New York Harbor is fed from the north by a steady, mighty flow of fresh water from the Hudson River.
Long Island, Manhattan, and Staten Island nearly meet, and the gaps between them are among the most important commercial waterways on Earth. It’s the busiest port on America’s east coast, and one of the busiest in the world.
A Hundred Million Invaders
NY/NJ Baykeeper's War on Microplastic
Reporting by Konstantin Kakaes
I.
The Hudson River comes down from the north with a steady, mighty flow of fresh water.
Long Island, Manhattan, and Staten Island nearly meet, and the gaps between them are among the most important commercial waterways on Earth. It’s the busiest port on America’s east coast, and one of the busiest in the world.
By plying the harbor with manta trawl nets, designed to capture small pieces of floating plastic, NY/NJ Baykeeper estimates that at any moment, there are 165 million pieces of plastic floating in New York Harbor alone. Billions more float through the rest of the world’s oceans.
Much of the plastic waste comes from polystyrene, the plastic used to make foam to-go food boxes and coffee cups. Single-use grocery store bags are are also particularly irksome, because the average plastic bag is used for only 12 minutes before it is discarded.
In 2015, just over 1.5 million tons of plastic came into the port as a commodity, ready to be molded, formed, and shaped into objects that we use every day.
Much of that plastic ends up back in New York Harbor, this time as floating debris. NY/NJ Baykeeper is on a mission to understand the plastic's journey—whether it’s from shipping, littering, stormwater runoff (which is also usually from littering), or wastewater discharge. So they launched a research initiative to count and categorize the plastic samples they collect from New York Harbor.
Plastic is cheap to make, and while its intended use may be brief, it lasts a very, very long time.
In 2015, just over 1.5 million tons of plastic came into the port as a commodity, ready to be molded, formed, and shaped into objects that we use every day.
Much of that plastic ends up back in New York Harbor, this time as floating debris. NY/NJ Baykeeper is on a mission to understand the plastic's journey—whether it’s from shipping, littering, stormwater runoff (which is also usually from littering), or wastewater discharge. So they launched a research initiative to count and categorize the plastic samples they collect from New York Harbor.
By plying the harbor with manta trawl nets, designed to capture small pieces of floating plastic, NY/NJ Baykeeper estimates that at any moment, there are 165 million pieces of plastic floating in New York Harbor alone. Billions more float through the rest of the world’s oceans.
Much of the plastic waste comes from polystyrene, the plastic used to make foam to-go food boxes and coffee cups. Single-use grocery store bags are are also particularly irksome, because the average plastic bag is used for only 12 minutes before it is discarded.
Plastic is cheap to make, and while its intended use may be brief, it lasts a very, very long time.
Matter is made of atoms.
Atoms combine into molecules.
Interestingly, molecules feel much different than the atoms they are made of. Hydrogen is the lightest atom. It’s a gas at room temperature.
So is oxygen. But combine them—two hydrogen atoms for each oxygen atom, and you get H2O—water.
The water molecule feels so different from hydrogen and oxygen, separately. The same is true of plastics. They are made, mostly, of carbon and hydrogen.
When these combine together in long chains, they act very differently than carbon or hydrogen would on their own.
Water, of course, covers most of the Earth’s surface. It doesn’t feel like lots of little molecules, but like what it is: the ocean.
Oceans are so big that they are a metaphor for bigness itself. They are so big that people got in the habit of throwing things in them to make the things disappear.
The ocean would swallow them up into its depths
–or so people thought.
Water, of course, covers most of the Earth’s surface. It doesn’t feel like lots of little molecules, but like what it is: the ocean.
Oceans are so big that they are a metaphor for bigness itself. They are so big that people got in the habit of throwing things in them to make the things disappear.
The ocean would swallow them up into its depths
–or so people thought.
II.
In the mid-19th century lots of people started playing billiards. This boom was ignited by Michael Phelan, an Irish immigrant who came up with both technical tweaks—adding diamonds to the table to help in aiming—and a series of competitions that stoked interest.
II.
In the mid-19th century lots of people started playing billiards. This boom was ignited by Michael Phelan, an Irish immigrant who came up with both technical tweaks—adding diamonds to the table to help in aiming—and a series of competitions that stoked interest.
But the billiard balls had been made of ivory, in particular the center part of elephant tusks.
As a result, ivory was getting too expensive and rare, so a New York billiards company posed a challenge—could anyone produce a substitute?
In 1907 Leo Baekeland, an inventor in Yonkers, New York, made, in his laboratory a “solidified matter yellowish and hard.”
In his notebook, the next morning, Baekeland wrote: “this looks promising.”
This new substance, which he called “Bakelite” would change the world.
It was the first synthetic plastic: a mix of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that could, like celluloid, be remolded into just about any shape. It was rare—a luxury. Coco Chanel made it into jewelry.
Meanwhile, in Germany, a chemist named Hans von Pechmann accidentally created polyethylene, which is today the world’s most common plastic. Pechmann stumbled across it while researching dangerous gases.
Peter Stackpole
The second world war changed the fortune of plastics. There were shortages of copper. There were shortages of aluminum. There were shortages of steel. Inspired by the scarcity of these metals, the American plastics industry banded together, and set out to make a world out of plastic.
In 1946, they threw a party: the “National Plastics Exposition”, at the Grand Central Palace in Manhattan. People lined up for blocks to come see the new plastics.
The industry thrived as few ever have.
III.
Our society today is defined by plastic.
It’s difficult to get through a day without it. It has taken the place of much more than ivory in billiard balls. The problem is that plastic lasts effectively forever.
If you had those hydrogen atoms on their own, they’d float away, evaporating into the sky.
The carbon could compress into a diamond, or graphite, as in pencils. But once combined by the complicated processes of industrial chemistry, they form bonds that are incredibly tough to break.
Industry got so good at making plastic that they can do it very, very cheaply. As a result, the lowly valued material is often meant for only one use.
But its afterlife is much, much longer.
IV.
NY/NJ Baykeeper trawls around New York Harbor to study and quantify the rogue plastic. They leave from Keyport, NJ, a small town tucked into the southwest corner of the harbor. Keyport used to be a major oyster-producing town, until pollution and overfishing led to troubles for that industry half a century ago.
IV.
NY/NJ Baykeeper trawls around New York Harbor to study and quantify the rogue plastic . They leave from Keyport, NJ, a small town tucked into the southwest corner of the harbor. Keyport used to be a major oyster-producing town, until pollution and overfishing led to troubles for that industry half a century ago.
They’ve never taken a sample that doesn’t have at least some plastic pollution. This might be a small piece of a fork, or a bag, or something larger.
But “the tiny stuff is what we worry about the most,” says Sandra Meola of NY/NJ Baykeeper.
Chris Jordan
The tiny stuff, known as microplastic, is problematic since it’s easily mistaken by fish and birds for food, and can cause digestive-tract damage and starvation when ingested, and can tangle birds and fish up.
Plastic can also absorb toxins present in water. Many of these toxins would break down naturally if not for the plastics that absorb and protect them. Fish sometimes eat the toxic-containing plastics.
And then sometimes humans eat the fish. As plastics move up the food chain, the problem is not just the plastics themselves, but the toxins, like PCBs and others, which the plastics preserve.
V.
It’s very difficult for us to get away from plastic in the modern world.
—but it is possible to minimize, or, with heroic effort, even eliminate—our use of disposable plastics. Many of the changes need to come from adjusting our lifestyles. Some of the changes are regulatory.
James McBey
Italy banned plastic bags entirely in 2011. So have many American cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and Austin. Washington, DC, and San Francisco have enacted legislation that aims to reduce plastic bag use, mandating that businesses charge for them. In New Jersey a bill to mandate a small charge for plastic bags is held up in the legislature. So too in New York.
Many states have recycling refunds for plastic bottles—New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Connecticut and California.
But regulation alone can’t fix the problem.
A cultural shift is needed too.
The benefits of plastic are obvious, but the costs are hidden. We need to acknowledge that our convenience comes at a cost, and in many cases it’s an unnecessary cost.
It just isn’t that hard to cut back on single-use plastics. Each step cuts the demand, and makes a small difference. You can ask the owner of the local take-out place to use compostable containers. You can speak up to government officials, whether at a city council meeting, state legislature, or even nationally.
Plastic lasts even though it would be better if it didn’t.
The works of humans that last should be those everyone wants to last– the Statue of Liberty ought to stand watch over the harbor long after we stop using plastic that no one really needs, plastic whose permanence threatens not just the ocean, but all who live near it.
Now it's your turn! Help us track plastic pollution along the waterways of New York and New Jersey.
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