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Modern art is (made from) rubbish
Posted by saunvedan on 26 September 2008.
It's been an arty week for me. After the polar
bear sculptures in the US,
an outdoor art group in Devon - Trail Recycled Art in Landscape (Trail) - has made a
trawler boat out of 5,000 plastic bags and named it Rainbow Worrier after our legendary
ship the Rainbow Warrior. They even filled it up with plastic fish in fishing
nets to highlight how plastic is destroying marine ecosystems.
Plastic waste isn't just what you see on beaches and coast lines. A plastic dump in the Pacific Ocean as large as Texas is constantly swirling in a massive gyre that is referred to as the 'trash vortex'. Other unflattering names include Asian trash trail and the Eastern Garbage Patch where six kilos of plastic swirls for every kilo of plankton.
How did so much plastic reach the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Well, 10 per cent of the 100 million tonnes of plastic that is produced each year is dumped in the sea mainly from ships and platforms. Winds and currents keep the plastic from drifting to beaches thus missing out on any chance of being picked up, leaving the plastic perpetually in the vortex.
Of course, plastic doesn't degenerate easily like organic materials and stays in the marine environment for a long time merely breaking into small parts and spreading to other parts of the ocean. The biggest threat is to seabirds and marine animals that eat the plastic mistaking it for food and eventually die as a result. Large numbers of animals also get trapped in abandoned plastic nets and lines.
On top of that, many other pollutants in the ocean are absorbed by plastic poisoning marine life that come into contact - some organisms cling on to floating bits of plastic and spread the toxins to other parts of the ocean. Most plastic eventually sinks to the bottom of the ocean where tonnes of rubbish stifle deep sea creatures. We can do our bit by using as little plastic as possible and recycling whatever we can to prevent it from ending up in the vortex.
The Rainbow Worrier is an excellent example of using art to raise awareness which won Trail the Recycled Art in Landscape Public Choice Award. Who said art wasn't meaningful?
Rubbish statistics
"10 per cent of the 100 million tonnes of plastic that is produced each year is dumped in the sea mainly from ships and platforms."
Where does this statement come from?
These days, it's more usual to claim that 80% of the plastic in the world's oceans has been washed off the land and only 20% has been dumped from ships and platforms. Greenpeace's own experts certainly subscribe to this view: see Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans.
Your tame boffins are also in tune with the informed consensus when they say that nobody really knows how much plastic finds its way into the oceans every year - so where did that "10 per cent of the 100 million" come from? (Indeed where did that "100 million" come from?) Ocean scientists have been calling for a proper quantification of marine litter for at least thirty years. Has it finally arrived? Unannounced? On a Greenpeace blog?
You'll probably try to say that the 10 million metric tons estimate comes from a study by the US National Academy of Sciences.
Please don't. The 1975 (not 1997 or 2002, as Allsopp, Walters, Santillo and Johnston say*; and not 1987, 1988, 1993, 2005, 2008 or any of the other years cited so authoritatively by all those "14 billion pounds of plastic!" eco-warriors out there on the Web) NAS study that is the ultimate source of most such numbers, Assessing Potential Ocean Pollutants, was a plucky attempt at cobbling together an estimate of annual global ship-generated waste from erratic and incomplete statistics that had been collected for other purposes. It was always imperfect; it's now 30 years old; it was always an attempted tally of all debris, with plastic reckoned to be "a minor component of the total refuse generated". So its estimate of the "flux of litter to the world oceans" of 6.4 million metric tons is unlikely to be of much rational use when trying to prop up a claimed flux of plastic to the world oceans of 10 million metric tons, innit.
Not denying that plastic in the oceans is a serious problem. Just trying to get you to up your game.
*Footnote: Please tell the authors of Greenpeace's Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans (2006) that their 1997 estimate of all garbage reaching the marine environment every year (6.4 million metric tons) and their 2002 estimate of plastics thrown overboard from ships ever year (6.5 million metric tons) can both be traced to the 1975 NAS report - that they are the same wrong number (all garbage thrown overboard) repackaged, repurposed and regurgitated. This isn't entirely their fault. If you can't trust the Marine Pollution Bulletin or the UN's Environment Programme, who can you trust? (Me, that's who. Proof of the 1975 NAS provenances available on request.)