Misconceptions About Ocean Plastic and Its Sources

Elizabeth reveals that mismanaged waste, not littering, largely drives ocean plastic pollution, while recycling alone won't solve the crisis.

### The Truth About Ocean Plastic: Misconceptions, Sources, and Solutions
* 🌊 Many people associate ocean plastic primarily with the **Great Pacific Garbage Patch**, often misrepresenting its **appearance and origins** through misleading images.
* 📸 Most photos circulated in the media are either fake or taken from coastal areas, while the actual garbage patch is a **swirling vortex of microplastics** that is **less polluted than many coastal zones**.
* 🐟 A significant portion of the plastic in the garbage patch comes from the fishing industry, with studies indicating that **75% to 86% of macroplastics** are related to fishing gear, challenging the narrative of **individual responsibility for plastic pollution**.
* ♻ The recycling narrative is complicated; while recycling is necessary, it cannot solely solve the plastic crisis, as **less than 10% of plastics are recycled globally**, and the focus on individual littering distracts from systemic issues like **mismanaged waste**.
* 🧪 Microplastics are a growing concern, with sources ranging from tires to paint, and they represent a **staggering amount of pollution**, particularly in high-income countries where they make up **62% of ocean plastic**.
* 🌍 Global efforts to address plastic pollution are underway, but progress is hindered by **petrostate interests that prioritize fossil fuel growth over reducing plastic production**, despite clear evidence linking **increased production to higher pollution levels**.
* 📉 Experts advocate for **reducing plastic production** and **simplifying the chemicals used in plastics** to improve recycling efficacy and safety, as the current trajectory indicates **continued growth in plastic use**.
* 📚 For those interested in a deeper understanding, a reading list of reports and resources is available for **further exploration of these critical issues surrounding ocean plastic**.

Elizabeth: When many people hear about ocean plastic, it's usually in the context of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The idea that there was this giant trash island in the ocean was one of the things that got so many people paying attention to ocean plastic in the first place. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in the open ocean. You cannot see land anywhere nearby. So when you see pictures like this, where there's clearly mountains or maybe islands in the background, that is obviously not the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And then when you start looking, you see that the majority of these are fake. Most of these are probably honest mistakes, but then there are other ones which are obviously Photoshopped, like this one, which is clearly just using a picture of a landfill or something. The question here is, what does this thing actually look like if it doesn't look like any of this and why is everyone using photos of it that are of something else?

These photos are just one example of all the things we get wrong when we talk about the patch and about ocean plastic in general. The plastic isn't coming from where you think, we're blaming the wrong people for it, and there are devastating sources of microplastics that hardly anyone is even talking about. I've spent the last few months diving into the research and interviewing experts, and I'm here to tell you that you're being lied to about ocean plastic. So, what does it actually look like? Well, in short, news sites and blogs use fake photos because the real thing just isn't that exciting to look at. It's this giant swirling vortex of plastic, it thins out at the edges, it moves every year, and plastic is constantly being added to it. It was talked about as another shame-on-us kind of thing, and it was assumed that it must be all of our daily household plastic.

that was in the garbage patch. Reporter: It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's mostly plastic, pooling what we all throw away. Basically, the framing was like, We've all been bad, and now there's this big patch here. A study from 2022 looked at the macroplastics, the stuff bigger than 5 millimeters, in the garbage patch, and found that 75%, up to 86% of it was from the fishing industry. I think a lot of news coverage probably thought there was no harm in laying on a little bit of guilt about plastic because we all do buy and use it every day, but guilt-mongering like that can still be dishonest, and making people feel defeated does not help. We've been doing that for a while now, and it has not addressed the plastic-pollution crisis. When I first started talking to experts about this,

I encountered one thing I really was not expecting. There's actually a debate going on over whether we should clean this thing up at all. Once it is in the ocean, it is connected with marine life, and it's too late to remove it. That's Martin Thiel. He might have a bit of a bold take on this, but he's not alone in thinking that at a certain point, plastic becomes part of the ecosystem. Once we throw away plastic, it's not ours anymore. And other life absolutely colonizes that plastic. Some studies have shown that nearly 100 species can live on plastic and make that plastic their home. And so being careful about how we clean that plastic up is really important to protecting and preserving the ecosystem. More research has actually come out about the garbage patch being teeming with life and actually that coastal species are hitching a ride all the way to the garbage patch and then thriving there. Scientists have also found plastic-eating microbes.

that can turn polyethylene into CO2, although in small quantities. That said, it's not a settled question yet. Some plastic leaches toxic chemicals. Some of it gets eaten by animals and contaminates the entire food chain. We don't fully understand the trade-offs between leaving plastic in ecosystems versus taking it out. Anyway, back to those photos. If the pictures we keep seeing are not of the garbage patch, what are they? The two most widely shared images of the patch are this one and this one. A photographer named Caroline Power took those off the coast of Honduras in 2017. So this particular crisis was actually close to land, not far out to sea. In reality, the garbage patch is less polluted than many coastal zones. Which might actually be good news because researchers also think it's more effective to clean plastic from coastal areas than from garbage patches that are far out to sea. It's actually really interesting that the fervor over ocean plastic,

the panic about it started with the garbage patch because the garbage patch is kind of this exceptional thing. It's mostly fishing gear, it's far out to sea, it's difficult to clean, and it's really not representative of the ocean-plastic problem as a whole. Closer to shore, you see more of what you'd expect: water bottles, wrappers, all kinds of consumer packaging. But how it actually gets there is often misrepresented. When you Google, How does so much plastic end up in the ocean? the main result you find over and over again is littering. To show you what I mean, here's an educational video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dianna: Where does marine debris come from? Marine debris comes from many different sources and enters the ocean in many ways. Intentional littering and dumping are a big cause of marine debris. Sometimes the trash goes directly into the ocean,

like when beachgoers don't pick up after themselves. And there are other examples of this all over the internet. So, this page, for example, it's called How Does Plastic End Up in the Ocean? And the No. 1 reason it puts is that we're throwing plastic in the bin when it could be recycled, and No. 2 is littering. Both of those are just not a majority of the problem here. This is the European Environment Agency, and it says, Poor waste management and careless littering on land are two of the main causes of the problem. Littering is responsible for a very small percentage of the overall plastic in the environment. Based on this graph from the OECD, you can see littering is this teeny-tiny blue bar here, and mismanaged waste, not including littering, is this massive one at the bottom. Mismanaged waste includes all the things that end up either in illegal dump sites

or burned in the open or in the rivers or oceans or wherever. The focus on littering specifically, it's an easy answer because obviously there's nothing wrong with discouraging people from littering, but it focuses on individual people's bad choices rather than systemic forces that are basically flushing plastic into the ocean every minute. Mismanaged waste includes everything that escapes formal waste systems. So they might end up dumped, they might end up burned, they might end up in the environment. We're not even talking about landfills here. If it's landfill, that's managed waste. According to the OECD, 82% of macroplastic leakage into the environment, so that's land, air, and sea, is the result of mismanaged waste. Putting so much emphasis on individual choices also takes the pressure off of the companies whose products so often become plastic waste. We know from beach-cleanup data that Coca-Cola has been the No. 1 plastic polluter.

for six years in a row, producing 11% of all the branded plastic pollution found on beaches. And just 56 companies are responsible for half the world's branded plastic pollution. So, I read Coca-Cola's sustainability report, and most of the emphasis for their solutions is on recycling. So, is recycling the key to stopping plastic from getting in the ocean? Spoiler alert: no. But it's more complicated than you might think. We know at this point that big lies were told about recycling, and they were told because the plastics industry had a PR problem. In 1969, there was a quote from the American Chemical Society saying, It is always possible that scientists and engineers will learn to recycle or dispose of wastes at a profit, but that does not seem likely to happen soon on a broad basis. And, boy, were they right. Globally, recycling rates are less than 10%, and they've been stuck that way for decades now.

Keep in mind, the amount of recycled plastic we make globally has quadrupled in 20 years. We're recycling more than ever; it just can't keep up. I think we need to show a graph here. So, if you look at what goes into the ocean, items that actually have a chance of being recycled are hard plastics made of just one thing. This report calls them rigid mono-materials, but you can see they make up just 18% of plastic leakage into the ocean. These other two massive categories, they make up a vast majority of the plastic in the ocean, and those are just not widely recyclable items. You might hear people say that they're technically recyclable; the technology exists, but it's just not economically viable, and it's not being done at a large scale. So, the industry has known at this point that mixing together different types of plastics makes them unrecyclable.

They've known it for more than 50 years, and they've just kept doing it. But either way, what we're looking at is less than a fifth of ocean plastic having even the potential to be recycled. So graphs like this really brought it home for me, that this is one of the biggest lies about the ocean-plastic problem, is that somehow we can recycle our way out of it. When such a tiny fraction of what's going into the ocean is even maybe recyclable, we need to talk about different ways to solve this problem. Recycling was doomed to fail because it was given an impossible task, and the impossible task was to just keep up with limitless plastic consumption. However, it's not exactly completely fake either, and that's something I'm encountering more and more in my everyday life when I talk to people about this. There's been so much coverage of recycling being a scam that people think it doesn't matter at all,

that they shouldn't even try. The reality is that headlines saying recycling is a scam or totally fake are misleading. You know, it gets framed as an either-or. Either we only need recycling and only recycling will fix this problem, or recycling won't fix this problem at all and we should absolutely give up on it. And I quite simply disagree. It is not an either-or, it is a yes-and. Yes, we need recycling, and we need overall reduction. One of the reasons recycling hasn't worked so well is because of low collection and sorting rates, and convincing people that it's totally fraudulent will just make that problem worse. So, PET, plastic No. 1, and HDPE, plastic No. 2, are legitimately recyclable. Though the rates of plastic recycling for all plastics is less than 10%, for those two plastics, it's closer to 30%, and we could double that in the US by just doing a better job collecting plastics.

We just need to stop thinking that recycling plastics gives us a license to consume as much as we want and stop accepting the industry line that it's perfectly circular. It's meant to be a last resort for plastics we can't eliminate, and it still comes with some environmental trade-offs. There is no hiding the fact that our recycling system is not working very well right now, but that doesn't mean we should give up on it. If anything, it means that we need to invest in it and make it work. As you can see, this is messy. We want magic pills and silver bullets, a perfect solution for all these problems, and that's just not going to happen. And it's about to get messier because we need to talk more about microplastics. So, microplastics are incredibly hard to wrap your head around. They see numbers in the billions, and they're measured in terms of particles, and it's just sort of impossible

to envision what that even means or how bad it is. From Europe, so much microplastic goes into the environment that it's the equivalent of everyone in Europe throwing one grocery bag into the ocean each week. Then, in the US, it's triple that number. Though microplastics are 11% of all the plastic that goes into the ocean each year, when you look at just high-income countries, that number goes up to 62%. Scientists keep finding them in new places, and then that makes the news, and now it's in the news cycle so much that it's almost become kind of a meme, with people joking about, like, microplastics for dinner and whatever you might see. So, for a while we were thinking maybe the main problem here was polyester and plastic clothing, but then we started having more data come out about tires. The tires on cars shed microplastics like crazy. Estimates vary, but tires can shed between 10% and 16%

of their weight over their lifetime. That means each tire on a car loses a kilogram, or 2 pounds, of tire dust over its lifetime. We also know that the heavier a car is, the faster its tires wear down, which means the more microplastics go out into the environment. So that means, like, the big SUVs, Americans tend to drive really big cars, those are creating higher numbers of microplastics. It's estimated that 9% of all plastic pollution going into the ocean is from tires, and right now there's just no way of catching it. So, textiles remained a problem. Then we added tires to the list. But the craziest thing is that after that, a report came out that said that there was a new source of microplastics we hadn't been calculating correctly and that if their math was right it created more microplastics than all the other ones combined, more than tires and personal-care products.

and clothing combined, and that source is paint. So, according to this report, about 40% of paint ends up in the environment, and the craziest thing is that 37% of paint is plastic polymers. Like, the composition of paint is plastic. We're painting our walls with plastic. When I heard that lots of microplastics came from paint, I had assumed it was mostly from ships, but actually, marine sources were not even a majority of the microplastics that end up in the environment. And a lot of it is from buildings. About half the paint applied in European lower-income countries will eventually leak to the environment. That is mind-boggling to me. All these things are basically modeled estimates. It's really difficult to measure microplastics, so people end up doing this sort of complex mathematic modeling to figure out how much paint gets shed off of these everyday objects. Even if this estimate is wrong and it's half that or a third of that,

paint is still a huge source of microplastics in the environment that's been wildly underestimated. Ultimately, the disconcerting vibe that I get from all of this is that we know there are huge sources of microplastics out there, but we could discover a new one tomorrow that's even bigger. There are also a whole other type of microplastics that come from things already in the ocean breaking apart. A recent study found that the color of the plastic actually makes a big difference in terms of how fast that happens. So red, green, and blue plastics become microplastics much faster than clear, silver, or black. Removing pigments from plastic would also make them much easier and more valuable for recyclers. But of course, mixing red caps and green bottles and all of that would mean brands giving up some of their brand power. So now we're getting to the really big questions. How do you compel massive institutions

that benefit from plastic to change their ways? Over the years, we've seen both governments and corporations make pledges to reduce their plastic footprints. Over five years, there was a 60% increase in these pledges, and in that same time, a 50% increase in plastic pollution. That's nuts. A 50% increase in five years? These pledges simply haven't worked. Plastic use is still set to triple by 2060. At this point, it might seem hopeless, but we're actually in a pivotal moment. In 2022, UN member states passed a resolution very ambitiously called End Plastic Pollution. For the past few years, they've been working on a global treaty. I've spoken to independent scientists who are at these negotiations, and they all talk about the same thing, reducing plastic production. This may seem painfully obvious, but we have to go through the data a bit because it's been weirdly controversial for a long time now.

to say that plastic production leads to more plastic pollution. If you map out plastic production since 1950 and map out the amount of plastic going into the ocean since that time, you get two lines that track each other very closely. And this is true even for individual brands. A 2024 study found that the more product that Coke, Pepsi, Nestlé, and other companies made, the more of their branded trash washed up on beaches. Even though making less plastic seems like a really clear answer, this idea is still tearing apart these negotiations. There is a big group of countries supporting the obligations to reduce plastic production, but we also have a very small group of countries that are stalling progress in these obligations. And this small group of countries are the petrostates. People think that we are negotiating a waste treaty, but in reality, we are negotiating the future of fossil fuels. The Center for International Environmental Law,

where Daniela works, analyzed the guest list at these talks. They found petrochemical and fossil-fuel-industry lobbyists outnumbered scientists at these talks, sometimes 3:1. These industries are fighting hard because they're counting on plastics for their future growth. The fossil-fuel industry is using all types of tactics to intimidate and to harass. So, as soon as we landed in Ottawa in April, we started to see billboards all over the city defending plastics, and with kids in a hospital with masks of plastic for oxygen, which, we are clear that we're not targeting these kinds of elements with our ads for production reduction. Inside the talks, industry reps don't want to talk about lowering production. They want to talk about recycling and waste management. Of course recycling is important, and we don't want to say that we don't need recycling, but if we want to make recycling

something that actually works. We need to bring production to more sustainable levels. There's no way that recycling is going to keep up with the levels of production that we have today. Every scientist and activist that I've spoken to about this issue wants two things: to reduce plastic production and to simplify the chemicals that go into plastics. There are about 16,000 chemicals used in plastics today, most of which are not regulated by international law. And getting that number lower could not only improve safety but also make recycling much more effective. I don't know how this is all going to turn out or if plastic production is actually going to go down, but I do know Dow, a chemical company and one of the world's largest suppliers of the polymers that go into single-use plastics, seemingly doesn't have plans to slow down anytime soon. Dow call: Plastics right now, PNSP.

silicones and coatings. I think we have a pretty good line of sight. Since 2019, we've seen a 20% increase in volumes in plastics. I think plastics is going to continue to see solid volumes, and we've got a cost advantage. So the long-term trends for plastics say the growth is going to continue to be there. If you're wondering where I got all this information, check out the link in the video description. I'm sharing a reading list of all the reports that I used to put this together. And for more Truth Complex, subscribe to Business Insider on YouTube.

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Debunking Myths About the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is often misrepresented in photos, with many images being fake or photoshopped.

The majority of the plastic in the patch comes from the fishing industry, not household waste.

There is a debate among experts about whether to clean up the plastic, as it has become part of the marine ecosystem and is home to various species.

Plastic's impact on the environment is complex, with some leaching toxic chemicals and contaminating the food chain.

The widely shared images of the garbage patch are misleading, as it is less polluted than many coastal areas and not representative of the overall ocean-plastic problem.

Mismanaged waste, rather than littering, is the main contributor to plastic pollution, with companies like Coca-Cola being the top plastic polluters.

A small number of companies are responsible for a significant portion of the world's branded plastic pollution, with recycling efforts falling short of making a substantial impact.

The majority of ocean plastic comes from non-recyclable items, and the industry's long-standing practice of mixing different plastics has hindered recycling efforts.

While recycling is necessary, it needs to be combined with overall reduction efforts and improved collection and sorting rates to be more effective.

The Challenge of Plastic Recycling and Microplastics

Recycling plastics should not be seen as a solution for excessive consumption, and the current recycling system is not effective.

Microplastics are a major environmental issue, with high-income countries contributing 62% of the plastic pollution in the ocean.

The main sources of microplastics include tire wear, textiles, and surprisingly, paint, which is responsible for a significant portion of plastic pollution in the environment.

The Underestimated Impact of Paint on Microplastics

Paint is a significant and underestimated source of microplastics, with other microplastics also originating from ocean debris breaking apart.

The color of plastic plays a crucial role in the speed of its breakdown into microplastics, with red, green, and blue plastics degrading faster than clear, silver, or black.

Despite increased pledges from governments and corporations to reduce plastic use, plastic pollution has continued to rise, leading to a global treaty aimed at reducing plastic production, which is currently a contentious issue in negotiations.

The Influence of the Fossil-Fuel Industry on Plastic Production

Petrochemical and fossil-fuel lobbyists outnumbered scientists at industry talks, using intimidation tactics to defend plastics.

The industry's focus is on recycling and waste management rather than lowering production, despite the need for more sustainable levels.

With 16,000 unregulated chemicals used in plastics, reducing this number could improve safety and make recycling more effective, but the demand for plastic is still projected to grow.