Environmental and Public Health 210

Dumping Wastes into the Ocean- Danielle Gifford

     Living in northern Wisconsin and being so far from the oceans, it is always exhilarating to visit the coasts and stand with the vast expanse of ocean and sky in front of you.  Every beach comber can testify that at one point, they have kept a watchful eye out for a bottle that may contain a message; a letter from some strange place written about love, loss, or whatever the case may be, in some exotic language, sealed with a cork.  Well, maybe the beachcombers of the past can testify to this.  Today, it would be a search of a skeptical eye, knowing that most of the things found on the shore would not be someone’s emotion on a page but someone’s garbage.

In many countries including the United States it has been standard practice to dump wastes created such as garbage, plastics, and radioactive decay, into the oceans.  The following is a chart that shows the most commonly washed up items in Texas:

 The current ocean laws forbid these practices in most countries but each has different regulations to follow. (e.g. Some countries say as long as you are so many miles out, it’s o.k. to dump.)  The following is a list of the regulations for United States waters:

ALL discharge of garbage is prohibited in the Great Lakes or their connecting or tributary waters. Each knowing violation of these requirements may result in a fine of up to $500,000 and 6 years imprisonment.

In Lakes, rivers, bays, sounds and up to 3 miles offshore it is illegal to dump:   All garbage

From 3 to 12 nautical miles offshore it is illegal to dump: 
  Plastic, Dunnage, lining and packing materials that float, All other trash if not ground to less that 1" 

From 12 to 25 nautical miles offshore it is illegal to dump: 
  Plastic, Dunnage, lining and packing materials that float 

Outside 25 nautical miles offshore it is illegal to dump: 
    Plastic 

It is also very hard to enforce because most of the dumping is done while out of sight of the coast guards, and after it happens, it is near impossible to prove who did the dumping.  Another reason it is hard to enforce is because most of the time, even when caught red-handed, the companies do not get anything more than a fine. As little as people get caught, most of the companies who choose to dump their wastes into the ocean are aware that the money they save over time pays for the fine if for some reason they are caught.  Some of the most common items found washed up on shores are  All of this garbage washes up somewhere, or is eaten by ocean creatures before it has the chance to disintegrate.  On one beach on the coast of Brazil, four dolphins washed up in one year.  The dolphins have poor eyesight and mistook plastic bags for food, swallowing and suffocating by them.  Most of the trash dumped takes a long time, even in water, to break down and go away.  The following is a chart that shows how long some of the most commonly dumped items take to go away:    

Source: Hellenic Marine Environment Protection Association (HELMEPA)

            In 1991 Tim Benton, an American scientist visited Ducie Atoll in the South Pacific, which is so remote it is 3000 miles from the nearest continent. He found over 950 pieces of trash in a 1.5 mile stretch of beach. This is what he found:

14 Crates (bread, bottle), 71 Plastic bottles (drinks, toiletries), 171 Glass bottles (from 15 countries), 18 Jars, 268 Broken plastic pieces, 74 Bottle tops, 29 Pieces of plastic pipe, 44 Pieces of rope, 25 Shoes, 6 Fluorescent tubes, 6 Light bulbs 7 Aerosol cans, 7 Food/drink cans, 2 Pop tops, 4 Gasoline cans, 2 Gloves (1 pair), 1 Canned meat (leaking but intact) 3 Cigarette lighters (not working), 2 Doll's heads (1 male, 1 female), 8 Copper sheeting from shipwrecks, 1Truck tire ,1 Plastic ninepin, 1 Glue syringe, 1 Small gas cylinder, 1 Construction worker's hat ,1 Plastic coat hanger, 1 Toy soldier ,1 Half a toy airplane, 1 Tea strainer, 1 Football (punctured), 1 Car floor mat, and 1 Asthma inhaler.

            There was another case where Fabian Prado Barretto made several hikes along the Linha Verde on the North Baja coast, the Costa dos Coqueiros. In four days he covered a total of 86 kilometers of beach on foot.

"I found out that it came from 26 different countries, with the USA (10), South Africa (9) and Germany (8) as the most represented countries on the beaches of Bahia. There was garbage from all over the world, as, for example, from Indonesia, Argentina, Canada, Spain, India, Finland, Thailand, South Korea (Cheju Island, an island in the Eastern Chinese Sea, between the Korean Strait and the Yellow Sea) and Cyprus. Of the 94 pieces collected, I identified the origin of 84 of them. The others I did not identify either because the label was unreadable, because they did not have a bar code, or because I did not understand the language.” Baretto says.  “The types of product found in largest numbers were mineral water (21) and milk (13). There were also insecticides, juices, cleaning and cosmetic products, writing material, soft drinks and different types of food. The types of wrapping that occurred most were plastic (46) and spray cans (21), as well as a lot of tetra packs (17).  In addition, 1647 signs were found, whose origin could not be identified because they had nothing written on them. Besides, 43 light bulbs, incandescent and fluorescent, which, because of their type, must be of foreign origin, as well as 54 glass bottles from alcoholic beverages.”      (Baretto)

            As these items are dumped, animals in the ocean eat the plastics, get them caught around their neck, or find some other way to get killed by the garbage.  One of the other ways that this trash is killing the sea creatures is by biomagnification.  This is when the chemicals are absorbed or eaten by all of the animals and stored in the fat.  As the larger animals eat the smaller ones, the content of chemicals in their own bodies rises.  Off the coasts of Europe, there are some whales that have a content of PCP’s that is over 100 times the concentration allowed by the EPA to be allowed into the environment by factories.  This means that the whales are classified (containing four times more than!) as hazardous waste.             

Each person or company condones their own dumping but the effects of all of the places that dump combine together to harm our beautiful oceans and the creatures they contain.

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