Good Lifestyle

NDLR: This story was published in the November issue.

Fate can take strange forms, and therefore seem perhaps it does not have any rare that Captain Charles Moore has found the goal of his life in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the moment and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

He arrived on August 3, 1997, one day, at least early: sunny. Few wind. The water of the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, its 50-foot aluminum-shell catamaran, cut into slices by the sea.

Back to the south of Hawaii California after a sailing race, Moore had changed the Algarita course, paging a little north. He had the time and curiosity of trying a new road, which would lead the vessel through the angle of an oval of 10 million square mile known under the subtropical gyre of the North Pacific. It was a strange of the ocean stretching, a place most boats deliberately avoided. On the one hand, it has been swallowed. "The black pot," the sailors called, and they avoided. Thus, made the great predators of the ocean: tuna, sharks and other large fish that required more brighter waters, flush. Gyre was more like a desert a slow and deep, vortex swirling clockwise and water caused by a high-pressure air mountain that is striped above.

The reputation of the region did not dissuaded Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic CV: deck sailor, sailor, sailor, scuba diving, surfing, and finally captain. Moore had passed countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast treasure of secrets and terrors. He had seen many things there, things that were glorious and big; Things that were fierce and lesson of humility. But he never saw anything almost also that cooling what was in front of him in Gyre.

It started with a line of ghosting plastic bags the surface, followed by a laid tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, carafes engine oil and cracked toys for the bath, a mutilated tarpaulin. Tires. A circulation cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Here, in this desert place, the water was a plastic shit stew. It was as if someone had taken the virgin landscape of his youth and shocked for a landfill.

How does all the plastic end here? How did this Tsunami Trash start? What does that mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more, and that his discovery had disastrous consequences for the healthy man and planetary. As Algoita slipped into the area that scientists now call the "Eastern Garbage Patch," Moore realized that the plastic track lasted hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week by wanking, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of the circulants encircling. His horror, he had stumbled through the Leviathan of the 21st century. He had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

"The plastic of everyone, but I love it plastic. I want to be plastic. This quote from Andy Warhol is engraved on a six-foot magenta long and the yellow banner that hangs with irony in the extreme workshop to solar energy in the house of Long Beach Moore. The workshop is surrounded by a madness of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits and vegetables, ranging from prosaic (tomatoes) to exotic (Chérimoles, Goyaves, Chocolate Kakis, white figs of size Baseball bullets). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was high, and it has a kind of outdoor truculence that reflects its "60s-activist roots, which included a passage in a municipality of Berkeley. Composting and organic gardening are serious business here you can feel virtually the humus, but there is also a hot-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet combinations hang the drying on a linen rope above.

This afternoon, Moore surpants the ground. "How about a beautiful, cool boysen? He asks, and a clamp out of a bush. It is a striking man wearing black pants without frills and a shirt with official epaulette looking. A thick salt and pepper hair brush frame his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep amazed trailing voice that comes alive and sardonic when the topic towers with plastic pollution. This problem is Moore's call, a passion he has inherited his father, an industrial chemist who has studied waste management as a hobby. On a family vacation, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what people have thrown. "We could be in heaven, but we would go to the discharge," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "That's what we wanted to see. »

Since his first meeting with the garbage patch nine years ago, Moore has been missionary to learn exactly what happens there. Going behind a 25-year career running a furniture restoration company, he created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his conclusions. He resumed his scientific studies, that he had put aside when his attention won to pursue a university degree to protest the Vietnam War. His tireless effort placed him on the front lines of this new battle more abstract. After calling scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (Executive Director of the Coastal Waters' Research Project of South California and an expert in marine environment), in order to develop Methods of Analysis of Gyre's content, Moore sailed to the Algoita several times in the trash repeatedly. At each trip, the volume of plastic has increased alarming. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the world there are signs that plastic pollution makes more than landscape mastging; This is also part of the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead sea birds that have washed down in surprising figures, their plastic packaged bodies: objects like bottles, cigarette lighters, buffer applicators and color remains Which, to a bird of food, look like a bait fish. (An animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds are not alone. All marine creatures are threatened by floating plastic, whales to zooplankton. There is a basic moral horror to see the images: a sea turtle with a plastic strip strangling its shell into an hourglass form; Plastic threads towing bumps that cut into his flesh and prevent the animal from hunting the animal. More than a million sea birds, 100,000 marine mammals and innumerable fish die in the North Pacific each year, either manually wrong with this unlocking, or engulf.

Pretty bad. But Moore soon learned that large tentacular waste balls were only the most visible signs of the problem; Others were much less obvious and much worse. Slide a finished net known as a Manta trawl, he discovered tiny plastic pieces, in a manner barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food in the water. He and his researchers analyzed, measured and trighed their samples and came to the following conclusion: by weight, this meaning of the sea contains six times more plastic than the plankton.

This statistic is dark - for marine animals, of course, but even more for humans. The more the pollution is invisible and ubiquitous, the more it will probably end up inside us. And there is growing and disturbing proof that we constantly ingest plastic toxins, and that even slight doses of these substances can significantly disrupt genes activity. "Each of us has this huge bodily load," says Moore. "You can take your serum to a laboratory now and they would find at least 100 industrial chemicals that were not there in 1950." The fact that these toxins do not cause violent and immediate reactions do not mean that they are benign: scientists are just beginning to look for long-term means in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

In simple terms, the plastic is a mixture of monomers related to become polymers, to which additional chemicals can be added for flexibility, flammability and other qualities. With regard to these substances, even the syllables are frightening. For example, if you think that perfluoroctanoic acid (PFOA) is not something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn, you're right. Recently, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has increased its PFOA classification to a probable carcinogen. Yet it is a common ingredient in the packaging that must be resistant to oil and heat. So, while there may not be Pfoa in the popcorn itself, if the PFOA is used to treat the bag, it is enough for lexivi in ​​popcorn oil when your Deluxe butter meets your overheated microwave oven than a single servition tip the amount of chemicals in your blood.

Other unpleasant chemical additives are known flame retardants such as poly-brominic diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been shown to the liver and the toxicity of thyroid, reproductive problems, and loss of memory in preliminary studies in animals. In the interior of vehicles, PbDes used in moldings and floor coverings, among others, combine with another group called phthalates to create a lot touted "new car smell. Let your new wheels in the sun for a few hours, and these substances can "off gas" at an accelerated rate, releasing harmful byproducts.

It is unfair, but, to singularize rapid catering and new cars. Pbed, to take an example, are used in many products, computers, rugs, and painting. As far as phthalates are concerned, we deploy about one billion books of them per year around the world despite the fact that California has recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make flexible and foldable plastic, eased phthalates millions of food packaged, cosmetic, varnish, pharmaceutical release coatings-in our blood, urine, saliva, seminal liquid, breast milk and amniotic liquid. In food containers and plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), that scientists discover can make amazing ravages in the body. We produce 6 billion books of this each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in almost all human beings who has been tested in the United States. We eat these laminating additives, drink them, breathe and absorb them through our skin every day.

The most disturbing, these chemicals can disrupt the endocrine system together delicate balance of hormones and glands that virtually affect all organs and cells by mimling female estrogen hormone. In marine environments, excess of estrogen led to Twilight discoveries of male fish and gulls that sprouted female sexual organs.

On earth, things are just as macabre. "Fertility rates have declined for some time now, and exposure to estrogen in particular synthesis of chemicals found in plastic products, can have a negative effect," says Marc Goldstein, MD, director of the Cornell Institute for Reproductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also pointed out that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: "prenatal exposure, even at very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in the breeding organs of a born baby. And after the baby is born, he is barely out of the woods. Frederick Vom Saal, Ph.D., Professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia which specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to "clearly orient polycarbonate bottles. They are particularly dangerous for newborns, including the brain, the immune system and gonads are still developing ". Dr. Vom Saal is looking for the pushes to throw each polycarbonate plastic element in his house, and stop buying plastic foods and canned boxes (cans are lined plastic) at the grocery store. "We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and anomalies in the prostate strain cell, which is the cell involved in human prostate cancer," he says. "That's enough to scare the hell out of me. At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, Mr. D., Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology, also found links between these chemicals and breast cancer.

As if the potential for cancer and the mutation was not sufficient, Dr. Vom Saal states in one of his studies that "prenatal exposure at very low doses of BPA increases the rate of post-natal growth in mice. And the rats. In other words, the pillaged BPA of rodents. Their insulin production has jumped in an extravagant way and then crushed in a state of resistance to the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced greater greasy cells, and many of them. A recent scientific article Dr. Vom Saal Coauthored contains this sentence Chilling: "These results suggest that the exposure in utero to the BPA contributes to the obesity epidemic that took place over the last two decades in the developed world, associated with The spectacular increase in the amount of plastic being produces each year ". Given this, it may not be quite by chance that America's vertiginous rise in diabetes, an increase of 735 percent since 1935 follows the same arc.

This news is sufficiently depressing so that the person reaches the bottle. The glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take a bottle of tequila, melt down and make another bottle of tequila. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, this triangle of promising arrows that appears on the products does not always mean an endless reuse; It simply identifies the type of plastic that the article is made from. And seven different plastics in common use, only two of them (labeled with n ° 1 inside the triangle and used in bottles of soda) and HDPE (labeled with n ° 2 inside the triangle and used in pitchers of milk) - a lot of a after sales. So, no matter how virtually you throw your smart bags and your shampoo bottles in your blue trash can, few of them will escape the discharge-only 3 to 5% of plastics are recycled in any way.

"There is no legal way to recycle a milk container in another milk container without adding a new blank layer of plastic," explains Moore, pointing out that, because the plastic melted at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the contaminated residue of its former content. Increase heat to get up, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So, the stuffed tips are mainly used to make entirely different products, things that do not go anywhere near our mouths, such as polar jackets and carpets. Therefore, unlike the glass of recycling, metal or paper, the recycling plastic does not always have less use of blank material. It does not help also that freshly done plastic is much cheaper.

Moore systematically finds drops of half-melted plastic in the ocean, as if the person making combustion achieved through the way through the process it was a bad idea and stopped (or fell from smoke) . "It's a preoccupation as a proliferable plastic around the world and people are lacking from the room to the trash and start burning plastic - you produce the most toxic gases known," he says. The Color Code BIN system can work in the Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in Africa remote or rural Peru.

"Except that the small sum that has been incinerated - and it's a very small amount - all a little plastic never realized exists," says Moore, describing how the molecular structure of the material resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic collapses in ever smaller fragments because it is exposed to the sun and elements. And none of these non-winning gastronomes of fragments disappears at any time soon: even when the plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too difficult for biodegradation.

The truth is that no one knows how long it will take for the plastic to biodegrade or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented things 144 years ago and the best estimate of science is that its natural disappearance will take several centuries. Meanwhile, each year, we abandon about 60 billion tonnes, most of which becomes disposable products mean only for single use. Set aside the question of why we create bottles of ketchup and six-packet rings that last half a millennium and consider the implications: the plastic never really disappears.

Ask a group of people to appoint a crushing global problem and you will hear about climate change, the Middle East or AIDS. Nobody, it is guaranteed, will cite slugly maintenance transport as a concern. And yet, sincere, the lens plastic pellets of the lentil form in its higher shape are particularly effective of chemicals of waste called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, including known cancers such as DDT and PCB. The United States has banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they stubbornly still in the environment, where they lock plastic because of its molecular trend to attract oils.

The word itself - rings - sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or pasta for children, but what it refers to what it is certainly not. Absorbing up to one million times the level of pollution of pop in their surrounding waters, becomes supersaturated anti-poison pills. They are light enough to blow like dust, to spread shipping containers and wash in ports, storm drains and streams. In the ocean, the sincere has easily confused for fish eggs by creatures that would like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a Bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these stubborn chemicals go directly to your table at your dinner.

A study estimated that Nurdeles now represent 10% of the debris of the plastic ocean. And once they are scattered in the environment, they are diabolically difficult to clean (think of confetti in a dead way). In places as distant as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 200 miles north-east of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they are commonly found mixed with the sandy beach. In 2004, Moore received a $ 500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad of ways to go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. During a visit to a polyvinyl chloride pipe plant (PVC), while traversed an area where the rails are discharged to the ground, it noticed that its trousers were filled with a fine plastic dust . By turning a corner, he lives wind drifts stacked against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore's voice becomes tense and his words spread in an urgent fall: "It's not the big trash in the beach. It is the fact that the whole biosphere has become mixed with these particles Plastic. What do they do to us "we breath them, the fish eat them, they are in our hair, they are in our skin."

Although the marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped the furrows and another plastic litter migrate to gyre largely from the Earth. This cup of polystyrene that you saw floating in the creek, if it is not picked up and specifically taken into a discharge, will eventually be washed at the sea. Once there, it will have many places to go: the North Pacific Gyre is only one of the five zones of this type of high pressure in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Each of these Gyres has its own version of the garbage patch because the plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40% of the sea. "It corresponds to a quarter of the surface of the earth," explains Moore. "So 25% of our planet is a toilet that never slips."

It was not supposed to be like that. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled an artificial plastic precursor called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt was established to perform a synthetic replacement of ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: save elephants! After a little DIY, he created celluloid. From there, each year brought a miraculous recipe: radius in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap and versatile-plastic seemed to be a revelation. And in many ways, it was. The plastic gave us bullet vests, credit cards, Slinky Spandex pants. He has led to medical breakthroughs, aerospace and computer science. And who among us does not have frisbee?

Plastic has its advantages; Nobody would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of his recent press releases, entitled "Plastic-Companion Companion Bags of a Family", reads as follows: "Very few people remember what life was like the plastic bags are an icon of convenience and art. Let us not forget the "beautiful" [sic] swirling bag and floating in American beauty? "

Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance graciously on the big screen lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa and Australia, prohibited, taxed or restricts the use of plastic bags because they clog the sewers and the lodge in the gorge of livestock. Like a pernicious kleenex, these fragile bags end up with trees and nibbled at fences, becoming eyes and worst: they also penetrate rainwater, creating simple breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying diseases.

Faced with the indignation of the public on images of stifling dolphins on "a companion of trust of a family", the American Council Plastics takes a defensive position, not sounding to the NRA: the plastics do not pollute, people do.

This has a point. Each of us throws around 185 pounds of plastic a year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet, should our products be fatal enough? Does a rejection change drop with us until the end of time? The razors and foam packaging foams are not a low consolation price for the destruction of the oceans of the world, not to mention our own body and health of future generations? "If" more is better "and it is the only mantra that we have, we are condemned," says Moore, by sending it.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, accepts. "If you could quickly advance 10,000 years and make an archaeological hollow ... you will find a small line of plastic," he told the Seattle Times last April. "What happened to these people? Well, they have eaten their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and could not reproduce. They did not last very long because they killed themselves. "

Wristwoves depressing, yes, but there are flanks of hope on the horizon. The green architect and the designer William McDonough have become an influential voice, not only in the environmental circles, but among the CEOs of Fortune 500. McDonough proposes a standard known as "cradle cradle" in which all the things manufactured. Must be reusable, without poise and beneficial over the long term. Its contempt is obvious when it holds a rubber duck, a common child's bath toy. The duck consists of PVC loaded with phthalate, which has been linked to cancer and reproduction prejudice. "What kind of people are we who we conceive like that?" McDonough asks. In the United States, it is commonly accepted that children's teething rings, cosmetics, food packaging, cars and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries - and many individual companies seem to re-examine. Currently, McDonough collaborates with the Chinese government to build seven cities using "building materials of the future", including a sufficiently safe fabric for eating and a new non-toxic polystyrene.

Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media shots such as Al Gore's an awkward truth, an awareness of the difficulty we have slapped the planet of the bitch. After all, unless we plan to colonize Mars soon, that's where we live and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or spending our days pumping drugs to deal with our endocrine systems. HAYWIRE. Cancer.

None of the plastic problems can be set overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely it is that, finally, the wisdom trumpet convenience and the cheap thumity. In the meantime, let the cleaning begin: the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) aggressively uses satellites to identify and eliminate "ghost nets", abandoned plastic fishing equipment that would never cease to kill. (Only one net recently released the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks and a loggerhead turtle.) New starch and corn biodegradable plastics arrived and Wal-Mart signed in as a customer. A rebellion of consumers against stupid and excessive packaging is on foot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak of "marine debris and hormonal disturbances" at a meeting in Sicily convened by the Vatican Scientific Advisor. This annual gathering, called the international seminars on planetary emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss the worst threats of humanity. Past topics included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.

The gray plastic kayak floats next to the Moore catamaran, Algoita, who lives in a slide in front of his house. This is not a charming kayak; In fact, it seems quite difficult. But it's floating, a two robust places of eight feet long. Moore stands on the Alguita bridge, hands on hips, looking at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same thing. He just informed Moore that he crossed the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just off. The two men shake his head.

"It's probably a $ 600 kayak," Moore said, adding: "I'm not even buying anymore. All I need will be to float." (In his opinion, the cast movie was a joke-Tom Hanks could have built a village with shit that would have washed on the floor during a storm.)

Looking at the kayak beating disconathily, it is difficult not to wonder what will become. The world is full of colder and sexy kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than the gray of the battle. The owner kayak is a boat lummox, 50 pounds of extruded subsiardes in an object that no one wants, but it will be there for centuries longer than we will do.

And as Moore stands on the bridge that looks in the water, it's easy to imagine doing the same 800 miles in the west, in Gyre. You can see its silhouette in the silver light, taken between the ocean and the sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on the ground. And below, you can see the house MadeMeure half submerged with forgotten things and thrown. As Moore looks on the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, soaking and skimming the water. One of the birds of travel, elegant like a hunting plane, wears a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives down and then boomerangs on the horizon. Faded away.

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