How Sailing Across the Pacific Changed My Thinking About Plastic

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- I knew so little about the ocean when I accepted a job as a writing teacher with Semester at Sea and set out west across the Pacific. Mostly I craved an epic journey, and our four-month itinerary through a smattering of ports in Asia and Africa read to me like a guarantee. In between cities like Beijing and Yangon, the sea would serve as a palate cleanser.

It was early 2015. My new colleague Sal, our faculty marine biologist, had spent much of his life on the ocean but was still wary of our trip’s first leg between San Diego and Yokohama. “Don’t believe anyone who tells you they can’t get seasick,” he cautioned. “They’re like people who tell you they can swallow any hot sauce. They just haven’t met their match.”

Nobody is a match for the Pacific. Even on days when I had three classes to teach and 50 essays to grade, the ocean never receded to a backdrop. It was the imp tossing water glasses off my cabin shelves and hurling shampoo bottles across the shower floor. It was the invisible dance partner I balanced against while lecturing on Rachel Carson—quads braced and toes pressed against the keeling floor. It was the twang and creak in my mattress, the slow and beautiful glide of my lampshade’s shadow down my cabin wall.

One night, during a storm as deafening as cannon fire, I stumbled down the hallway to a nearby deck and saw the Pacific’s might in the raw. I watched it buck our seven-story cruiser up in the air, and when the prow fell and smacked the sea’s surface, the spume was so astonishing—like an uproar of billowing clouds—that I had to turn my head. It felt like nature was smashing her cymbals right in my face.

I did know enough about the ocean to realize, a week into our voyage, that we must be nearing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: an infamous gyre of floating rubbish that by some estimates stretches over 600,000 square miles. I winced in anticipation of seeing that undulating band of blue out my porthole window sullied with jugs of bleach and kelp-gnarled car bumpers, and for the first time in my life, I cared for something in nature as tenderly as I might a dear friend.

But when we reached the shores of Hilo, Hawaii, without my spotting a single bobbing soda bottle—let alone a mountain of rubbish larger than the state of Texas—I asked Ann, our faculty oceanographer, where it was. Her answer baffled me even more: We’d sailed right through it.

Plastic, I quickly learned, photodegrades over time, but only to a point. A bottle cast out to sea will break down into tiny pieces, some smaller than 5 millimeters, then hang suspended like confetti right beneath the sea’s surface. In our pristine-looking path to Hawaii, it was all there—87,000 tons of electronics, toothbrushes, fishing nets, yogurt containers, and CD cases—churned into a thick soup that was invisible to me yet comprises three-quarters of some turtles’ diets.

Our ship would ply two more oceans, but the Pacific was where I woke up to a cruel paradox that for all its staggering force, nature is a passive receptor of our toxins. If the sea had become a being to me, comprehending the damage done was like learning this dear friend had an infection running through her bloodstream. Microscopic cancers likely beyond retrieval now. Tiny poisons I was culpable in creating.

Experts still don’t know how long it takes for plastic to fully break down; the prevailing thought is about 500 years, though the answer may as well be never. A bold endeavor by the nonprofit organization Ocean Cleanup is under way to filter trash out of the patch, but no one knows whether it will succeed.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch washes up in my memory in banal moments. Receiving takeout with plastic cutlery I don’t need, rinsing a yogurt container for recycling, or weighing the cost of eco-friendly diapers—I can’t hear the term “single-use” without thinking “eternal impact.”

So as geeky as it feels to bring Tupperware on dinner dates when I know I’ll want leftovers boxed up, I only need to imagine the restaurant’s plastic packaging breaking down into edible shards, joining the toxic soup that whales swallow and birds unknowingly feed their newborns. I need only send my imagination back out to sea, to that very spot I “missed” and can’t shake, and let the blunt truth of oceanographer Sylvia Earle ring hard through me: “There’s no ‘away’ ” to throw to.