Bruce Bisset: Surgery needed for plastic age

Bruce Bisset

Frenchman Benôit Lecomte, 51, is either insane or a superhero – or maybe both – for setting out on Tuesday to swim across the Pacific from Japan to San Francisco.

He's already swum the Atlantic, 20 years ago, but this latest effort is not just a freestyle ultra-marathon; it's designed to check the health of our largest ocean, including a traverse of the so-called "plastic island" midway across.

That's the area – now half the size of Europe – in the North Pacific Gyre where plastic waste has accumulated to the point it appears an almost-solid mass atop the water.

There's conjecture Lecomte may not be able to swim through it, so densely packed is the debris.

Tuesday was, incidentally, World Environment Day, and in keeping with this year's theme of "beating plastic pollution" Lecomte will be accompanied by a yacht crewed by scientists sampling and testing the "plastisphere" — the zone where organic and man-made material come together.

Over the course of the 8800km six-month voyage the researchers will study the health of phytoplankton, the impact of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear accident, and the results of sealife making a home on discarded plastic.

They'll have plenty of subject matter: humans have so far manufactured about 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic and more than 8 million tonnes ends up in the ocean every year.

On present trends by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish, by weight, in the seas.

A United Nations report released concurrently focuses on dealing with "single-use" plastics in particular, such as shopping bags, drink ring-packs, straws, and plates and cutlery. Not only are these the least recycled, they make up much of what ends up in the ocean.

An increasing number of countries have banned or are moving to ban plastic bags, and there are now many alternatives for other single-use items: plates made from bamboo or palm leaves, edible cutlery made from sorghum flour, and even a form of imitation leather made from pineapple leaves.

New Zealand is lagging well behind the international trend to reduce plastic usage, though it seems Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage's push to ban plastic shopping bags may soon become government policy.

Meanwhile our agricultural waste stream could be the raw material for useful products. Mycofoam is an alternate to expanded polystyrene, made from agricultural waste placed into moulds and mixed with live mycelium fungus, which grows into a finished shape that can be dried and used as a biodegradable packing material.

And who knew plastic could be made from milk? Some early plastics were, until oil-derivatives came to dominate the market. Now new techniques are producing a durable biopolymer "yarn" from waste casein to weave into textiles; it only takes about 6 litres of milk to make a whole dress.

Perhaps our biggest challenge is to find ways to use the mountain of harder plastics building up in dumps country-wide now that China has stopped taking it; certainly we should deal with this waste ourselves instead of looking to foist it off on other, poorer, countries.

This provides added incentive to councils to invest in chipping and compacting plants to produce roading and construction materials, such as the "plascrete" that is a home-grown invention. It should also fuel impetus to reduce plastic use at source: the multi-layered packaging and wrapping that everything you can name seems to come in nowadays, regardless of good reason.

A simple lesson in becoming tidy Kiwis is to "refuse what you can't re-use". It's one we all need to start following, every day of the year.

Because otherwise we'll drown in it.