The Plastic Soup Trip

Read all about my trip to San Francisco, the Islands of Hawaii and L.A. where I will dig into environmental disaster number one: The Plastic Soup.

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About 8 months ago I stayed at this family in Kailua (Oahu. Hawaii). They lived next to the house where Obama stays every winter. No one wanted to go on a picture with Obama that winter, but they did. They were the only democrats in the neighbourhood... Oh and they had two cute turtles!

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Innovations to Fight the Soup

Time flies when you are having fun. I have been back in the Netherlands for quite a while and already worked on a lot of cool stuff. One of the things I want to share with you is the Plastic Soup Lab. I have been part of this team for half a year and we just launched our new website.

Here I will implement all the knowledge I have gathered during my Plastic Soup Trip so we can create the best solutions possible. We will also share the latest Plastic Soup Tech news and opinions on new innovations out there. See you there!

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The End of the Beginning

The 14th of August I stepped on an airplane to San Francisco, Hawai'i and L.A.. Now, nearly 40 days later, my trip has come to an end. I have spoken a lot of inspiring people, saw a lot of amazing places and my head is filled with fresh information and innovative ideas.  This is not the end, this is just the beginning. The coming year I will use this knowledge in my work at the Plastic Soup Foundation to create new ways of fighting the Plastic Soup. Besides that I will do presentations and workshops at companies to teach them all about this problem and show them how they can change thins.  If you want to have more information about me, or are you interested in a presentation and/or workshop on how you can fight the Plastic Soup? Mail me!

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Today I met Captain Charles Moore. He discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area between Hawai'i and California filled with plastics. Now we know plastics are in all our waters, so we call it a Plastic Soup. Had a great talk with him about new discoveries in the field of Plastic Soup and possible solutions. Oh, and he has the coolest license plate ever. ‪#nodebri

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What can the Prices of Plastics Teach Us?

PET (polyethylene terephthalate) is a plastic we all know very well, because it is used in soda bottles and other types of packaging. These figures are the costs of different types of PET available on the market.

These figures can answer a lot of questions about plastics and recycling:

Why do we use plastics for packaging? A soda bottle weighs about 12,5 grams. One kilogram of PET can make 80 soda bottles. That is 12.5 grams of PET for about 1,25 cents. Very, very cheap and lightweight. You will never get those figures with glass, because glass requires a certain thickness of the bottle = muchos weight.

But there is another reason why the industry uses plastics for soda bottles: it can be molded. Why fill a container with bottles of air, if you can ship a little tube (see #1) and mold it into a bottle later? So low weight + low volume + low costs = more profit. 

Why should we separate different plastics? Just look at the figures and you will see the answer. There are a lot of different plastics. Like paint, it's hard to get a bright yellow color out of a mix of multiple kinds of paint. The more you mix them up, the less you can do with it. The properties of the mixed plastics material are not good. 

Why don't we use the plastics out of the Plastic Soup for our products? Plastics out of the oceans are even worse compared to the mixed stream of recycled plastics. Not only is it mixed, but the plastics are brittle and covered with micro-organisms. preparing them for production takes a lot of effort, raising the price per kilogram. Why pay a high price for these plastics, if you can get a cheaper mixed stream or even a single stream?

Well.. here marketing is starting to change things. Today you can buy jeans or bottles (partly) made out of ocean plastics. Because the material is part of the marketing, the price per kilogram goes up. People want to be part of the solution, so they are willing to pay more for a low quality material. An interesting trend and possible solution for cleaner oceans.

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You can go to this beach every day and fill a bucket of plastic

Cheryl King, Hawaii Wildlife Fund

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Sharktastics: Plastic chewed on by fish / birds. A word invented by Cheryl King from the Hawaii Wildlife Fund. These artworks are made with only these types of plastics that washed up on beaches. 

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a plastic bottle with bite marks from fish and birds, a common thing to find on littered beaches. #plasticsouptrip #plasticsoup #hawaii

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Fishings Nets are the Tumbleweeds of the Ocean

Kyle from NOAA

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Marine life on a buoy: a Plastic Sphere.

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"If we don't help them, no one will."

That's why Kyle and his team went on a 21-day-boattrip to Midway Island to clean it up in 2013. For people who don't know: This island is literally in the middle of nowhere. To get there from Oahu is 2100 kilometers. To remove plastic soup from this area you need a big boat, experienced free divers and muscles. "We do free diving because of the danger of entanglement. When you are cutting up a net under water, the ropes can get everywhere."

The fishing nets are dangerous a danger for the inhabitants."The animals are curious by nature and start playing in the nets. We find a lot of animals being entangled." The area is home of the endangered monk seal and green sea turtle (honu in Hawaiian), the reason why the work of NOAA is so important. "If we don't help them, no one will."

So what did they find way out there? When Kyle showed me the numbers, my jaw dropped. Some examples:

44 individual net clusters

30,492 hard plastic fragments

5705 oyster aquaculture spacers

4781 bottle caps

2214 beverage bottles

980 toothbrushes and personal care items

886 slippers

Total weight: 13795 kilograms of plastic marine debris. In the middle of nowhere. More information about NOAA here. All pictures are property of NOAA.

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Found a lot of plastic rocks on Kamilo Beach. Lava rock and all kinds of plastics molten together.

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Kamilo a.k.a. Trash Beach

My whole trip I looked at pictures of trash beach. Plastics everywhere. I expected heaps of plastic, but as we turned around the corner the beach actually looked... rather clean. A dam of wood blocked the beach, like someone wanted to stop the plastic from coming in. Looks can be deceiving though.

A few weeks ago, the Big Island was hit by two tropical storms. The East Coast of Hawaii (Puna), was hit hard. Trees cracked and large waves took the debris into the ocean. Because of the currents, some of it ended up at Kamilo Beach. The combination of large waves and wood changed it. The wood became a large dam, unfortunately not blocking any plastics. The beach was filled with small plastics, like colored glitter on a muffin.

I've seen this at the beach in Kailua, but that was just a thin line of debris. Here, I could not pick up sand without picking up plastic. Blue, turquoise and white were the dominant colors of the plastics. Sometimes I spotted a rare red piece. It was a fascinating, yet disturbing sight. 

In front of the wooden dam there were a lot of little twigs floating around in the water and microplastics. At first I couldn't see them, but after taking my hand out of the water it was covered with tiny dots.

The big shocker came when i starting walking inland. The big waves coated the beach with small plastics, but pushed all the large pieces into the bushes. I started recognizing things: a plastic container for shampoo, a buoy, a toothbrush and some rope. 

In the bushes large nets with lava rock and plastics blocked the way. I tried to pull a net out, but it was impossible to move it. The massacre went on and on as I struggled my way through the bushes.  

Sand, wood, lava rock and plastic, that is all there is on Kamilo Beach. Many times I thought I was crazy spending all this time and money to travel to a dirty beach in Hawaii. But this beach really shows how urgent our plastic soup problem is.

A man-made material has not only became part of our way of living, but also part of nature. 

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The road to Kamilo a.k.a. "Trash" beach

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Zero Waste in San Francisco

Three bins to rule them all The San Francisco government provided their citizens with a very easy system: three bins for all your trash:

The green bin is for all the compostables: plants, food scraps and soiled paper

The blue bin is for recyclables: bottles, cans, plastics (packaging), clean paper

The black bin: all the rest

Besides that they have a place where you can hand in toxics, big items electronics and clothing. Recology is the company that collects all the waste and they recycle it at different sites in the Bay Area. This is in short how to hope to achieve zero waste.

Green  The green bin and the whole composting program is a big success in the Bay Area. 600.000 tons of compostables are collected every year. By collecting all the food, from citizens and restaurants, plants and soiled paper, Recology creates high grade soil. The soil is so good the wineries in California want it to grow their grapes. There is a lot of protein in the soil and the grapes tend to like it. Blue This is where the magic happens. Paper, cans and plastic are mixed together, but Recology has a way of separating all the different materials. Won't get in to detail, but by using different separation techniques like sorting by density or using a simple magnet, they can separate the paper, steel & aluminum and plastics.

Black Everything in the black bin goes to a landfill. San Francisco does not "thermally recycle" (burn) their garbage, like a lot of countries in Europe do. Robert Reed from Recology was really clear on that: "Burning is bad." I will dive into this topic in another blogpost. Now 470.000 tons of garbage still end up in landfills. Recycling or... selling? "So okey, they still use landfills, but they recycle right?" Well, kinda. The recycled plastics are either mixed together so they become  a black type of plastic used in park-benches or they are sold to China for roughly $ 75,-. What they do with it? They don't know.

This was a bit of a bummer, because I expected something spectacular. I expected high quality recycling, all the plastics in different containers, but this doesn't sound like it. There is a good reason why high quality recycling doesn't happen according to Reed: "We use so many different kinds of plastics in our products and containers, it's too hard for us to separate everything." 

Make it less complex The environmental department acknowledges this problem. Take a soda bottle: The cap, the bottle and the wrap are all different plastics. Upcoming in San Francisco is the Tetrapak-packaging: a sandwich of plastic-paper-aluminum used for all kinds of drinks. Impossible to separate, let alone recycle. The techniques to recycle different materials are there and improving, but the growing market of different materials makes it hard to do good. So what to do?

Telling companies they can't use a certain type of material is probably even harder, probably impossible. The ban of plastic bags and the upcoming ban for plastic bottles in public spaces only helps to reduce the volume, not the types of material. Consumers can be educated in separating different materials at home, but with all the different plastics out, consumers will probably not recognize the difference. And if they do, how many bins would you need? As long as this complex problem isn't solved, Zero Waste is yet another American dream. 

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When I was young, we reused glass. Nowadays, we throw away plastic.

Sweet old lady during a bus ride