are turning into plastic … are we,” to “US News and World Report,” and “Rolling Stone.” Audio‐visual media were also interested and I never turned down a single interview, from a student classroom to Late Night with David Letterman. Documentaries were made by the likes of Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons, who sailed aboard my research vessel to do the film, Trashed. Also sailing with me were the crews of Nightline and CBS Sunday Morning, among many others. I even took a public television film crew from the Korean Broadcasting System out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to film our research As the media began to produce more content on the issue of ocean plastics, the scientific community also began to show greater interest in the topic. A little‐known Italian scientific organization, The World Federation of Scientists, started by a physicist and scientific advisor to the Pope, had been holding annual conferences to discuss what they considered “planetary emergencies,” such as climate change and pollution. For their 2006 meeting at their headquarters in Erice, Sicily, they wanted to include “Pollution of water by plastic” as a new planetary emergency. They reached out to Jean Michele Cousteau, President of the Ocean Futures Society, who had given a keynote address, “Trashing the Sea” at the 3rd International Marine Debris Conference in 2000. The organizers wanted him to present data on ocean plastic pollution, but his group had done no studies of the subject and had no data to present. They then contacted me to see if I would be willing to present my data at the conference, and I agreed. This meeting of top scientists was to become more productive than I could have imagined. There was a small press room, and a past editor of the Transactions of the Royal Society overheard me talking to someone about plas tic pollution. He approached me and offered to create a dedicated issue on the topic in one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific journals. Up to this time, no researcher had published on the transmission of chemicals sorbed to plastic into wildlife. Several papers were presented at the conference in Erice on the endocrine‐disrupting effects of compounds in plastics such as BPA and phthalates, but the connection had never been established linking them directly to wildlife through plastic ingestion. The Theme Issue was edited by Richard Thompson, author of the paper “Lost at Sea: Where is all the plastic?,” Shanna Swan, a researcher on phthalates at the USEPA and author of Countdown, Fred vom Saal, a pioneering researcher on the effects of BPA, and myself. The theme issue in Transactions of the Royal Society B, was titled “Plastics, the environment and human health.” It contained the article by Teuten et al., “Transport and release of chemicals from plastics to the environment and to wildlife,” which was an important milestone in the field of ocean plastic research. I bring up these personal experiences for two reasons: (i) some of these aspects of the history of plastic pollution research have not before been reported and (ii) to show how scientific progress may in some cases be advanced by individuals who straddle the line between research and activism.
After the Royal Society publication in 2009, research papers on the effects of chemicals associated with plastics became commonplace and we began to enter the rapid growth phase of ocean plastic research. The paper that created the most interest in ocean plastics after my actively promulgated finding that plastic outweighed zooplankton in the central Pacific was Jenna Jambeck’s paper published in Science in 2015 titled “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean.” The editor of this volume and the author of chapter 12 were co‐authors. Both the scientific community and the public were shocked at the median figure of eight million tons of plastic waste per year enter ing the ocean, and that this amount would be likely to grow into the next century, since “peak waste” would not be reached before 2100. In 2016, based on this paper, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicted that there would be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 and that one refuse truck’s worth of plastic is dumped into the sea every minute. I would speculate that few major newspapers or online news platforms failed to mention one or both of these estimates. Images that showed the sea surface covered with plastic in near coastal areas became more com mon. Many had requested similar images of the “trash island” because of my work in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. However, because debris there occurs in Langmuir windrows (long lines) that can stretch for more than 50 miles, and the debris is rarely touching, no areas covered in debris existed in the gyre, even in the areas with the highest concentrations of surface plastic. I have emphasized the point that plastics in the ocean are pollutants, but there is still considerable debate concerning their harmfulness. A milestone 2013 paper linking plastic ingestion in fish to negative physiological outcomes was by Chelsea Rochman and colleagues, “Ingested plastic transfers hazardous chemicals to fish and induces hepatic stress.” Consumption of plastic particles that had sorbed pollutants while floating in San Diego Bay resulted in liver abnormalities in fish.
There remained what many considered the most important aspect of plastic pollution, its effect on human health, as papers quantifying the plastics consumed in seafood were becoming common. In 2017, Fred vom Saal and Aly Cohen edited an Oxford University Press Publication titled Integrative Environmental Medicine intended for medical practitioners. Their goal was to mainstream cutting‐ edge concepts that were not taught in traditional medical courses. Sara Mosko, a physician and I contributed a chapter: “The Plastic Age: Worldwide Contamination, Sources of Exposure and Human Health Consequences.” The Key Concepts included this provocative statement: “The list of human health problems that correlate with exposure to chemicals in plastics reads like a catalog of modern Western diseases.” Although correlation is not causation, correlations do merit further investigation. We are now in the phase of plastic pollution research where the dividing line between environmental effects and medical research has been breached and medical researchers are looking seriously at potential human health effects. While at first, concerns about eating fish that had consumed plastic were paramount, we now have ample evidence that exposure through respiration is a greater threat, and that plastics at the nanoscale have invaded consumables of all kinds.
An implication of the dictum that the dose makes the poison is that as the dose of a substance increases, so does its potential toxicity. There are certain substances in plastics that contradict this. I imagine a crowd unable to get through a door when an individual could. Binding to receptors can exhibit a U‐shaped curve where a very low dose given at the right time binds to a receptor and larger doses have less effect until the system is eventually overwhelmed at very high doses. Future ocean plastic research will examine such questions and others as they relate to population‐level effects.
This volume concludes with two chapters on behavior change and legal remedies, which are certainly important in stemming the tide of vagrant plastics invading the ocean and the entire biosphere. However, the economic drivers of plastic pollution are in the ascendant, and until the worldwide growth of infinitely variable plastic products is redirected by a major paradigm shift, scientists will continue to work in a “different” plastic world.
1 Plastics in the Anthropocene
Anthony L. Andrady
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
We live in an era where human beings dominate and control most geochemical processes on Earth’s surface, including some aspects of the ocean system. It is impressive that Homo sapiens accounting for a mere 0.01% of the biomass on Earth, can exert such control; the mass of structures built on Earth by man now exceeds the total biomass on the planet (Elhacham et al. 2020). The present epoch of man deserves to be formalized a distinct period, the Anthropocene, within the geological time scale (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). This era started in the post‐World War II (WWII) years (Steffen et al. 2015; Zalasiewicz et al. 2016) and is ongoing. Plastics, a unique identifier of the Anthropocene, survives as stratigraphic markers in the soil to guide future archeologists exploring our era. Historical origins of plastics, however, can be traced further back in history, perhaps to 1869, when Wesley Hyatt invented nitrocellulose as a potential substitute for elephant ivory that was used to make billiard balls at that time. Even though Wyeth’s celluloid billiard balls were a failure (as some of them exploded on impact), this unique product opened the floodgate for synthetic plastic products in to the consumer
