More Plastic Than Life
Captain Charles Moore on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
On June 10, the Save The Albatross Coalition (a program of Zero Waste USA and a host of aligned nonprofits and institutions) hosted Captain Charles Moore for a morning with the man who found the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He discovered it in 1997, almost by accident, steering home through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre after a sailboat race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. The patch he sailed into has not improved in the decades since. By his own measurements, it has gotten worse on a scale most people would refuse to believe.
In 1999, two years after that first crossing, he came back with a net and found six kilos of plastic for every kilo of zooplankton in that water. His most recent trawls put the figure at 246 kilos of plastic for every kilo of zooplankton. That newer figure is still on its way to peer review, and Moore allowed that it may come down somewhat once distance from the center of the patch is factored in. “It’s still going to be a very big number,” he said. The most remote stretch of ocean on Earth now holds more plastic than life.
The lubricant of globalization
Moore calls plastic “the lubricant of globalization,” and he means it as history, not metaphor. Synthetic polymers were spun out of petroleum refining waste after World War II, when an economy retooling from war to consumer production found a use for a byproduct nobody had wanted. The result was a tsunami of new products. It was also, because no one priced the consequences, an invasion of plastic pollution that no one has managed to quantify.
He has little patience for the word “externality.” The pollution isn’t external to anything. “There is no such thing as a side effect,” he said. “They’re all effects.” The reach of those effects is now total. A recent collision between a Chinese space station and a fleck of orbital debris forced an emergency evacuation of the crew. Moore’s own entry into the field was humbler and just as telling: fishing nets fouling ship propellers, millions of dollars in damage to the fleets. The trash was already everywhere. It simply hid well.
Hiding in plain sight
It hides because the open Pacific is breathtakingly clear. There is little upwelling in the subtropical high, little nutrient flow, little algae, so a diver sees blue for hundreds of meters. From a satellite you see only ripples and reflection, which is excellent for measuring wind speed and useless for spotting plastic drifting at or just below the surface. That clarity is why, for years, no one believed an island of trash could exist out there.
The proof comes from a manta trawl, a net shaped like a manta ray dragging a third-of-a-millimeter mesh behind the research vessel Algalita. Pull it through a kilometer of that gorgeous empty blue and the collection bag fills with fragments. Moore’s longtime colleague Shelly Moore (no relation), who first quantified plastic pellets on Orange County beaches, helped him track the trend across eleven fixed stations from 1999 to 2019. The count per square meter climbed from a couple of particles to more than sixty. Dr. Nikolai Maximenko of the University of Hawaii modeled the patch independently. Moore’s trawls confirmed the model with uncomfortable precision.
Why you can’t clean it up
The most useful thing Moore did was dismantle the fantasy of the cleanup. Working from his book Plastic Ocean, he once calculated how long it would take to tow the plastic out of all five ocean gyres, which together cover roughly 40 percent of the ocean’s surface. His estimate was 79,000 years, and that was the static number, before accounting for the plastic still pouring in.
Then came Boyan Slat, the Dutch teenager whose Ocean Cleanup project made Moore its foil. “Captain Moore said it would take 79,000 years,” Slat told audiences. “I can do it in five.” Moore’s reply was a slide showing the arithmetic. 79,000 minus 5 is 8,995. The pitch worked anyway. It won lottery funding, tugboats, and a 600-meter boom built from plastic sewer pipe on a decommissioned airfield in Alameda. Towed into a U out near Hawaii, the rigid pipe undulated like a snake in the swell and broke apart in short order. The wreckage was hauled back across the Pacific at tremendous expense and turned into sunglasses.
To show why the geometry never worked, Moore used the island of Hawaii as a ruler. Trawling a single 200-meter-wide boom at the slow speed required to actually trap debris, sweeping an area the size of that island would take about six years. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre holds many islands’ worth of that area, and the patch isn’t a fixed deposit anyway. It’s a dispersal zone fed from every coast, with the plastic spreading through the entire water column and raining to the seafloor as it breaks down into marine snow. Cleaning the surface in the middle treats the one place the problem is most visible and least fixable. Moore quoted Aristotle: youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope. We are all quick to hope the ocean can be vacuumed clean.
The film: a graveyard, eight times the size of Korea
To let the audience feel what twenty years had done to him, Moore screened a documentary by the Korean Broadcasting System, the Korean equivalent of PBS, which sent a three-person crew on his fifth and final research voyage in 2019. The film traces the 25-ton catamaran a thousand kilometers out, the trawls hauled day and night, the petri dishes of “plastic soup” where plankton should be.
It also does the detective work. Cone-shaped caps recovered from the patch turn out to be eel trap parts, “Made in Korea,” lost by the hundreds: one fishing region alone sheds an estimated 300 to 500 traps a day. Plastic buoys “Made in China” wash up by the thousands on Korean beaches. The clockwise North Pacific current carries all of it to the same place, a patch the film measures at eight times the size of the Korean peninsula. One crew member, Raquel, tries to scoop fragments with a hand net, gives up against the endless spread, and comes aboard in tears. Moore narrates his fifth visit plainly. He feels he has failed, because after twenty years of telling people how to change, he is looking at the worst he has ever seen.
The film closes on the conclusion Moore has spent his career arriving at. Plastic is in our food, our water, our beer, our honey, our salt, and the air we breathe. His discovery in the middle of the ocean was the first sign that plastic was out of control. We now know it is a threat to humanity itself. By current estimates, within thirty years the ocean could hold as much trash as marine life by weight.
What the science is actually finding
The damage is biological, not just aesthetic. The clear, nutrient-poor gyre supports a fragile drifting community that juvenile sea turtles depend on to grow up safe from predators. That community is shrinking. The purple Janthina snails Moore once saw at garden-snail size now come up small. Fish are smaller. In one survey, 35 percent of four lanternfish species had eaten plastic, around two pieces each. Seabirds are smaller and sicker, with researchers now proposing a name for the condition: plasticosis.
The microplastics are worse than the visible debris, and the nanoplastics worse still. Asked about them, Moore was blunt about the limits of the tools. Raman spectroscopy reaches down to about one micron and identifies the polymer, but the smaller the particle, the less it will tell you, and capturing microplastics dispersed through the water column simply isn’t possible. The Moore Institute was among the first two labs accredited to measure microplastics in drinking water, and even so, he said, the idea of pure and clean is “out the window.” Chris Sparnicht of STAC pointed attendees to a companion piece on nanoplastics at albatrosscoalition.org for an overview and links to the peer-reviewed detail.
Stop it at the source
So if not cleanup, what? Moore’s organizations (Algalita Marine Research and Education, the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research, and his for-profit Plastic Intelligence) are betting on open science aimed upstream. The macro debris can still be chased: ghost-net “wrangling” tags drifting fishing nets with satellite buoys so vessels can retrieve them before the roughly 52 tons that hit the Hawaiian archipelago each year wreck the coral. But that is a drop in the bucket. The real work is “last chance capture” at the mouths of rivers, and better still, not making the waste in the first place. No burn, no bury, Moore said. Today most recovered plastic is too dirty to recycle and ends up incinerated or converted to fuel and burned, which is precisely the outcome his coalition exists to end.
That framing carried the discussion afterward. Silvia Petrova, formerly of USAID, put it simply: rather than clean up the mess, stop producing the plastic and manage what remains by Zero Waste principles. Clare Romanik of the Marine Debris Foundation, which has funded Algalita, spoke to the upstream sources in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Pacific Islands. George Koshy described student programs carrying the work into classrooms abroad, with a new push to bring researchers to students in Africa rather than fight visa hurdles to bring students here. From Kenya, Muguro David Ngige, a certified Zero Waste associate, described monitoring his country’s coast and finding turtles dead from eating clear plastic they had mistaken for jellyfish.
A patient man
Moore is assembling twenty years of trawl data, with Maximenko, Shelly Moore, and chief scientist Gwen Lattin, into the scientific paper that will close this chapter of his fieldwork. Peer review is slow, and he would not name a date. “I’m a patient man,” he said. “I’m gonna keep pushing.”
Below are summaries from the Q&A’s from June 24 and September 23.
Q&A June 24: “What’s the plan now?”
The June 24 encore drew a different room: Surfrider and Recology veterans from California, county staff from Minneapolis, organizers from Baja California Sur and Vancouver Island, and a microplastics researcher from the University of Patras in Greece. Shafia Nisa of Hakuna Matata Vibes opened the questions with the one everyone was holding. What’s the plan now?
Moore’s answer fit in a sentence. If it can’t be recycled, upcycled, or reused, it can’t be made. Half of all plastic is packaging, made to be ripped off and thrown away, and “away” usually means the environment. “Production equals pollution,” he said, and an industry whose bottom line runs on production won’t change that on its own.
Neil Seldman, a founding board member of the Save The Albatross Coalition and campaign manager for Zero Waste USA’s Cornucopia campaign, asked whether it was time to tax plastic and ban single-use products. Moore pointed to oil as the precedent. Petroleum is liquid plastic, he said, and plastic is solid petroleum. Oil spills can already be chemically fingerprinted back to the company responsible, and the same fingerprinting is now coming online for plastic. “We already have a lot of evidence of who’s the worst.”
Roy Cooper of ReUp Creative pushed back. Companies with bottomless budgets treat fines as a cost of doing business. Moore agreed that’s the crux, and his answer is measurement. His company Plastic Intelligence builds a quality-assured baseline of a community’s or corporation’s plastic footprint. Pay the tax if you like. If the footprint grows, the penalties climb a ladder.
Rachana Shah of Beyond Plastics explained why that ladder is hard to build. Her group has tried four years running to pass a plastics reduction bill in New York, and four years running lobbyists for Amazon, Kraft, Coca-Cola, and the American Chemistry Council have beaten it, partly by warning labor unions of lost jobs. Moore said the opposition even includes some environmentalists, who defend plastic packaging because it cuts food losses between farm and fork. He’d rather packaging came with a clock on it. A bag of potato chips, he said, shouldn’t be something you can inherit.
Rachana also asked whether any species manage to avoid eating plastic. None escape it, Moore said, because eating isn’t the only exposure. Birds weave it into nests, deep-sea worms build their tubes from it, and jellyfish carry it in their bodies. “Everything is used” is a rule of ecosystems, and plastic is now part of everything.
That leaves the work local. The global plastics treaty has been stalled by the major producing nations, Moore said, so grassroots recycling and Zero Waste groups are the fallback. Neil argued the fallback is really the engine: bottle bills and bag bans all began in single communities and rippled upward. He recalled schoolchildren whose protest helped push McDonald’s off foam packaging, and the record bears him out. A fifth-grade class in Closter, New Jersey, founded Kids Against Pollution in 1987, and McDonald’s dropped its foam clamshells in 1990. Chris Sparnicht added that California, which would rank as the world’s fourth-largest economy on its own, moves national markets with every plastics law it passes. Moore offered his own example: Long Beach Organic, which he founded, now runs nine community gardens on former vacant lots, with surplus produce going to students at Cal State Long Beach.
And the paper? Moore reported that the twenty years of trawl data had finally been cleaned up, much of it from pre-digital field records, and a meeting to begin the final draft was set for early July. After that, it goes out for comment before peer review.
For those who asked: the KBS film can’t be posted online. The broadcaster has granted permission only for educational screenings like this one.
Q&A September 23: Who’s still watching the patch?
The September session started mid-afternoon in California, which made it 1:35 a.m. in Kenya for Muguro David Ngige, 4 a.m. in Colombo for Selen Yildiz, and dawn in Taipei for Yi-Hsien Chiu, a fisheries official and the son of a fisherman. Hayden Smith and his Sea Cleaners team joined from Auckland.
Rick Anthony, whom Moore credited with founding the Save The Albatross Coalition alongside Neil Seldman, brought the conversation back to its namesake. The albatross, Moore said, is the ocean’s champion plastic detective, scanning thousands of miles of surface for anything that looks like prey. A floating bottle cap looks like prey.
The fix is a tether. Attach the cap, and a PET water bottle, which is denser than seawater, sinks and takes the cap with it. Even a bottle that floats keeps its cap out of a scavenging bird’s reach. The European Union now requires tethered caps on beverage containers. California’s Connect the Cap bill has reached legislators at least four times without passing, so Rick said the next step is to find one city willing to go first. Neil named what the industry is refusing to spend: a fraction of a penny per bottle. It’s the same instinct, he said, that keeps electronics makers from agreeing on a universal charger.
Dennis Uyat asked what plastic displacing plankton does to the food chain. Moore called it a plastic diet. Animals fill their stomachs with particles that return almost no energy, and birds can stop feeding altogether once they feel full. The result is smaller, sicker animals and, eventually, crashing ecosystems. There’s now more plastic on the seafloor than at the surface, carried down in marine snow. As for what the petrochemical industry thinks, Moore saw no mystery. No industry volunteers to cut its own production. “Everything that sounds good is what we call greenwashing.”
Robert Butler of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project asked the question the film raises and leaves open: since Moore’s last voyage in 2019, who is monitoring the patch? Nobody, Moore said. His work depended on a small sailing research vessel that could reach the gyre without burning much diesel, and nothing like it has been built since. Replicating it would cost millions. Robert noted that California funded microplastics research only after the particles turned up in drinking water, and asked how to make a similar economic case for the garbage patch. Moore didn’t think one exists. No one has put a dollar value on plankton in the middle of the Pacific, and he doubts anyone can. The change has to come from society rather than a spreadsheet, he said, because the political system “is not fit for purpose.”
Hayden Smith offered the view from 24 years on the water. Sea Cleaners boats go out five days a week, carrying volunteers from schools, councils, and companies. They still find the black plastic bases Coca-Cola once glued to its bottles, a part discontinued more than 35 years ago, on coastline they cleaned three months before. “There isn’t a human being alive on the planet that will ever see an ocean free of plastic,” he said. Sea Cleaners now describes its work as preventative environmental infrastructure rather than charity, a framing Moore said has won support from both ends of New Zealand’s political spectrum.
The paper got a human face this time. Hazel Vaquero, data director at the Moore Institute, described checking two decades of handwritten field logs, where a digit one reader takes for a 7 another reads as a 2, and Hazel reads as a 3. Shelly Moore and a Cal State Long Beach adjunct professor are working through the analysis with her. Funding is thin, Moore said, and the work takes the time it takes.
Videos for presentations below include only the question and answer segment of the webinar. To watch the full presentation, please watch the beginning of the June 10 video.