California Coast & Ocean

Each year, more than 50 million tons of plastic resin (the raw material used to make plastic products) are produced in North America alone; a record high of 57.5 million tons was produced in 2004, according to the American Plastics Council. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that in 2003, of the 26.7 million tons of plastic that made it into the municipal waste stream, less than four percent (1.4 million tons) was recycled.

The amount is growing all the time, in part because of a phenomenal increase in plastic packaging, particularly disposable single-use containers. "People are consuming more of everything, they're consuming more stuff on the go, and for many of those products, plastic has become the packaging of choice because it's lightweight and durable," says Pat Franklin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute. For example, about 3.3 billion small (less than two liters) units of non-sparkling water--a product that essentially didn't exist before the 1990s--were sold in the United States in 1997 (the first year for which figures are available), mostly in plastic bottles. By 2003, more than six times that much was sold and now, Franklin estimates, around 25 billion plastic bottles of water are purchased in this country in a year. That's an eight-fold increase in less than ten years.

Online purchases are another growing source of plastic waste. Businesses that ship products directly to customers, rather than in bulk to stores, use more protective material and filler, according to Fritz Yambrach, professor of packaging science at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

An unknown, but significant, amount of the plastic produced never makes it to the landfill or the recycling plant, landing as trash along roadways, in parks, on beaches, and in the ocean. A sizeable amount never even makes it into products: Algalita's Moore estimates that fully ten percent of the microplastic loose in the environment comes from the tiny pellets used to make plastic goods. Commonly called "nurdles" (legend has it they were named years ago by southern California lifeguards), these pellets are the most common contaminant found on Orange County beaches, Moore says. In three days of testing in 2005, Algalita collected 236 million pellets from the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. Algalita has been working with some plastics manufacturers in southern California to identify where they're losing pellets and what they can do to stop the loss.

Sixty to 80 percent of all marine debris--any manmade, solid material that ends up in coastal waters, estuaries, and oceans--worldwide is plastic. Some comes from spills at sea: containers falling off cargo ships, waste thrown overboard from passenger and commercial ships, and gear lost from fishing boats. Plastic pellets can come from containers lost at sea, but many are lost during transport on land or at industrial facilities and make their way into streams and waterways. According to the EPA, 80 percent of marine debris is from land-based sources, including landfills along the coast, urban runoff and stormwater overflows, and beach litter.