KVCR's Ben Purper
Guests are noticing a subtle change in the Aquarium of the Pacific’s Café Scuba, where the Long Beach aquarium is phasing out single-use disposable plastics.
It’s all part of a new campaign created by the Aquarium Conservation Partnership, a national network of 19 major aquariums across the country – including aquariums in Chicago, Baltimore, and Monterey Bay – as a way to pool their resources for a common cause.
The ACP’s first campaign, named “In Our Hands,” aims to remedy the fact that about 8.8 million tons of plastic go into the ocean each year – a number which, according to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, is the “equivalent of a dump truck pouring a load of plastic trash into the ocean every minute, every day “ – and the prospect that that number could double by the year 2025.
Dr. Jerry Schubel, President and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific, explains that plastic pollution can harm not just marine life, but humans themselves.
“We see an increasing amount of plastic going into the world ocean, most of it is plastic that humans just fail to dispose of properly. And so, it’s a behavioral problem,” he says.
“We know that since plastic don’t biodegrade, they break down physically into smaller and smaller particles, and so animals ingest these particles and can cause intestinal blockage, and there’s a concern that this could be passed up the food chain to humans and could affect us if we eat seafood.”
Dr. Schubel says that reducing ocean plastic pollution is a matter not only of using less disposable plastic, but also properly disposing of what we already use.
“People are the problem. It’s not really that the plastic industry is some evil empire, it’s that we’re not very good stewards. We’re not opposed to plastics, I want to make that clear, we’re opposed to the inappropriate uses of plastics and we’re opposed to the way humans discard these.”
Plastic pollution is visible right outside the Aquarium of the Pacific’s doors. In the Long Beach Harbor, you can see floating plastic bottles, plastic straws, Styrofoam – exactly the types of disposable plastics that Schubel’s talking about. Much of it comes from the Los Angeles River, which flows south into Long Beach.
Robert Palmer is Beach Cleanup Coordinator for the Long Beach chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit focused on ocean health that has their own plastic pollution campaign called Rise Above Plastics. Palmer says plastic pollution is even worse on the city’s beaches than it is in the harbor.
“In the winter time, it’s really bad cause we’ve got the LA river dumping out here and with it comes all the pollution that gets into the street and goes right into the storm drains and ultimately the LA river and the Long Beach coastline are completely without being treated.”
Palmer says that the beach is plagued with all forms of disposable plastic – even plastic bags, which were banned last year as part of Proposition 67.
“There’s plastic straws, there’s lots of plastic caps, plastic bottles, plastic coolers… we have a ban on plastic bags but we still get plastic bags down there.”
Aimee David, Director of Ocean Conservation Policy Strategies at Monterey Bay Aquarium, says that this kind of problem is not limited to the coasts of densely populated areas – it’s truly global.
“We’re seeing plastic throughout the ocean, it’s pretty much ubiquitous now. We see it in the Pacific, we see it in the middle of the Arctic, we see it in the deepest ocean trenches.”
David cites a 2014 EPA report that lists the recycling rate for plastic at 9.5%, meaning that only about 10% of all plastic generated in the country ends up being recycled.
“We also know that plastic production has been on the rise ever since it was really introduced into the market in the 50’s, and that recycling has been really hovering around 10% for the last decade. And so there is this big difference between what we produce and what we actually recycle.”
It was the severity of the problem that led the Aquarium Conservation Partnership to choose plastic pollution as their first major issue.
“It was our desire to come together to work collectively for conservation impact – a lot of our aquariums have been doing more and more in the ocean and freshwater conservation space, and we decided to kind of put our institutions together and develop a plan of action that we could all work on together. Plastic pollution was really an issue that rose to the top, so to speak.”
David believes that aquariums, with an audience of people already inclined to care about environmental issues and ocean pollution, are uniquely situated to lead this campaign.
“We also want to be laboratories for innovation, we want to showcase cool alternative products and get people excited about it. I don’t think we’re going to go backwards, I think what is really the case is we need to push towards invention and innovation.”
“We don’t know what the solution is going to be yet. I think it’s going to be a process to get there, what we want to do is increase investment in that type of innovation to see what kind of products we’ll have in the future.”
One way the Monterey Bay Aquarium plans to generate that kind of excitement is through an event they’re calling the Ocean Plastic Pollution Summit, where 3rd through 12th grade classroom teachers come to the aquarium to learn ways to communicate the problem of plastic pollution to their students.
“What we do is we bring teachers from across the state to Monterey, we teach them about the latest on plastic pollution science and solutions, and then we kind of ask them to go back and develop a curriculum for their students for innovative projects to help solve the problem, and then they come back sometimes with their students to talk about what they’ve done.”
“It’s a really inspiring program, and I think that the solution of this problem… really rests with the young generation, the incredible powerhouse of knowledge and industry that we have here in California.”
The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach is one of three California aquariums in the partnership, alongside Monterey Bay and the California Academy of Sciences’ Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco.
According to Dr. Schubel, “California’s been a leader in many of these initiatives. I guess I would like to see us be a leader now in educating the public and change the attitudes and behaviors of our people, and I think that’s where this network of aquariums has a role to play.”
Dr. Schubel sees the Aquarium Conservation Partnership’s efforts as an experiment, of sorts – one that could have the most impact by setting an example for others to follow.
“If this has an impact in North America – since all of these 19 are in North America – then we ought to export the model through the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums because most of the plastic that enters the world ocean comes from Asian countries and there are a number of aquariums – Japan has more aquariums per capita than any country in the world.”
“If it’s successful in North America, let’s export the model to our colleagues in other countries.”
Until then, the aquariums will continue to phase out disposable plastic in their facilities and find sustainable alternatives.
You can learn more about the project at http://www.ourhands.org/.
