imagine the out cry if a restaurant advertised Orang-utan steaks or fillet of White Rhino? It’s really no different.
There are solutions however, which if pressed into mass action could push that ominous 2048 date back a bit: Only buy sustainably sourced seafood bearing the Marine Stewardship Council mark or that caught in Alaska, one of the most sensitively and well managed fisheries out there. Don’t buy farmed fish because it’s a bag of crap; it takes 5kg of “other” fish to produce 1kg of salmon. That just doesn’t add up.
Pressure politicians to listen to fisheries scientists when setting catch limits; or better still to push for the creation of marine protected areas. If all of the money spent on subsidising the fishing industry was redirected to maintaining marine protected areas then they would be protecting 30% of the worlds’ oceans rather than the current 0.6%.
I’m not saying stop eating fish, perhaps just go about it in a different way, armed with a bit of knowledge and some realistic facts. I plan on catching a lot of what I eat this summer, and when I do buy fish, checking the source. I urge you to do the same.

http://www.endoftheline.com/film

Photography: Various shots from Tsukiji fish market, Tokyo Japan. This is the largest fish market on the planet and the venue for the infamous Tuna Auctions. I hit the place at 5am to get a realistic view of what goes down there.
Below that, Blue Basque boats in the harbour at Mundaka, Northern Spain, and some rusty old trawlers at dock in Portland, Victoria, Australia.