Where Plastics Go to Kill

Beware the revenge of the nurdles.

Photo: Jacob Hallaska/Aurora

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IT’S AN OIL SPILL. Only solid, and far more deadly. The average liquid spill of petroleum will kill marine life for a year, maybe 10. But it could take 400 years for that petroleum-based six-pack ring holding your beer to break down. Each year, undegraded plastic chokes to death some 100,000 whales, dolphins, seals, manatees, plus an unknown number of sea turtles and about 2 million birds. And once it has broken down, it becomes deadlier still.

Four hundred years is about how long the word “plastic” has been in the English vocabulary, deriving from the Greek plastikos, meaning “able to be molded.” Except modern plastics are built to be durable and have become positively unyielding. And we keep making more of the stuff: 115 million metric tons a year. Light though plastic is, that’s the equivalent of the weight of 347 Empire State Buildings. Ten percent wends its way to sea. Twenty percent of what gets to sea has been tossed off ships and oil rigs; the rest comes via floods and sewage, and much of that from ever-profligate Americans, who produce a record-setting 240 pounds of plastic per person per year.

Remote islands around the world are covered with acres of lighters, pens, bottles, tampon applicators—and tiny pellets of preproduction plastic called nurdles that compose 11 percent of beach litter. The vast eddies of the ocean basins, known as gyres—once called the Horse Latitudes and avoided by sailors—are now full of plastic and riotous with new chemistry. The Texas-sized “great garbage patch” in the North Pacific Gyre holds an estimated 3 million metric tons of mostly plastic trash, six times the mass of the plankton found there. Most has broken into microplastics that chemically bond with PCBS, DDT, and endocrine disrupters to make this area a million times more toxic than surrounding seas. Suspended in surface waters, those plankton-sized flakes are mistakenly consumed by jellyfish and small fish that are in turn consumed by bigger fish, taking the toxic payload further and further up the marine food chain. In the end, the plastic comes back to pollute all of us, something the nations of the world, currently content to ignore a problem in international waters, should remember.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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