What Will It Take to Get Plastics Out of the Ocean?

A few palm trees stand strong in the salty breeze. Located on the southern tip of the Pacific island chain of Hawaii, Kamilo Beach is an isolated stretch of black volcanic shoreline in the middle of nowhere.

Just a few hundred yards from shore, humpback whales rise up from the depths, colorful fish fill the reefs and rare sea turtles swim in to nest on the beach.

But even in this remote place, garbage washes ashore each day. “We find a lot of toothbrushes and combs, plastic bottles and caps, over and over again,” says Megan Lamson, a marine biologist working for a local non-governmental organization, the Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund.

Old Hawaiian sayings have described the bay as a place where people went looking for loved ones if they got lost at sea. “Historically that area has been kind of the catcher of things that are floating in the ocean,” Lamson says. But over time, the composition of materials that wash ashore has changed dramatically. “Back in the day it was large pieces of heavy wood from other continents,” she says, “now, unfortunately, it’s a lot of plastic.”

It’s an all too familiar sight around the world. Since the early 1970s, researchers have collected plastic from beaches and oceans around the globe. At the 9-mile (14-kilometer) stretch of coastline around South Point alone, about 15 to 20 tons (14 to 18 metric tons) of trash wash up each year. “Here on Hawaiian beaches, we have debris from all around the North Pacific,” Nikolai Maximenko, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, explains. Some pieces come from Asia, others from the West Coast of North America, and, Maximenko adds, “of course we have local products, too.”  

From Gyre to Garbage Patch

To understand how a remote place like Kamilo can get so swamped by massive amounts of trash, one must consider the hydrodynamics at play.

Hawaii is located in a huge circular system of ocean currents, the North Pacific Gyre. Within the gyre, trash can get trapped and circulate for years. One region between the islands and California contains such a high density of man-made debris that it has been nicknamed the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. When currents change, the garbage can wash back ashore — and so it is found on beaches like Kamilo.

At the International Pacific Research Center in Honolulu, Maximenko and his colleagues have taken major steps in understanding how marine debris travels the oceans’ currents. He and his team have developed a computer simulation that can project the behavior of floating items at sea. By using drifter buoys and satellite data, the model indicates how trash accumulates in the oceans.A few palm trees stand strong in the salty breeze. Located on the southern tip of the Pacific island chain of Hawaii, Kamilo Beach is an isolated stretch of black volcanic shoreline in the middle of nowhere. Just a few hundred yards from shore, humpback whales rise up from the depths, colorful fish fill the reefs and rare sea turtles swim in to nest on the beach.

But even in this remote place, garbage washes ashore each day. “We find a lot of toothbrushes and combs, plastic bottles and caps, over and over again,” says Megan Lamson, a marine biologist working for a local non-governmental organization, the Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund.

Old Hawaiian sayings have described the bay as a place where people went looking for loved ones if they got lost at sea. “Historically that area has been kind of the catcher of things that are floating in the ocean,” Lamson says. But over time, the composition of materials that wash ashore has changed dramatically. “Back in the day it was large pieces of heavy wood from other continents,” she says, “now, unfortunately, it’s a lot of plastic.”

It’s an all too familiar sight around the world. Since the early 1970s, researchers have collected plastic from beaches and oceans around the globe. At the 9-mile (14-kilometer) stretch of coastline around South Point alone, about 15 to 20 tons (14 to 18 metric tons) of trash wash up each year. “Here on Hawaiian beaches, we have debris from all around the North Pacific,” Nikolai Maximenko, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, explains. Some pieces come from Asia, others from the West Coast of North America, and, Maximenko adds, “of course we have local products, too.”  

From Gyre to Garbage Patch

To understand how a remote place like Kamilo can get so swamped by massive amounts of trash, one must consider the hydrodynamics at play.

Hawaii is located in a huge circular system of ocean currents, the North Pacific Gyre. Within the gyre, trash can get trapped and circulate for years. One region between the islands and California contains such a high density of man-made debris that it has been nicknamed the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. When currents change, the garbage can wash back ashore — and so it is found on beaches like Kamilo.

At the International Pacific Research Center in Honolulu, Maximenko and his colleagues have taken major steps in understanding how marine debris travels the oceans’ currents. He and his team have developed a computer simulation that can project the behavior of floating items at sea. By using drifter buoys and satellite data, the model indicates how trash accumulates in the oceans.

Most debris ends up in the five big subtropical ocean gyres located in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, which rotate clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern. Water samples collected from these regions show elevated concentrations of plastic particles, and the evidence that the oceanic gyres are becoming marine debris hot spots continues to grow. According to new models by researchers from Australia, a sixth gyre might form in future decades — in the Arctic Barents Sea.

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