We love plastics. We hate plastics. Plastics are a blessing. Plastics are a curse. Plastics save life. Plastics kill. Plastics preserve. Plastics destroy. Plastics have helped the environment. Plastics are destroying the environment. Plastics are the cheapest material ever. Plastics are the most expensive material ever. Plastics are the best. Plastics are the worst. Plastics must continue. Plastics must stop.
All of these, and more, are true.
A toxic love affair
Plastics were arguably first discovered in 1839 when Johann Eduard Simon, a German apothecary, distilled a substance from a tree. He named it “styrol” and, a few days later, it thickened. He called it “stryloloxyd”. Today, we would call it “polystyrene”.
Since then, humanity has fallen in love with plastic. And it is easy to see why.
Medical devices are made from it because it can be easily made sterile. It is so very cheap, which has helped the price of goods to plummet, which means goods are affordable even for people without much in the way of financial resources.
Plastics production also generally consumes little in the way of energy (good, especially in Ye Olde Days when energy was embodied in the form of forests, which had to be chopped down en mass and burned so that energy could be released) and other resources. Contrast, say, the amount of labour and material needed to make a wooden chair vs the same resources needed to make a plastic chair.
Plastic is easy and cheap to shape and to work with, so it has found use in art, in pipes, in machinery, as furniture, as drink containers, and in many other ways.
For instance, it was used to create the keyboard upon which this article is being typed, the fan which is cooling the author as the article is being typed, the back and the insides of the screen upon which these words appear, the power sockets through which the electricity that powers the equipment to make this article, and the cup in which the coffee is contained that powers the author of the article that makes these words appear.
Well, we think you get it. Without the author literally even moving his head, there are numerous plastics visible. There are many more visible right now that could also be listed, but, for the purposes of brevity and avoiding tedium, they won’t.
Where o where it’s everywhere
Plastic, as you are probably aware, is everywhere.
It’s in our fields, our forests, our beaches, our oceans, our kitchens, in our wildlife, inside our animals, and it’s inside our fish. It’s in our drinking water and it’s probably inside your brain right now.
It’s well known that big chunks of plastic break down into smaller and smaller pieces until they arrive at the nano-scale. A nanometer is one-billionth of a metre. That’s the number “1” divided by 1,000,000,000. If you were to take a nanoparticle of plastic and multiply its diametre by one million, it would approximate the length of a small ant.
Nano-plastic is super tiny. So tiny that it can cross the blood-brain barrier in mice. It’s bad enough in mice, of course, but we humans ingest large amounts of nano-plastics too and it is showing up in our blood and in other human tissues.
This should be concerning. The blood brain barrier protects the brain from harmful substances. You, me, and pretty much all blood-bearing creatures on the planet need clean blood so that we can live. But nano-plastics have been found in lungs, livers, spleens, kidneys, and the human placenta. The presence of plastic in our blood and in our tissues is not conducive to health. Internalization of plastic adversely affects growth performance, oxidative stress, induces metabolic disturbance, kills cells, mutates cells (read: can promote the formation of cancer), causes inflammation, can introduce pathogens into the body, and various other horrible things.
We can pretty much file all of that under the category of “not good”.
Macro plastics, macro-problems
Jumping up in scale by a few million units and we have macro-plastics. Things like plastic bags. Plastic bottles. Plastic wrapping. Plastic garbage of all shapes and kinds.
Today, global companies produce about 400 million tonnes of plastic a year, according to the UN Environment Programme. Only about 9% of plastic is recycled. The rest is waste. Of the seven billion tonnes of plastic waste generated globally so far, less than 10 per cent has been recycled, UNEP reckons. None of this stuff is going away anytime soon as plastics in the environment can last for hundreds to thousands of years; it’s a non-natural substance that was created relatively recently so there are few critters, creatures or microbes that can scoff it up and thereby degrade it (but there are some such as Zophobas morio and also Galleria mellonella larvae).
Humans (mostly) live on land. Human-created plastic is washed from the land by rain into rivers, irrigation ways, canals and other waterways, and is then washed out to sea. The near global consensus is that about 80% of all plastics are washed into the the ocean by about 1,000 or so rivers.
A lot of plastic has, and continues, to find its way to the ocean. So much so, that the Ellen Macarthur Foundation has warned that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
Who and where are the polluters?
All of this plastic, all of it ever made, is human made. These days its mostly made by about twenty companies, which produce more than half of all single-use plastics. The plastic 20 are ExxonMobil, Sinopec, Dow, Indorama Ventures,Saudi Aramco, LyondellBasel, Petro China, Reliance Industries, INEOS, Alpek SAB de OV, Braskem, Borealis, TotalEnergies, Lotte Chemical, Formosa Plastics Corp, SIBUR, Rongsheng Group, Jinagsu Hilun Petrochemcial, China Resources Chemical and the China Energy Investment Group.
The top plastic polluters are the Philippines, India, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Brazil, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Thailand. Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that these are largely countries with lower gross domestic product or lower gross domestic product per head. Ship-eyed viewers will have noted that some of these countries – particularly the Philippines, Indonesia, China and India are major source countries of seafarers.
Marine-source plastic waste
Although the overwhelming amount of plastic pollution in the ocean has a landside origin, 20% of it does not. It comes from the ocean, or, rather, from things that float in the ocean. The obvious culprits include the fishing fleet (plastic lines, nets and the like), the recreational fleet (yachts and the like), the cruise industry, the offshore industry, and – we are extremely saddened to acknowledge it, from the commercial shipping industry.
Unfortunately, some of this plastic pollution in Australia is from commercial ships. Plastic bottles are being found on the beaches of Australia with markings from overseas (e.g. foreign languages, barcodes etc) of products that are not sold in Australia, in places where there are few overseas fishing fleet vessels or few recreational vessels, in places where currents would not wash marine debris ashore, bearing no marine growth and without signs of degradation from the mechanical action of waves or the light-induced degradation from the sun. The lack of marine growth and the lack of UV / wind / wave degradation proves that the plastic waste has not been in the water for a long time which thereby proves that the plastic did not come from overseas countries – it must have landed on Australian beaches from nearby watercraft of some kind.
If that’s not convincing enough, or you find it all too circumstantial, there have been several convictions for illegal marine pollution:
• A ship’s master and owners fined for pollution in Great Barrier Reef
• Bulk carrier owner and master fined for Queensland garbage disposal
• Master and Owner found guilty of illegal garbage disposal in the Great Barrier Reef –
• Shipping company and chief officer convicted for dumping garbage in Great Barrier Reef –
Let us state it for the record:
Shipping Australia abhors plastic waste in the world’s oceans.
There is no excuse for it and it must stop.
Plastic waste from ships typically takes the form of waste that someone clearly has thrown overboard. It is usually plastic bottles or food wrap and the like, or it is partly incinerated plastic garbage.
Shipping Australia does not know exactly why this is happening. Especially as the international shipping industry has taken extensive efforts to tackle the scourge of marine litter and garbage. Dumping plastics over the side of a ship is illegal under international law and Australian law.
Ship-source plastic garbage in the sea – the law
In 1973 the global shipping community got together at the International Maritime Organization (a specialised United Nations agency that regulates ocean shipping on a global basis) and passed the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL).
MARPOL was amended over time with a series of Annexes, and Annex V entered into force on 31 December 1988. Annex V is the “Prevention of Pollution by Garbage from Ships”. It contains an absolute ban on the disposal into the sea of all forms of plastics.
Regulations 2 and 3(1)(a) of Marpol Annex V state: “The Provisions of this Annex [Annex v] shall apply to all ships… The disposal into the sea of all plastics.. is prohibited”.
In Australia, we have the Navigation Act 2012 (Commonwealth) which contains the updated maritime laws and heads of power for bodies like the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, to make further, detailed, laws. This includes anti-sea-garbage laws.
Generally, international laws don’t apply in Australia unless our Parliament specifically makes them apply. In Australia, this happened on 14 November 1990 when the Australian Government passed regulations tackling marine garbage. The same absolute prohibition on the disposal of plastics into the sea by ships applies in Australian law. A further series of Federal, State and Territory laws apply.
Meanwhile, the Australian Maritime Safety Administration has issued Marine Order 95 which also tackles marine plastics pollution.
MO 95 sets out the rules for garbage management plans and garbage record books. The MO 95 requires Australian and foreign ships to develop and write a garbage management plan and to have a garbage record book. That book requires details of all discharges at sea – who / how / what / where / when etc – to be recorded.
Dumping garbage at sea in Australia waters is a criminal offence, as is failing to record it in the garbage book under the Protection of the Sea (Prevention of Pollution from Ships) Act.
Meanwhile, the various states and territories around Australia have enacted their own versions of MARPOL.
• New South Wales — Marine Pollution Act 2012
• South Australia — Protection of Marine Waters (Prevention of Pollution From Ships) Act 1987
• Western Australia — Pollution of Waters by Oil and Noxious Substances Act 1987
• Tasmania — Pollution of Waters by Oil and Noxious Substances Act 1987
• Victoria — Pollution of Waters by Oil and Noxious Substances Act 1986
• Queensland — Transport Operations (Marine Pollution) Act 1995
• Northern Territory — Marine Pollution Act 1999
What can be done
Shipping Australia will be taking part in a series of workshops, and will be working alongside community groups, the authorities, academics, shipping companies and many more to tackle the issue of illegal discharges from ships.
Shipping Australia will do its part. We will inform and educate where necessary about the plastics problem. We intend to invite experts and authorities to give presentations to the shipping industry on plastics. We will do what we can.
We will encourage policy change where possible – plastic waste reception facilities should be made available in all ports, quarantine laws / policies / procedures need to be adjusted so that quarantine laws do not prevent the safe and correct disposal of plastics ashore, the provision for the funding of disposal of plastic wastes should be provided by central government so that there are never any barriers of any kind to the provision of facilities and the correct disposal of plastics.
Ultimately, however, bearing in mind the widespread nature of plastics, and the fact that the easy-disposal of plastics seems to be widespread in a wide range of countries, the fact that plastic is cheap to create-use-discard but difficult to get rid of properly, and the fact that a handful of companies disproportionately benefit, then this is not really a shipping problem.
Root cause analysis and what must be done
It’s a worldwide plastics problem.
Ultimately, plastics, and single use plastics particularly, need to become expensive to create, acquire and use but cheap to dispose of correctly. That means reduction, reuse and recycling of plastics.
That means taxes and levies on plastic creation, sale and use. It also means the introduction of hefty taxes and plastic-container deposit schemes so that throwing away, say, plastic bottles, is expensive.
Our wildlife, our environments, our water, our food, our bodies, our brains are already contaminated with plastic. We do not know what the effects of poisoning the planet – and everyone and everything on it – will be. But it can’t be good.
We must preserve the use of plastics to benefit all of humanity.
But we must reduce plastic waste on a global scale.
That is all.
