By Dr. Robert Thorson
One of the things I really like about late winter is the burst of litter that precedes the burst of spring. This acute exposure to our own trash focuses attention on the wasteful, synthetic, toxic materialism we’ve come to enjoy, and which is slowly poisoning the world’s oceans.
A steady dribble of roadside litter accumulates during November, December and January. First, the illegal disposal of trash is far less likely to draw societal scorn and police attention because the dark nights are longer. Conversely, the daytime viewing for what is now a public problem is shortened. And when we do see the litter, it’s duller because the brightness and color used by marketers to sell products are muted by the diminished radiation and cloudier skies caused by earth’s seasonal tilt.
Finally, during winter, the emotional response to our primate sensory system shifts inward toward personal issues associated with food, warmth and human connections. And except for die-hard winter sports enthusiasts, this semi-hibernation distracts us from outdoor nature.
On top of all this comes the smother of snow, which does more than hide litter. The beauty of this white veil conditions us to see the world as purer than it actually is. Frequent snows and cold temperatures hold the veil together until it eventually melts.
And even then, it lingers longest where snowplows leave low ridges parallel to roadsides, sidewalks and parking lots. Entombed within those ridges is a hidden concentration of litter, like dirty money in a secret bank account.
Eventually, the withdrawals are complete and the snow is gone. The litter brightens, and begins to irritate us. But it’s still too cold and wet for neighborhoods and volunteer groups to pick up the ditches and pavement edges. It’s too early for town cleanup crews to mobilize, to put away their winter things (shovels, salt, sand, plows, trucks) and take out those of spring (brooms, disposal bags, water hoses, edging tools). The calendar result is that we must stare at our trash for about a month, dealing with it each day like a bad hangover that re-appears each morning.
This is only the first half of my land-sea story. Trash that isn’t picked up washes into gutters, drains, streams, rivers, estuaries and the sea. In general, the concentration decreases, being highest on the edges of parking lots, and lowest when floating away from the mouth of a broad estuary. Local concentrations develop behind trees fallen across streams, in eddies alongside rivers and on beaches. But large storms and floods eventually come and take them away, floating them to the nearest ocean.
Until recently, the aphorism “out of sight, out of mind” has worked pretty well for the problem of land litter. Beyond the estuary, we thought, the litter either sank, quickly decayed or became so diluted it didn’t matter. But now, thanks to serious sailors and GPS tracking, we’ve found new and bigger twists to seafaring junk – visible vortexes, enormous eddies, sea-sized swirls and gigantic gyres of slowly degrading plastic residues larger than the continental United States, smack dab in the middle of the world’s oceans. The land trash that de-concentrates from roadside to seaside re-concentrates into great swirls produced by sluggish, stationary currents.
There are no half-eaten cheeseburgers or soggy doughnut holes out there. They’ve long since decomposed and been eaten. But the plastic bags and bottles remain, slowly swirling as a dilute slurry of millimeter-scale particles traveling just below the surface and chemically reacting with the intense subequatorial sunlight and sea water.
The largest gyre, in the north Pacific, is one big chemical reaction nearly the size of Australia. In that cauldron, plastics decompose to polymers and other synthetic molecules, which travel up the food chain from microscopic zooplankton, the small invertebrates feeding on them, their fish predators, and those of us who eat marine fish. At the molecular scale, to eat a slice of broiled tuna is to eat a de-concentrated version of the plastic bag you saw blowing in the wind a decade ago.
I love litter melt-out season for the same reason I love writing environmental wake-up columns. It gives me hope that someday, the world will notice what’s coming down.