Today on Good Morning America you can see an interview with Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins who are currently amid a voyage to the Atlantic garbage patch. The couple are part of a crew that have traveled from the US Virgin Islands to Bermuda and are now on their way to the Azores to collect trash, take scientific samples and document their voyage.
Anna Cummins and Marcus Eriksen, co-founders of the 5 Gyres Project
They’ve created an incredible website called 5 Gyres that will eventually have information about all five garbage patches. Yes that’s right. There aren’t just two patches but five–most of them are relatively unexplored.
If you want to keep up to date on the voyage, they’re blogging at BlueTurtle. Some of the photos are stunning–like the one where they show a rubber boot they found all the way in the middle of the ocean. Or the beaches strewn with plastic. It’s pretty incredible and reminds me, sadly, of my time in the Pacific Garbage Patch.
A few weeks ago, I went behind the scenes at Recology’s artist in residence program. Each year the program selects professional artists to rummage through waste at their transfer center (the place where people dump their garbage before it goes to a landfill). Then the artists have four months to put together an exhibit using only the material they’ve found. This year’s artists are Erik Otto and Christina Mazza.
Recology resident artist Christina Mazza
They’ll only be showing their work for two days! Tonight and tomorrow afternoon (more details below). I love this program because it’s the only program of its kind in the entire country! No other state has a program that pays artists a stipend, gives them a space to work and supports their exhibitions. Also, it keeps material from ending up in a landfill. It all goes to prove my belief that most things you find in a dumpster aren’t actually trash.
Recology Artist in residence exhibition
Friday January 22, 2010 5-9pm
Saturday January 23, 2010 1-5pm
503 Tunnel Ave. San Francisco, CA 94134
View Larger Map
It’s the time of year when nearly every publication is compiling a list of its favorite books from 2009. The New York Times always has good recommendations as does NPR and this year The Daily Beast aggregated several lists and picked the most popular tomes. It’s worth checking out.
But I’ve found that in all the books I’ve read this year, from Half the Sky to The Road there’s one that stood out and made me want to shout that’s it! Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place.
The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, my pick for the year
Yes, this book is from 1989, not 2009, but as it celebrates its twentieth anniversary I was amazed at how well it stands the test of time. Oldenburg explains something that’s missing from our lives called the Third Place.
The first place is home and the second place is work and we spend our entire lives in a rat race going from one to the other. Today, we might even add in a quasi-third place that is the mega-mall (or substitute any other retail mecca here). When we have free time we use it to spend money and then when the money runs low we enter the rat race again to make more money to pay for more stuff. This observation is made by Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff.
The real third space that we’re missing is the community space. The space where we informally gather with friends to socialize and unwind and communicate. Oldenburg calls these places anchors of society and believes they’re not a luxury but a vital component to a healthy culture.
He suggests that Europe has these places—the piazza, the sidewalk café, the pub, the town squares. Starbucks has tried to capitalize on this idea of the third space by creating warm cozy environments away from home. Baristas never ask patrons to leave and indeed the couches encourage people to stay. Starbucks does this intentionally and even adopts Oldenburg’s language saying, “We strive to create a welcoming environment…and continue to focus on making the Third Place experience for every Starbucks customer.”
But one tenet of the third place, at least for Oldenburg, is that it’s free or inexpensive and highly excessive. I’d hardly say $5 for a cup of coffee is free or inexpensive. And though Starbucks makes strides toward this notion, we need more.
I’m not the first to recognize that there’s a gap in society that needs to be filled by a genuine third space. Robert Putnam writes about this in Bowling Alone and Colin Beavan certainly has this realization during his No Impact Man Project. Michael Pollan says this is one of the reasons he frequents farmer’s markets—to meet people and to establish a sense of community. Even when he doesn’t need anything at all he goes to the market to run into friends, to spend time outdoors, to simply connect.
This is my hope for the coming year, finding more time to connect. I discovered this briefly while I was in the middle of the ocean on my garbage patch reporting trip for the NY Times. Without any TV or really any entertainment at all I was connected to five other people in the most intimate way. To sit out on the deck at dusk and enjoy the simple presence of someone else’s company was so blissful. It’s something that, three months after returning, I still miss.
I met Mathieu Young after discovering his GOOD magazine recycling slideshow. Intrigued with this piece and impressed by his photography, I emailed him and we met up in Los Angeles to discuss the two things we have in common: photography and trash. I later discovered that we have a lot more in common than that, he’s from NorCal where I currently live and we’re both U.C.L.A. alums.
Mathieu and I talked about his work on the slideshow and last week I was delighted to receive an email with extra photos from his excursion! These were never before published photos that he took of the adjacent landfill completely out of curiosity. He’s written an eye-witness account of the experience and I’ve posted it below the slideshow I put together of his Simi Valley landfill images.
“My fascination with the landfill started when my cousin and I were remodeling an apartment building in LA. We spent many a Saturday dropping off truckload after truckload of construction debris, and I always loved the visual of the dump. This was just a sorting center though, and it always made me wonder what the trash’s final home looked like.
When I finally made it out to the Simi Valley landfill, where the trash is buried in tiered mountains lined in plastic (to eliminate leeching) and then replanted with the native ground cover, I was surprised by how pastoral some parts were. You don’t go to a landfill expecting to see flowers and owls and cows grazing.
Waste Managment, the private company that runs this site, is actually doing some innovative things, including capturing the natural gasses created by the decomposition to power the site and their LNG vehicles, bringing in owls to control the rat populations instead of spraying chemicals, and making a concerted effort to keep some level of harmony with the native habitats by replanting ground covers.
But, then you arrive at the drop-off and sorting hubs, and the sights, sounds and smell instantly remind you what a wasteful society we’ve become, and that no matter how good we get at burying our trash, we really just need to produce less of it.”
-Mathieu Young
Since the Scripps Institution of Oceanography hosted the first in a series of conferences today, I thought it would be appropriate to post a quote from Miriam Goldstein who is a PhD student at Scripps and visited the garbage patch this summer. Miriam and I spoke a few weeks ago about our experiences at sea and what it’s like to be amidst an ocean of plastic. We’ll be speaking together on a panel about the garbage patch at the 2010 Science Online conference in January.
“It’s important to have wildernesses and these untouched places and to be able to see an area that’s so remote. I think people care about it because the open ocean is one of the last wildernesses on the planet. We need these places, that’s what makes it so sad because away from land there’s all this plastic. There’s reason to care even if we can’t show catastrophic harm. It’s morally wrong to treat the ocean like a garbage can.”
-Miriam Goldstein, PhD candidate, Biological Oceanography, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
In order to be accepted into a Stanford Design School course last year I had to find a solution to disposable cups being used at Moonbean’s, the campus coffee shop; here’s what I came up with:
I’m not the first one to realize that the amount of single-use cups going to landfills is staggering. Chris Jordan has called attention to this in his remarkable rendering of how many cups are used on U.S. airlines every 6 hours (answer: 1 million). Starbucks has even admitted that if 50 customers at each location used reusable mugs, we would save 150,000 cups per day, reducing waste by 1.7 million pounds of paper per year.
The Beta Cup Fonder Toby Daniels says no to disposable cups
Toby Daniels has a bigger take on the design school application process–get people to tackle the same problem but on a global scale, then pay the winner and help bring the final product or concept to market. Through The Beta Cup he’s looking for the next big idea to solve this problem and is awarding $20,000 to the successful designer.
Green Cafe Network Founder Kirstin Henninger with Krystin Rubin, Co-owner of Mission Pie Cafe in San Francisco
I had a chance to catch up with Daniels a few weeks ago during a phone conversation where he spoke from his home in New York. Daniels said he used to be one of the worst offenders of disposable coffee cups and that they literally started piling up around him. The guilt plagued him and he thought if we’re all part of the problem then we can all be part of the solution.
And through the Beta Cup blog I discovered another cool cafe endeavor right in my own backyard–the Green Cafe Network. Founder Kirstin Henninger helps small coffee shops “go 
green” by reducing their waste (water waste, wasted electricity, wasted coffee cups). Next year she’s hoping to go national. Check out the podcast I produced to hear from the founders themselves.
»Listen Here
“Carbon footprint” has been in the dictionary for ten years. But what about other footprints?
How many rolls of toilet paper do we
use a year? How many jars of
mayonnaise? How many light bulbs?
What are these footprints? Recently I
came across a really interesting online
calculator that figures out how many
paper cups you use if you go out for
coffee. Click on the photo to try it out.
This week KQED, a Northern California radio station and NPR affiliate, published 25 photos from the garbage patch–some of them that I hadn’t released before. I didn’t include all of them here but I’ve posted some of the ones that didn’t appear in The New York Times slideshow. Hope you enjoy.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a 200lb. mass of drift net and rope has tangled together slowly over time. Though fish and crabs live successfully in and around the debris, other wildlife like turtles, sea lions and sharks get tangled in the ropes and die of starvation.
Bill Cooper, a crew member aboard the research vessel Alguita, grips a chunk of polystyrene, which never biodegrades. Polystyrene, often referred to as Styrofoam, is used to keep fishing nets afloat but contains chemicals that leech into the water and may be stored in fish tissues.
Within the Eastern Garbage Patch, Captain Charles Moore examines an empty plastic water bottle, a common sight in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A decade after the plastic water bottle craze exploded in the late 1990s, these containers still get carried out to sea where they break into smaller and smaller pieces without ever decomposing.
Five Hawaiian sergeants make their home inside a plastic yellow crate, mistaking it for a coral reef. This debris likely traveled all the way from Korea where trash is carried out to the garbage patch by the eastern flowing Kuroshio Current.
A fishing net, a 55-gallon barrel and a plastic crate are among hundreds of objects that Captain Moore and his crew found floating in the Pacific Ocean in September. Drift nets like this one ensnare turtles, fish and sea lions that get tangled and cannot escape.
The top half of a plastic bottle is still intact before it has broken down into an unidentifiable fragment. Below it a Petri dish full of plastic particles collected from the Garbage Patch suggests the amount of trash in the ocean is increasing.
First mate Jeffery Ernst holds up a barnacle-covered buoy removed from the Eastern Garbage Patch during a research voyage in September. Because buoys are so lightweight, they often break free from fishing nets and end up contributing to pollution in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
A piece of yellow styrofoam a research team found floating in the middle of the Eastern Garbage Patch is home to a blue crab and two gooseneck barnacles. Pieces like this pervade the garbage patch where there's often more plastic than marine life.
Hundreds of plastic fragments taken from the Garbage Patch fill a Petri dish that is also crammed with insect-like water striders and blue copepods. Most of the fragments are blue, green and white since the dyes in yellow and red plastic fade more quickly in the sun.
A few weeks ago GlobalPost asked me to write up an eye witness account of the garbage patch. It was scheduled to run as part of the Oceans Project, which is, by the way, worth checking out. In the end they didn’t run it as the copy for their project went online before they could get to my submission. But I thought, why keep it nestled away on my computer. It’s here for you to consider.
I was asked one question repeatedly before I left for my month-long Garbage Patch voyage. “Is it literally an island of waste?” I’d heard the patch called everything from a trash vortex to a plastic soup. San Francisco-based Project Kaisei, which is investigating ways to clean up the mess, even referred to it as the 8th continent. I wasn’t sure about this, so in early September, when I set off to visit the patch among a crew of five people that included Captain Moore, who discovered the patch, this question was on the top of my list.
For the first few days we didn’t see anything. We were hundreds of miles off the coast of Oahu and all I saw were flying fish that soared past the ship and red-footed boobies that nestled on the railing of the ship at night.
"red-footed boobies nestled on the railing of the ship at night"
And then we started trawling. Moore uses a fine mesh net attached to a rectangular aluminum frame that he drags behind the ship to collect samples. As soon as he pulled up the net, turned it inside out and dumped the contents into a large glass bowl I could see what all the fuss was about. Tiny pieces of plastic the size of popcorn kernels were floating in the water. Most were white or green or blue—Moore later told me that the dyes in yellow and red plastic tend to fade quicker. And among all the plastic were tiny organisms—crabs and jellyfish and halobates, insect-like creatures, which resemble mosquitoes.
The even more shocking discovery is that this became routine. After a week, I was accustomed to the net coming back up with plastic fragments. And eventually the objects got bigger. One day we pulled up a plastic Popsicle stick. Another day we found a toothbrush, the next day an umbrella handle and the next day a small plastic wheel that looked like it belonged on a toy truck.
"a small plastic wheel looked like it belonged on a toy truck"
And it didn’t matter the time of day or night. There was always more trash. I remember waking up one morning and looking over the railing just in time to see an enormous light bulb float by. On another day, as the sun set, the motor stalled and first mate Jeffery Ernst had to dive under the ship with a flashlight and untangle a piece of rope that was wrapped around the propeller.
But it wasn’t like an island. You certainly couldn’t walk on it and there were days when the seas were violent and we didn’t see anything. Captain Moore joked, “the garbage patch is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.”
The comment seemed laughable but stuck in my head. This was the problem—not that there was a garbage island or that the fragments were too tiny to bother cleaning up, it was the unpredictability. An island would be simple to clean up, we’d send out hundreds of commercial vessels to remove large chunks and that would be that. Or if all the pieces were small we’d declare the cleanup effort pointless and move on. But the fact that we can rescue some items while abandoning others makes us desperately believe that we can eventually get to it all. Even our attempt to label this patch—to call it an island and neatly package it up for media production shows our attempt to categorize an indefinable mess. We believe that if we can understand it we can tackle it. That we can remove the toothbrushes and water bottles and ropes. And that one day, we’ll return for the glass light bulb.
While in New York, I took a photo of an umbrella handle lying by a trash can after a heavy rain had obviously ripped off the umbrella top. Something else struck me while I was there–New Yorkers’ fascination with their own waste. This was humorously revealed when The New York Times headline for No Impact Man’s project was “The Year Without Toilet Paper.”
Well while Colin Beavan was reducing his waste Justin Gignac was capitalizing on it. After a friend questioned the importance of packaging design, Justin set out to sell the most useless thing he could think of. He walked the streets of New York, picked up trash, placed it “artfully” in glass containers and sold the boxes for $100 a piece. And it worked. To date Justin has sold more than 1,200 boxes of trash back to New Yorkers who provided him with the free rubbish in the first place. I have to admit it’s clever marketing and he even has special limited edition collections like trash from a Yankees world series game or trash from Times Square after New Years. In the interest of not putting more plastic into the environment, these boxes will not be appearing on my Christmas list. (Justin, if you offer biodegradable versions, let me know).
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the IDEO New York team which envisions a garbage-free NYC (link below). Their video of spotless NY city streets is pretty tantalizing. Either way you look at it, New Yorkers have a complicated relationship with their trash. Should I mention that they’ve been shipping their garbage to New Jersey for years after the Fresh Kills landfill in Long Island closed down? Perhaps this is better left for another post.
NO TRASH NYC 2030 from IDEO on Vimeo.
