In a report just released, the National Academy of Sciences takes America to task as being “the country” most responsible for polluting its rivers and estuaries with plastic waste that eventually winds up floating on the surface of the oceans. But the basis for the suspect claim needs to be carefully examined.  

Prior reports on the same issue estimate, on a country by country basis, the flux of packaging materials: plastic bottles, shopping bags, single-use eating and drinking utensils, and sundry other consumer items afloat semi-permanently on the ocean surface. Study outcomes vary among themselves and produce somewhat divergent results, but discrepancies are attributable to differing methodology and application of modeling instead of rigorous use of empirical sampling.  

However, neither of these reputable studies supports the NAS in its effort to single out the United States as the primary source of the accumulating plastic debris in the oceans. That dubious distinction is reserved for several Asian nations. In today’s China, India, the Philippines, and South Korea there is little emphasis on controlling the plastic waste escaping into watercourses that discharge into the sea. The leading plastics polluters are the above-named Asian nations, with the United States coming in a distant 8th in one study and much farther down the list in another. The U.S. contribution is assigned to less than 2% of the world’s total.  

The ultimate destination of plastic in the Pacific basin, mostly originating in Asia, is a slowly rotating “whirl-pool”, a giant gyre of surface ocean water located north of the Hawaiian Islands that covers an area three times that of France. The islanders and their guests do not contribute significantly to the nouveau geographic feature said to be observable by satellite.  

The other “garbage patch” is a similar feature located in the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda and extending southeast toward the Tropic of Cancer. It is commonly known as the shoreless “Sargasso Sea”, at one time referred to by European explorers as the “Horse Latitudes.” Even before the time of Columbus, Portuguese mariners recognized it as an area of water dangerously becalmed for lack of winds. It contained then, as now, vast beds of kelp, a prolific seaweed known as Sargassum.  

In more recent times, plastic waste from the continents that define the Atlantic Basin has mixed in with the kelp and serves as a substrate for barnacles and other sessile marine creatures. Intergrown together they form a thick, impenetrable mat. The marine plastic load has increased with the growth of sundry plastic packaging materials that are light enough to float in seawater and be ferried over distance on prevailing ocean currents. The currents along the periphery direct flotsam into the gyre, viz., by the Gulf Stream along the western edge, the North Atlantic Current to the north, the Canary Current to the east, and the North Atlantic Equatorial Counter Current to the south. 

In response, some municipalities along both U.S. East and West Coasts have enacted anti-plastic drinking straw ordinances, with a goal of reducing plastic flotsam in both oceans. But even if a total ban on plastic straws and other plastic eating utensils were to be imposed unilaterally on a national scale, the several international studies referred to above demonstrate the United States plays only a small part in overall plastics pollution of the oceans worldwide, compared with the named Asian nations, as well as several countries in Africa and South America, where waste management is still in its very early stage of development. A complete ban on the use of plastics in packaging, as impractical as it would be for the United States, would have a de minimis effect on the problem as popularly conceived.  

An odd thing happened one day. I noticed a plastic bag, nearly submerged as it moved downstream in a Florida tidal creek. The bag would deviate a bit left, then right as it drifted along. I managed to catch the bag with a fishing rod, and contained in it was a very much alive bass that somehow had trapped itself within. I returned it to the water and disposed of the bag in a receptacle. 

The experience called to mind reports of sea life becoming entangled in abandoned fishing gear left adrift. Both fish and birds become ensnarled in gear lost by fishermen at sea. Whales and sea turtles sometimes run afoul of abandoned netting, floats, hooks, and lines, and often to their distress. 

This then raises a question: what represents the most detrimental forms of marine plastic waste? Is it the flotsam made up of plastic cups and drinking straws and similar items in the Sargasso Sea and the Pacific patch? Or is it the isolated, but potentially more hazardous solid objects and webbing remaining afloat for an indefinite duration that attract and may do harm to various birds and marine animals?  

Clearly, a better place for the disposal of plastic packaging waste is a properly managed landfill. Even better would be to recover the waste concentrated with other combustible wastes to use as a fuel supplement for generating electricity. An even better alternative would be to separate the waste for purposeful recycling into material suitable for consumer goods made from recovered plastic. Some popular brands of designer clothing use recycled fishing line that is re-melted, spun into yarn, and used as fleece for ski wear. 

Opponents to the use of plastic materials in packaging like to suggest substituting alternate materials such as biodegradable paper (plant fiber) to manufacture drinking straws. Paper straws preceded the plastic variety by several generations but are often regarded by users as less esthetic. Paper straws tend to become soggy and non-serviceable even before the beverage in hand is fully consumed.  

The conundrum of what to do with the plastic that finds its way offshore is vexing because an effective solution lies beyond the scope of our domestic shores and within the governance of foreign nations.  

As a society, we are too quickly persuaded to follow one imprudent course of action or another by what later turns out to be only a half-truth or even an outright falsehood. Mark Twain is said to have once referred to this very human tendency:   

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”