I can’t remember whether Susie posted on this, but ever since I read it I have been haunted by the specter of plastic accumulation. There really doesn’t seem to be much chance of escaping it, from the hundreds of totaled plastic-based cars I saw in the yard where my beloved Saturn sat before going on to its compacted reward, to the little bag that encases every brick of cheese and bag of rice I buy. I never thought much about it before, but now it just breaks my heart every day.

In 2001, in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, we published the results of our survey and the analysis we had made of the debris, reporting, among other things, that there are six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton. Our readers were as shocked as we were when we saw the yield of our first trawl. Since then we have returned to the area twice to continue documenting the phenomenon. During the latest trip, in the summer of 2002, our photographers captured underwater images of jellyfish hopelessly entangled in frayed lines, and transparent filter feeding organisms with colored plastic fragments in their bellies.

Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his colleagues have discovered that floating plastic fragments accumulate hydrophobic—that is, non- water-soluble—toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.

The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5×1015) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish? After what I have seen firsthand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.