Whitehouse calls
volume of plastic waste in the ocean “intolerable”
By John
McDaid in Rhode Island’s Future
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was joined
by local environmental groups at a press conference April 23rd in
Middletown to discuss the crisis of plastic pollution in our oceans and
highlight federal legislation and local actions being taken to address the threat.
Dave McLaughlin, executive director
of Clean
Ocean Access, hosted the event at their headquarters.
“Earth Day
worldwide started a campaign to end plastic pollution,” said McLaughlin. He
reported on an event Sunday in Portsmouth where Clean Ocean Access, joined by
five local Girl Scout Troops, removed 1,425 pounds of marine debris from
Pheasant Drive beach.
“Breaking free from plastic and saying no to
single-use plastic is imperative to improve the health of our oceans and our
environment,” said McLaughlin.
Sen. Whitehouse echoed that sentiment.
“Every year we dump five shopping bags of plastic trash per foot of coastline
into our oceans,” said Whitehouse. “If we keep it up, if nothing changes, if we
just go with status quo then by 2050 there’s going to be more plastic waste in
our ocean than there will be swimming fish. That’s not a world we should
tolerate having to leave to our children.”
McLaughlin noted that the last Volvo Ocean Race brought
130,000 visitors and added $140M to the state economy. Protecting our oceans,
he said, is not just about “being kind to the fish,” but rather, “This all
comes home to our ocean state in real economic value.”
Whitehouse talked about the sources
of plastic pollution. “Studies show that the vast majority of the plastic comes
from five or six Asian countries that have terrible upland waste disposal
programs.”
The senator’s Save Our Seas Act, coauthored with Sen. Dan Sullivan
(R-AK) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), passed the Senate by unanimous consent in 2017.
The measure would boost the federal response to marine debris and enhance
cooperation between the US and other nations in the issue.
Whitehouse told a reporter that the
bill will be coming up for a hearing in the House shortly.
He also described
work with Sen. Sullivan to engage trade representatives on the issue.
“If you
can get these Asian countries that compete with us to clean up their act, two
things happen: One, it’s a more level playing field for American companies that
are behaving well. And two, we actually have companies that are very very good
at upland waste disposal. So it actually opens a market for American business
overseas to meet the upland waste disposal needs that we I hope will be
demanding of these countries.”
“The work that we’re doing requires global and
national and state and local action,” said Janet Coit, RI DEM Director. Coit
thanked Whitehouse for his work at getting bipartisan support for this issue at
the federal level, and acknowledged the efforts of local environmental
organizations.
“The fact that we care so much about this place means that our
marine trades have been on the cutting edge of reducing discharges and are
interested in helping reduce plastics. It means that we have Boy Scouts and
Girl Scout troops out doing clean ups. I certainly pledge to continue to try to
uphold and enforce our environmental laws so that we can strengthen the whole
web of people who are working to protect and celebrate our wonderful
environment, our beautiful oceans.”
RI Clean Water Action director Johnathan Berard
discussed work his organization has done to quantify the threat. “This is not
just something that’s happening in the middle of swirling gyres in the middle
of the ocean,” he said, “it’s happening right here in our own backyard.”
Berard
brought along samples from a “trash trawl” that found plastics and
microplastics in samples collected along the length of Narragansett Bay.
Microplastics are the result of the
breakdown of larger items through the action of wind, waves, and sun, said
Berard, and they pose a particular risk to marine life because of their small
size. “They end up like chemical sponges absorbing pollutants in the water,
where they’re ingested by seabirds, by fish, by shellfish that mistake them for
a meal, and they end up in our food chain.”
Bearard showed a reporter a jar of
material collected just off India Point near the hurricane barrier in
Providence.
“You can see there’s big chunks of plastic, there’s polystyrene
foam, there’s what is clearly film plastic. We found fishing line and also
other gnarly things.”
“We’ll never be able to remove
enough plastic from the environment to keep up with the amount that we as a
society is putting in,” said Berard.
“Instead we need to enact meaningful
source reduction strategies to keep single use plastics out of the waste stream
entirely. Reduce Reuse Recycle isn’t just some clever slogan that we learned in
school, it’s actually an order of operations.”